Retailer Brian Hibbs has a column on Newsarama, and this week he discusses his movement to a Point of Sale (POS) computer system. What this means is that when you buy books from his store now, he scans the UPCs of the books (or enters the books manually if there are no UPCs). This, in turn, allows him to track inventory on the computer, use it for re-orders, etc., etc.
All of this is very neat, but I was a little amazed that Hibbs is just now getting there. Hibbs is supposed to be one of the best comics retailers in the country. My retailer -- Chicago Comics on Clark St. just north of Belmont; tell them I sent you and you'll receive absolutely no discount! -- has had a POS system for ages. I've been in stores where they don't have them, but then again, I've been in stores where there's a giant display of a busty superheroine and a clerk who can really only engage in conversation when the topic turns to whether Green Lantern could beat Superman. I always figured all of the "good" stores -- the ones we like to think of as what a comic book store should be like -- have had POS systems for years.
Does your store have a POS system?
Posted by Jason Fliegel at August 17, 2007 9:48 AM
The store I usually go to does. The store I only sometimes go to didn't as of a few months ago.
Bedrock City in Houston doesn't. Depending on your metric, it is either the first or second best store I've ever been in.
If I'm recalling correctly, way back in the day when the rest of the world was moving to POS, it was the comic book publishers who stood in the way of the transition: Indy books with no UPCs at all and the big 2 putting little character pictures or mini-house-ads in the UPC boxes of the direct market version of the books, and for a while, even if they did put on UPCs, they didn't bother to make each title have a unique code, let alone each individual issue.
Neither of the "good stores" I've frequented here in Seattle (Comics Dungeon and Zanadu Comics, the latter of which is a "chain" of two stores) have them. Well, admittedly, I haven't been in Comics Dungeon for a few years, but they didn't use a POS computer system as of then.
So no, it's not just the Android Dungeons of the world that don't have Point of Sale.
My store is "good" in that they have a wide variety of material.
... but they still write down your purchases in a notebook at the checkout.
My comic store is Comic Relief in Berkeley, which is easily in the top ten in the country. (They're having Scott McCloud for a signing this coming Sunday!) No POS, just a cash register.
For no good reason, it's disturbing to realize that there are curmudgeons (or at least other curmudgeon lurkers) from my neck of the woods...
Dr. Comics & Mr. Games in Oakland is my store of choice, and I believe they are on a POS system. I'll try to pay more attention next Wednesday.
(For what it's worth, Comic Relief is a fantastic store, a gem to the industry, but I'd rather my money circulate in Oakland, and also I prefer to have all the current issues on one wall rather than have to walk back and forth from the new release shelves to the "this month" shelves.")
I've only skimmed the latest "Dave Sim's Collected Letters" for fear of spoilers (still two volumes of the big book to go...) but there's a couple of interesting exchanges where he appears to be engaged in a project of encouraging retailers to use a point of sale/web update plan for stocking the Cerebus phonebooks...
Hi, Jake! I actually live only a few minutes' walk from Dr.-Mr., and I'd buy my comics there except that I'm loyal to Rory Root. (I've been buying comics from his stores since before Comic Relief opened.) I did buy the latest PS 238 collection from them recently when Comic Relief was having some trouble getting it for me, and as far as I recall they just rang it up on a regular cash register.