What is Entertainment Value?

Being that I'm a comic book seller, and graphic novel and trade paperback seller, I have a general notion of the resell price of most media out there. But for simplicity's sake, let's talk about something I have NO real knowledge about and so I can pontificate as a 'regular guy'.

Movies. Live ones at the theatre, I find myself going less and less these days. Why? Mostly my wife-- every couple of weeks, usually mid-Friday night she'll get the notion to have us go see a movie. I say sure, you do the moviefone thing, and tell me what you like. Nine times out of ten she can't find anything she thinks is worth the price of a $9-10 ticket times two, a couple of bucks for parking, or $10 on junk food. Call it $35 for the two of us to be easy--and we pass.

Is this because we are both over 50 years old? Have we seen it all? Are we jaded? Who knows?

Now, it's not that we're unhip or anything--we're both online regularly, we both use iPhones, and we have the choice of media on our tv sets, our laptops, and for godsakes..now our iPhones! But is the media worth it? On iTunes, for instance, Apocalypto that Mel Gibson flick is $15.00. Would I watch it on my little iPhone for $15.00?

I could rent it for $4-5, right? Or I could rent it right in my home for $4 and not even go to the videostore.

Hmmm...now that I think of it--maybe I am jaded. Agghh. I just think--for a movie that I'd view once or twice, I'd be willing to pay $4-5. Having been a collector of comics for many years, I understand how folks like to collect--and I make money at it thankfully. Still, I have a non-collector's view about entertainment, be it a movie, news, a comic book, or a novel. I want it cheap because, much like the newspaper, once I've read it, I'm totally done with it.

DONE. With it.

I DON'T need dozens or hundreds of DVDs or video cassettes up on my shelf, viewed once or twice for the most part. I certainly don't need 20,000 comic books that I've read once...and may never read again--up...in half of my bedroom.

So--short answer here is this one: media should be cheap and disposable. Or capable of recycled. I buy novels in hardback and read them, then put them on Amazon. Yah, I lose money, but I get a little bit back.

C

The Secret World of Pain==Andropause

Yeah, whatever.

Last couple of days I've been 'off' a bit, you know? A general malaise of the blues with no specific one thing making me any sadder than usual. A lot of my angst seems to center around what I've done with my life and what I'm currently doing with it-- those dreams of my younger self and the reality of that 54-year-old's life.

So--is it andropause, the male equivalent of menopause? Jeez, who can say? Ordinarily I'm a fairly upbeat guy, with positive thoughts and outlook, but more and more, now into my 50s, I'm feeling like an 'adult' with all that it carries in terms of responsibility. I've got a good paying job--which is stressful--I've got a GREAT part-time, self-employed gig which is satisfying on many levels--but the time together is making even that a bit stressful--but at least my family life at home is smooth with a wife and son and mother who love and care about me. That's something; perhaps my greatest accomplishment to consider when I'm moldering in my grave---or will I just be cremated? Haven't decided.

Next topic... iPhone!

Ahh, that such a tiny little device could bring such odd, technolustful joy. Phone is cool, check the weather, get driving directions, listen to music, watch videos, send texts, take pictures, see maps, surf the effing web, check email...anywhere.

ANY-FUCKING-WHERE!! (pant pant)

What I'm Thinking About Today

I dreamed last night that my company asked me to place dirty bombs in certain retail accounts of mine.

(shudder)
This had me tossing and turning enough of the night that I feel like I've moved toward a supporting rolein a zombie flick this morning.

Last night my wife at 1215am announced to me that she'd just ripped her first DVD movie onto the iPhone. My response was a wall-shaking, wet fart two minutes later that she heard in the next room. "Was that YOU?" she shakily queried, nearly dropping her iPhone.

"Just ripping my own CD," I told her.

So, yes, there are still laughs in our life--thank God.

Still, I was talking about angst. 'Angst'. Some online dick says, 'A feeling of anxiety or apprehension often accompanied by depression.' That works, sure. Dropping dirtybombs on under-performing accounts might qualify easily as some warning sign. Regardless, I woke up in an odd state; feeling a miasma of pointlessness to life, tired of its repetitiveness and sameness (as far as my work goes). Is this andropause; the feared 'male menopause'? Aggh, it could be. I don't often suffer from feelings of depression or the blues, as more often than not I'm able to pull myself out of it in a relatively short time.

