Comic Book Guy (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore)
With sadness we report the demise of yet another comic book store as the economy and crushing debt take down another comic book store in the Seattle/Tacoma/Everett area. That leaves just three or four major comic book stores left in the entire three metro area where you can get comic books in a real store, play games, or otherwise enjoy the physical shopping experience of being in a place that smells of books.
The sad part is that they basically faded, and as the News Tribune reports out of Tacoma, it really was the double whammy of credit lines that could not be paid off, both to the banks and to the distributors, as well as the stunning decline in the physical comic book market to go along with that. With rents, and the lack of shoppers who had money to spend, Comic Book Ink tried multiple ways of staying alive. As we reported earlier, they even went and tried to crowd source a way out of being some 130,000 dollars in debt last year.
The real question is what happened when they basically paid off the crushing debt, then decided to close down almost a year after the initial appeal to people to help them out. They literally were able to stave off the closure of the store for a year, but I would love to do an interview with them to find out what happened, how it happened, and what they would do differently.
In the longer run though folks, we really need people to start buying again and to buy stuff they need to be working at jobs that pay above minimum wage.
Let us see if we can get them into the interview cycle and see what lessons we can all pull from this one.
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