Comic Zone is Closing on Monday, May 30th

It is with a heavy heart that I share this news to anyone following.

As you can tell, we haven’t made a blog post since August, and it was shortly after that when we knew we needed to close. We kept hoping against hope that we could avoid it, and I think we did pretty well to hang on for another 9 months. But it hasn’t been an easy 9 months at all.

When I first realized we would need to close, I felt really sad and depressed for a couple of months. We kept calling people and trying to work out deals to keep the store going, even if we were not involved, or perhaps not AS involved in it. We had lots of nibbles, lots of ideas were tossed around. We even hired a business broker to try to sell the business for us, but in the end, nothing has panned out, and we had to make a decision.

After planning to close the store at the end of December, then the end of January, then February, then March, we finally set a solid date to stay open through Free Comic Book Day and close at the end of May.

And that time is now here.

As I look back over the past three years – we had at least six months of planning before we even opened – I can say that I am really glad we did it. It’s been an amazing experience and we have met some primo quality people… our customers.

In thinking back over the past two and a half years, I realized that we have never had a bad customer in our store. Comic book fans are the BEST people! Intelligent, creative, appreciative, polite. More than anything, I have valued our customers, and more than anything, my heart is heavy for letting them down by closing.

One of the reasons I personally wanted to open the store was so that my sons, my partner, and I could own a business together and learn some of the ins and outs of being entrepreneurs. On this count, I would say that all four of us benefited greatly. It gave us a different mindset to take into the world, and into our next ventures. And for that I am very grateful.

I am also grateful for the opportunity to have worked with my sons in such a setting. It’s a different kind of bonding experience. Oh, it wasn’t all milk and honey, but for the most part, we could discuss and settle our differences in a satisfactory way. Our strength was always our individual gifts. Between the four of us, we had it all covered.

In looking back as to what we could have done better, I would say that our marketing was always our weakest link. We all knew that, and in fact, had hired three different consultants to help us improve on it, but alas, at the end of the day, we didn’t do as well as we possibly could have. If I had it to do over, I would have approached it differently. However, back then, I didn’t know what I know now.

Monday is our final day. I want to end it on a good note. We will be open from 10 am to 6 pm. We will have huge sales all day. We will have pizza, just like when we opened.

I could get all sappy here about how it’s felt like home to be here, how this has been OUR creation, and the joy that I got from that… and how much I will miss having the store. But honestly, there will be time to lament after we are closed. For now, I just want to make the most of the two days we have left.

Hope to see you on Monday!!!

Value is in the eyes of the beholder

I ran across this comic today, and just had to share. It’s so reminiscent of so many people’s attitudes towards comic books. Heck, Action Comics #1 is probably worth MORE than gold staples!!!

Heart of the City

On that note, we had someone bring in some vintage comic books yesterday – from the 1940s and 1950s. Even in bad condition, these comics are worth something! She is going to try and sell them on her own, but if she can’t, we will be working out a consignment deal with her.

Whether or not we get them in our store, it was very exciting to just SEE these comics and touch them! What rare finds!

Superhero Parties

Comic Zone is venturing into a new arena.

As of May 1st, we will be sponsoring Superhero Parties – mostly as birthday parties, but we will accommodate any kind of party. We are working in partnership with buzzberry’s to offer these parties.

Here is our current flyer announcing our parties:

SuperHero Parties

For your party, call us and we’ll walk you through the process. Just think of how much your little one will LOVE having his or her favorite comic book hero at the party! What a hit! And Mom and Dad, no cleanup! We do it all!

Executive decisions

We met with a counselor from the Small Business Association in Scottsdale on Thursday and he had some great ideas on things we can do to bring in more business and to serve the community in new ways. I am really excited about some of the possibilities we have ahead of us. So stay tuned for some new and innovative changes in the near future.

As a comic book store owner, however, sometimes you have to make some hard decisions. After a long hard effort to make our webstore successful, we finally had to admit defeat. We were using Intuit’s POS webstore – which interacted with our point of sale system and with our accounting system and paying a hefty $150/month for it. It’s been 15 months now, which means we have paid a total of $2250 in monthly fees, not to mention the initial set up fee of something like $200. That’s enough. A small, family-owned store like us just can’t compete with the Amazons and the folks selling private collections on e-Bay for 80% off cover price and free shipping.

In over a year, we have only had two orders through our webstore, and didn’t really make much of a profit on either one. Thus, the decision to discontinue it.

We are brainstorming ways that we can continue to have some sort of ordering system, even though we don’t have the fancy, integrated POS webstore any more. We do want people to be able to order from us. For now, all I can suggest is emailing us at info@comiczoneaz.com with your requests and we can let you know if we can get them for you, how much it will be, etc. We can always take a credit card payment through paypal or over the phone.

The best part of meeting with the counselor was finding out all of the things we are doing RIGHT as a small business. And there is more to come, so stay tuned….