That one rainy Saturday that turned into a comic shop haul nightmare

So I hit up my local shop on a rainy Saturday last fall, just looking for a few back issues... ended up slipping on a wet floor and knocked over a whole display of long boxes. The owner wasn't mad, but I spent the next 4 hours helping him reorganize everything by alphabetical order. Has anyone else ever had a comic shopping trip go completely sideways like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

patricia3210d ago

The owner of my local shop does pure alphabetical but only because he's got a color coded sticker system on the bags, red for modern, blue for bronze, green for silver, so the letters just help you find the right box faster. I think your fall actually helped the guy if he was willing to stick with it, because most shops that try switching to alphabetical get complaints from old school collectors who want it by publisher first. You basically gave him a free labor test run to see if it worked without having to close the store for a day. Plus you got a story out of it that beats my usual "found a cheap copy of Secret Wars 8 in the dollar bin" tales.

williamw7511d ago

Wait, you helped him sort by alphabetical order? Most shops organize by publisher first, then title, then alphabetical within that. You might've made his system a mess unless he actually does pure alphabetical.

mark_green11d ago

Actually pure alphabetical works way better for back issue bins since you're grabbing stuff across publishers all the time, I've seen shops do it that way and it's actually faster for pulling orders. The whole publisher-then-title system is just what everyone copied from Diamond's old catalog listings and it's not even how most collectors think when they're digging. If the owner was cool with it then he probably already runs his shop that way or he realized it makes more sense than following some outdated standard.