With the West Coast Civil Warless for this week – and that’s not the only book that we’re missing this week – James Sime (of San Francisco favorite, Isotope – The Comic Book Lounge) writes about shipping confusion, and retailer organization ComicsPro:
Apparently phone calls to all West Coast accounts have been going out all day asking us to not sell Civil War until next week, but if that’s what Diamond wanted, why did they ship any copies? And where’s my phone call, wasn’t I supposed to get one too? And am I going to get those confirmed two-day-air rush orders from the East Coast that I placed to take care of our pre-order customers shipped to me by Friday or are the rumors true and Diamond is going to decide to freeze all West Coast rush orders on Civil War for a week? Apparently no one knows. So we’re down running our respective businesses based on rumors now? Certainly not ideal.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s amazing how few problems I have week in and week out with Diamond’s distribution. And the folks have always been very nice and professional every time I’ve called them. And I think my rep with the company is simply wonderful. Those guys deserve a round of applause as far as I’m concerned… but they’re screwing up bad on this one.
Personally, I don’t think Diamond should distribute any book that has over 50% allocations to my coast if they have the option of waiting a week and filling our complete order the very next week. And for a book as popular as Civil War I feel they should have made our East Coast friends wait as well, if possible. Or perhaps they could direct ship the missing books so we’d at least be able to get them into our customer’s hands as soon as humanly possible. Or at the very least I’d like for my distributor to put “Ships to West Coast accounts on January 10th” next to these titles on their shipping list… how hard could that possibly be?
…It doesn’t take a whole lot of imagination to see how useful ComicsPro could be next time our distributor is thinking about shrugging it’s shoulders and giving us “sorry that’s all we know” or a vanilla “regrets the error” message when there is a distribution crisis with the biggest book of the entire month. Could ComicsPro make all those crazy pie-in-the-sky dreams that we comic retailers have come true? Probably not. But it could definitely help Diamond make better decisions about distributing allocated books. And something as simple as seeing “Ships to West Coast accounts on January 10th” next to those books this week… that one simple thing… will make our lives and our customer’s lives better.
January 4th, 2007 at 9:06 am
The problem here is what leverage would ComicsPro have with Diamond? Even if every retailer joined the organization, what are they going to threaten the sole distributor of 80+% of their weekly inventory with?
Until there’s a legitimate competitor to Diamond, and/or when the direct market weans itself from its narrow focus on superhero floppies, nothing’s going to change.
January 4th, 2007 at 9:52 am
This is why we do not allow monopolies in the US, but as long as it is just about a bunch of “funny books” nothing will ever happen on that level.
Seriously, this displays a major flaw in the current system. Competition would probably help out with the poor customer service when this type of thing happens. “Oh well, deal.” is not a suitable answer when a persons business relies on delivers of a product on certain days.
I hate it for you West Coasters, stay away from the internet, you know some idiot will spoil it.