EXTRA // 8.01.02

RETAIL: THE SINGLE SYNAPSE THEORY
By Alasdair Stuart

I've been thinking a lot about goldfish recently. Specifically, because I've been thinking a lot about memory, and the fact that I have an unusually good one. I have near total recall from age four upwards and a lot of the time, it's a real asset. Certainly at work, I'm normally able to point people at the right book or issue and anything else by the same creators with relative ease.

A lot of the rest of the time though, it's a royal pain. There's some embarrassing stuff locked away in my head (Including God help us all, poetry) and I'd really, really like to flush every now and again. Which brings me to goldfish and their fifteen second memory span. That fascinates me. That there is a creature which almost never moves, lives in a static and relatively barren environment and yet, once every fifteen seconds, everything old is new again. Part of me would love that, the rest of me recoils in horror from it. I like most of my memories and have no desire to lose them.

Which brings me to comics, and the way in which they are both marketed and sold.

Comics are sold on goldfish memory spans. On one level, this is a charge that can be aimed at the worst of mainstream comics and how content they are to re-hash the same plots over and over again. You know the kind of thing, a cover with the shattered remnants of character of the week on the front cover and the caption:

Welcome to the INSERT COPYRIGHTED GROUP NAME HERE, Anaphylactic Man, Hope you survive the experience!

Like I say, everything old is new again.

The other aspect of the goldfish sales pitch though, is a little more insidious. Better writers than me have commented on the concept of "pop comics", set-length stories which have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a damn good idea, forms the basis of at least two company's major output now and looks set to be one of the foundations for the future of the industry. However, there's another aspect to the "pop" element of comics. A comic, it's been said, takes you about as long to read as an average length pop single and is treated in much the same way. You play it once, maybe three times at most and then put it away before you either buy the album or take it out, filled with embarrassment a few years later. The pop element of comic retail is inherently damaging. Readers are conditioned now to think in week long jumps and nothing more. You come in, buy the comic, read the comic and put it away to forget about until the next one comes out. It's entertainment in rigidly defined little chunks, entertainment in fact, being sold as food. The underlying message to most comic marketing is this:

THIS COMIC IS BREAD. IF YOU DO NOT BUY IT WITHIN A WEEK OF BEINGG PUBLISHED, IT WILL BECOME GREEN AND MOLDY.

This isn't healthy, either for readers or retailers. Readers become used to trivializing a lot of the stuff they read and retailers have to get their orders EXACTLY right, balancing pre-orders with pickups from the shelf and any future sales. If you get it right, you've sold out of the bread, if you get it wrong you've got dead stock.

We try to do things a little differently.

Normal procedure for Comics Day looks like this:

-Take down the previous week's releases, filing them into the eight shelves of the previous MONTH's releases we also have on display.
-Take delivery of the new stuff.
-Bag it
-Do standing orders
-Go home

Roughly in that order. However, we've added a stage. Now, when it's time to file the other stuff down we take a look at it and see, firstly, if there's any parity between the old stuff and the new stock. If we've got FRAY Issue 6 on the shelf and FRAY Issue 7 [EDITOR'S NOTE: This is, obviously, a hypothetical example] sitting in a box for example, we'll rack them side by side. Secondly, if there's anything we've actively enjoyed from the previous week. Case in point; THRUD THE BARBARIAN from a couple of weeks ago. We all read it, all dug it and it's a first issue anyway so that'll stay out with the new releases, albeit to the immediate right of them.

Finally, if there are any first parts or one shots left from the previous week, we'll do that. A good example of this is AMAZING SCREW ON HEAD, which was on our new release shelves for two weeks. As a result of that, we've sold through the initial stock, a re-order and am now re-ordering more of it.

Ultimately, this helps both us and our customers out. The customers get a better cross-section of the more recent releases and as a result, an attention span longer than a week. That way, anything we've missed or they've missed is given longer to catch their attention and as a result is more likely to be picked up. For us though, it's even more of a win/win. Firstly, we're offering more variety and nine times out of ten will be able to fill the inevitable gaps we get in standing orders. Our customers know we're not perfect but they also know that we'll make up for any mistakes we make. It's not quite retail godhood (We actually prefer to think of ourselves as retail Mounties) but it's getting there.

More importantly though, it's a real godsend financially. The less dead stock we have, the more turnover and profit we produce. The bills get paid, the bank account increases and the shop doesn't get swamped in dead stock. It's a means of cleaning house, keeping everyone happy and doing the job all in one. Everyone goes home happy.

Even the goldfish.