Oh, hell. Nothing more this time around. Short one, eh?

Bought an iPhone--no, wait! TWO iPhones!!

I admit that I had no hardon going for the iPhone, despite being a regular Mac user. My wife was in technolust, though--yet at $500 for the basic 4GB unit and $600 for 8GB, a purchase wasn't going to be happening anytime soon. Of course, 'soon' is a relative term, isn't it?

Moreover, my wife mentioned to me in no uncertain terms that if I bought one for myself, that she'd immediately put the hammer down to me about my credit card responsibilities, that we shouldn't indulge ourselves, and that there was no way in Hell that she would allow me to keep it wthout knowing her dismay, ire, etc., well, you get it. So when I got the urge (and the cash) to go ahead and get one, I had a problem. What would be the solution?

Simple: I bought two iPhones.

One for her and one for me. If she insisted that it was an indulgence, the answer was simple--they'd both go back.

Like THAT would happen.

So now we both have the devices and we love them. Great fun, excellent manufacturing and engineering and all that. But--but--well, there's always a but: ATT service.

$20 for a data service package each month. OK, not too bad, but what about the folks who just want the iPhone, an iPod, and the cool factor? No such luck--you NEED the dataservice plan--even for voicemail! Yes, there's something called 'visual voicemail' that REQUIRES the data service package. Now, on balance, I wouldn't mind--and don't mind so much--paying the $20 data package service but to have to have the data service in tandem with basic voicemail services--it's kinda like...like blackmail.

Yah, blackmail. You can have the phone, you can have basic call and receive calls, but if you want voicemail, you gotta pay $20 a month. This. Fricking. SUCKS. It does NOTHING to ingratiate ATT with me, and I've been with the company for nearly ten years and have had increasingly more complaints about the company every year. Just little things, mind you--but now, with the iPhone now, well--if it weren't for the iPhone being tied to them, I'm not sure I'd stick with them at all. And just on general principles.

More and more it seems that large corporations are STICKING it to the consumer in little, inane, or horrific ways. I don't like the trend, not at all.

But the iPhone is pretty awesome, I must admit. Going online in the middle of the day to check email from work or for personal--to check movie listings? Directions to some address? You can do most anything electronic with this marvel, and it's SO COOL...

Chris

Customer Service...what a bitch!

Oh, no gender implications in that. Really!

So, it turns out that a fellow who named himself after a famous comic book dog for his eBay moniker ID emails me, then phones me, to complain that of the several items that he had ordered, only one had arrived. Where were the other items? And having heard that my son was helping me to manage fulfillment, proceeded to question my son's reading ability, and then demand that the remaining items be shipped to him OVERNIGHT in a fevered cell phone message.

Now, I've been selling on eBay for a number of years now, and have been moderately successful at it. My sales have increased comfortably over the years, doubling at one point a couple of years ago, and now...this summer I'm finding that sales are getting close to doubling again. Which is great, though it puts demands on my time, and given that I have a regular full-time job to hold fast to, the increased business, while delightful, has also proven to be a bit stressful, as well. So, I hired my son to assist me in fulfillment each week. He gets paid a handy sum per hour in cash, and I'm freed up to do other things in my online business.

And along comes ol' 'Ace' here--complaining of my poor service, demanding immediate fulfillment, and in essence insulting my son for his poor performance. What would YOU do?

Yet...here's the capper: it wasn't my son. It was MY error, from the word go. All on me. I admit as much to my unhappy customer, still in a fairly calm manner tinged with only the barest measure of sarcasm (I AM a good writer, remember), and his response to me was that...

'If you bother to look at you paid invoices. You would see a multi sale. This
is what it looks like. There are NO EXCUSES....

and then...

'After reading an invoice I do not understand the "oversight"
PLEASE SEND ME THE OVERNIGHT CONFERMATION # & TRACKING #
The only book I did receive is 223...

'If I receive the comics on MONDAY it would have taken a MONTH to complete
the order. How is that reasonable. '.

Hmm. So, here's the thing. In most every way, it's completely understandable that he's upset, and that taking a month for all the items to arrive is certainly not reasonable. Points to him for all this. A mistake was made, and he bore the suffering of having to wait.

