Comic Book Specialty Shops
The evolution of the comic book specialty shop (or "direct-only stores") in the early 1970s created a whole new system for delivering comics to customers. Before the advent of the comics retailer, most comics were found in grocery, drug, and toy stores. The specialty shop presents a number of competitive advantages over those other venues:
- Condition: direct market retail outlets usually attempt to maintain their inventory in good condition. Their shelves are often the full height of the comic book, whereas the wire racks of grocery, drug, and toy stores were typically only half the height of the comic books, resulting in bent spines and dog-eared pages.
- Content: direct-only stores cater to older, more mature audiences, and thus can market material deemed too offensive (due to graphic violence, nudity, language, drug use, etc.) for grocery/drug/toy stores. In addition, due to the non-returnable nature of direct sales, typical direct-only stores contain a substantial archive of back issues.
- Price: The older, more mature customers of direct-only stores are typically willing to pay several times more than the average customer of a grocery/drug/toy store. Cover prices approaching (or even exceeding) $5.00 became common.
- Knowledge: The proprietor of a direct-only store is often a collector himself, which means he is quite familiar with his inventory. Customers often have the option of phoning their orders in ahead of time, and by the time the customer arrives at the direct-only store his order will be set aside behind the counter, "bagged and boarded." (Each comic book is placed in its own polyethylene or PET film sleeve and supported by an acid-free cardboard backing board.) Direct-only store proprietors often arrange their inventory by publisher and/or genre, as opposed to the haphazard presentation of grocery/drug/toy stores.
Read more about this topic: Direct Market
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