Today's Musings

What weird weather we’ve been having here in Wisconsin. January’s been around 40 degrees nearly every day.  We set a record this month for the longest consecutive days that were mostly cloudy – I think the previous record was 14 and we went something like 17.  Yesterday it rained almost all day, today it’s snowing even though it’s just barely cold enough to do so.  Why do I mention weather? Because, it can have an impact on sales.  If it is raining or snowing sales are usually much slower than if it isn’t. So, today has been a quiet day so far.  Sunday was too, although those that did come in made larger purchases, so it didn’t feel quite so bad.

Having it be slow today has actually worked out (not financially, but project wise).  I bought a large collection of X-Men comics yesterday.  This was the first collection I bought without Craig’s input. Usually he handles all of the purchases, but this lady, who is a current customer, brought in a bunch of her old comics, and I didn’t want to send her away after she lugged them all in here.  I thought I was being generous with my offer because she is a current customer and because she had a good reason for wanting the money.  Since it was all X-Men comics (some regular X-Men, some Uncanny, Wolverine and Gambit) I knew it would be a decent investment, even at the higher price I gave her, because X-Men stuff always seems to sell.  When Craig looked through them today, he was quite happy. She had great runs without too many missing, plenty of key issues, and even some fairly decent late silver-age X-Men books that could easily earn back the investment for the collection.  I felt good about that!  And the customer was happy to have the comics gone and money in hand, so it worked out for everyone.  (You loyal blog readers now have an advantage if you are looking to pick up X-Men comics, since you now know that I just snagged some new stuff.)  Now, I just have to go through the long process of sorting, rebagging, and pricing everything.  That can take a while, so it is kind of nice to have a slow time where I can work on that.

Sequart.com has invited me to do a regular column on their site!  I will be writing a retailer commentary column.  I just need to come up with a name for it—this assignment has stumped me. I could write three columns right now, but I can’t come up with a name for the dang thing.  So far all I have come up with is “behind the racks” and “in the trenches” but I don’t really like either of those.  This site is fairly sophisticated, so I want a clever column name, but it’s just stumping me. *sigh*  I am sure I’ll think of something.  Once my articles are posted, I will put links to them here and on the regular Neptune Comics web site.  Feel free to make topic suggestions!