I'm going to send his books out to him on Monday and pay either Priority Mail (a week to deliver) or, if I'm feeling particularly generous and stupid at the same time, I may send them overnight. Which will be about $36 vs $9 for Priority Mail. I'm really undecided on this--but the 'thing' remains--

He was a total dick about it.

So--yeah, I'm going to OVERNIGHT the books to him, and only because under the circumstances it's the 'right' thing to do-- but the guy is STILL a dick and I'm going to remove him from ever ordering from me again on eBay. I don't need this aggravation, and prefer the multitude of my customers who, generally, are nice and patient with my occasional errors. Yeah, I'm not perfect and I tend to broadcast that fact to whomever will listen. And if I screw up, I'll go that extra few kilometers to make things right again--but I swear, if you start insulting my son, act like an asshole, and generally come across like a demanding !@#$, how far do you think that'll take you in this world? A series of pyrrhic victories as you browbeat your way through the world.

What remains is the issue of feedback. The guy's not happy, and his books are going to be way late, so I risk getting a pile of negative feedback from this fellow, ol'... 'Ace' as I call him, referring to his seeming attachment to Batman's faithful canine friend. Well, whatever. If he negs me, he negs me, and he runs the risk of my own ire should I choose to respond to his negs with my own.

Still, that's plainly NOT fair--and I don't play that game. The best I might feel compelled to do would give him some NEUTRALS, just for the attitude. That's probably not fair, either. Jeezis!!

Anyone know a good therapist?

Success, Failure, Fun

Jiminy, if ever I need to be reminded about things being relative, all one has to do is start to feel some joy and confidence in one's business successes and then talk to someone else--to quickly realize that when it comes to selling comic books, I'm only a small potato in the big patch.

Fact of the matter is, since I started selling on eBay some five or six years ago, my sales for the most part steadily, if irregularly, increased marginally each month. Hey, more sales is more money, and it is still qualified as 'fun' as far as I'm concerned. When I opened up my eBay store, sales remarkably became quite consistent and got punched up to what we'll call 'levels around the turn of the century'. (is this vague? it's supposed to be)

Now, every once in awhile, my sales would spike considerably into the future...say, the mid 35th century or so, and wow! Exciting! And manageable...every once in a century...or month. In January of this year, I started listing items on amazon just to increase my number of sales venues, and that proved to add a century or two to my sales experience. All well and good, but then, this summer, things just went berzerko such that even Rip Hunter, Time Master, would have felt the pressure.

Suddenly each month I'm adding close to a fricking EON to my monthly sales experience. I'm pushing into the 40th century AD, and even at times into the 50th century and beyond. Astounding--marvelous, and scary! And all when my regular day job is becoming a bit more demanding than it ever was before.

The result has been that my fulfillment has slowed down by a factor of up to a week at worst.

The good news is that my son is proving to be a very reliable worker in helping me do fulfillment; while he doesn't necessarily love the work that he's doing, he likes the 'paycheck' (I pay him cash for each hour worked), and I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to set him loose 100% on fulfillment which will make him my 'numbah one son'.

I like having him work for me; it's nice to have him around while I do work in my comic book warehouse,

And so-- the eBay Toyo Days Comics experience continues on--with my 1st employee.

On a related note, considering that my sales have increased as they have, it's also correlated to an increase in my purchasing: I haven't been actively seeking out more inventory to buy from collectors, but it's been made available and one thing I have to do is take advantage of the opportunities to buy when I can. And I have--it's just that I have less time to process all that stuff.

Originally, my wife thought that the blog would be a useful selling tool; direct my cohort of regular customers to the blog so that they could see my thoughts on comic books and the like, but for me--personally, the blog isn't about selling. It's about observing my own life and successes...and failures...and where things don't even go south or north, but stay the same.

I enjoy it. Thanks for reading...all eleventeen of you.

Homeless Days of Harry Potter

So--I'm waiting in my car for my son to return with his cold drink when this homeless guy walks up to me, leans on my door, and says look, I've got a copy of the new Harry Potter book. I say--that's nice, and return to my comic book.

Do you want to buy it? $5!

Nary a thought passes my mind; I check the book, run through to make sure there's no drool or nastiness, hand him a fiver, and he's thankful and ambles off (at that very moment another tragic figure approaches with an empty gas can, asking for money for gas--to which I give her a buck. OK....OK, maybe she DOESN'T have a car; it's just a ploy...)

