The Four Color Media Monitor

The Irish Sun reported about another specialty store manager in south London who's catering to the speculator crowd over in the UK:

A COLLECTOR who read comic books for fun says he now sells graphic novels for £4,000 each.

Steve, who owns A Place In Space, a comic book shop in Croydon, South London, says loyal customers spend thousands for rare editions.

The entrepreneur was buying and selling comics long before taking on the store and even supplied other a place of his own.

He told MyLondon: "Friends said that I had a good eye for products and when we were offered to buy the business, my wife and I decided to go for it."

The shop is now thriving and has some high-end stock that catches the eyes of collectors.

Steve revealed that he has items on his shelves worth up to £4,000 each because of how rare they are.

And they're bound to remain that way, since they'll be locked up in a vault until they're sold to the next auctioneer for even more money on the speculator market. Once again, we have an example of too much emphasis on buying for the profit, not the reading value. Although the store manager also says:

However, Steve has seen sales of rarer books decline amid the cost of living crisis.

He said: "We can see that customers are changing their buying habits and don't want to spend a lot of money on one item.

"But they are happy to spend it on lower value items, where it seems you get more value for money."

I hope they're changing their habits to buying for reading value's sake, because all this emphasis on speculator sales has gotten way out of hand. It's got to be cheaper to buy for readership's sake too. That's where the real value's found for money. I think it's great the interviewee owns a specialty store, but this speculator approach to marketing is just way too absurd at this point, and anybody who's getting into the business should set a better example by at least trying to establish a store selling on merit, and just as good would be if they sold more paperbacks and hardcovers than pamphlets. That way, it'd be much easier to stop all the ludicrous profiteering that's ruined comicdom over past decades.

Labels: Europe and Asia, history, msm propaganda, sales