Quote Originally Posted by Ascended View Post
Still, the distributor is not a great excuse. Location matters. The guy who stocks the shelves in the abandoned, empty aisle the trading cards are in can walk over to the toy section or electronics and stock the anthologies there. It's not that much harder to track, I'm sure, and I doubt it'd hurt productivity much (though I've never worked in distribution like this, so maybe I'm wrong).
I wouldn't be surprised if there aren't rules in place on the distributors preventing that. Having two distributors jostling for the same space seems like a recipe for stepping on toes.

There is another thing in the economy of newspapers and newspaper distribution: ads. Historically, newspapers have received half of their revenue (and sometimes more) out of advertising. Comics might be a little different, but ads were still present. But that market is entirely different today. American comics doesn't seem to have had outside ads since the 80s or so, and I just checked some new Swedish ones we had lying about, and they didn't have it either (ads for new albums from the publisher, but that's not a revenue generator).

Distribution was only one half of the puzzle here. Revenue is another.