Odd thing is, I was off to my warehouse to do some work on my ebay business, and as I have an ancillary Amazon selling account, I list the book and thirty minutes later, it's sold for $17.50. Cool, I'm thinking. Helped the homeless guy, made a sale. Everybody's happy.

Except one guy, a good friend who points out that the book was probably stolen. I'm trafficking with thieves now?

I'm slightly abashed, but then I think--who knows? Who could absolutely know? Sure, there's a much higher chance that this guy did lift the book, or got it from someone who did, but...you know? I try not to have that harsh or suspicious a nature of my fellow man. Or maybe--

And how about all the folks I buy comics collections from? Did they steal the books at some point? I have on many occasions bought comics from various comics retailers, often staffers, and well--for the life of me, with the volume and quantity that they are offering me, one has to wonder--what kind of discount did these guys get? Or was it the five-fingered kind?

I'll never know--and I can't presume the viewpoint of a cop on each transaction that I undergo. Everyone has some larceny in their hearts--I was caught shoplifting when I was a teen. On rare occasions, I've been known to keep the incorrect change given to me by cash clerks when it worked to my advantage...but no, mostly I'm a pretty honest guy. There's enough to worry about in this life--like global warming and the effect it's going to have on my kids when they grow up.

Or how much they'll be paying to buy a house--if ever.

Chris TOKYODAYS

wives, fax machines, and comics

'Do a blog! You have so many interesting things to say!'

'Have you set up your blog yet? It will help sell your comics.'

'Blog now, or forever hold your peace.'

Yes, yes my dear--finally...at my wife's continual insistence, I have created this--my ego-driven (certainly not mine!) all-new blog. Which panhandles the notion-- 'blog'. Sounds kinda disgusting to me. 'Blog' sounds like something that either ends up under your tires, stuck between your teeth, or the unfortunate name given to one's ugly pet.

The primary reason I avoided this little ego-enterprise was, oddly, at first technological. I'd made an attempt to do a blog before...months ago...but there were too many hurdles getting it assigned to my website. More and more these days, ease of use is a byword with me, and if the activity takes up time and hoo-hah, well...next?

Case in point.

I wanted to buy a new fax-machine that would allow me to do broadcast faxes to my customers--so off to the ol' Office Depot where I bought my Brother CX575 whatever. I liked the notion of not sitting down in front of my fax machine and pressing a button or two and setting up 75 faxes to go out one after the other while I could attend to other aspects of my life.

Entering fax numbers and names? Done. Creating a group? Done. Arranging to enter numbers into the group?....Arranging to enter numbers into the group?....

BLEEP!

30 minutes into a phone call with a well-spoken south Asian woman later, neither of us could figure out how to get it to work. A subsequent call to another charming resident in the Indian sub-continent (why they ascribe such names as 'Johnny' or 'Matilda' to obviously Indian-accented phone tech assistants I'll never dope out) got me only slightly further along. They made valiant efforts to get the damned thing to perform in the manner the 'manual' stated the device could achieve that I waas able to channel my disdain where it belonged--to the management that allowed the poor tech writer to get this manual to market.

I promptly returned the item to the Office Depot, got my money back, and ultimately got a measure of satisfaction out of actually faxing the pages I needed to my customers one...by...one...by...one...(my old fax machine purportedly can do broadcast faxes but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend another hour dicking around to get there with Brother) and so I learned a bit about patience and forbearance.

As to Brother from whom I had bought the device, I was irritated to note that the website really didn't allow any place to easily COMPLAIN about my problem. I'm a big believer in customer feedback, and in today's faster-paced lifestyle, who has time to DICK AROUND (thanks Fran) with tech that doesn't do what it's supposed to do? (which raises the question about folks who use Windows regularly...there is a mass dysfunctionality event if there ever was one)...

But I digress.

So--other than driving around Northern California selling pills to health food stores, I'm a comic book dealer. If you'd like to see my listings of vintage comics, current comics, comic lots, magazines, etc. you can click here to see what my part-time life is about.

It's my wife's presumption that posting this blog may drive business there...we'll see. In the meantime, I'm trying to determine if I'm having fun yet.

OK, I like to write--so yeah, I'm having fun. More next time.

Chris

j

PS--my very first blog has already gotten editorial comment; that it should primarily be about comics and comics-related issues. Well, we'll see how well that works out. Isn't it true that blogs will take on lives of their own?