Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KDLadage" data-source="post: 1013177" data-attributes="member: 88">OK... I think you are missing the point. I will try again. If you are not, in fact, missing the point, then I appologize and you can ignore this post. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />We have two issues here: The first issue is that the large business can afford to discount a lot more than the small business. This is a simple fact created by the economies of scale. Although I feel that this sort of thing hurts the hobby, as it takes money away from businesses that truly care about the hobby's growth, it is a seperate issue all together. As Derek and others have stated -- it is Derek's job to make it worth coming to his store over going to Walmart.com or Barnes&Noble or Amazon and getting a cheaper price. That is his delima as a businessman.The second issue is the street date, which you appear to be treating as a moot point. The exact day the books hit the shelves, if all stores are treated equally, is not a big deal. If they are all released at the same time, then the little guy is back to square one: how to get customers to buy from her/him when the big chains have such deep discounting. It is a problem, but not one that cannot be recovered from.If, however, the little guy has to wait a week or so after the big guy to sell the material, then this is a problem that the little guy simply cannot fix -- he has to charge more for a product that s/he cannot deliver as timely. Please note the use of the word 'cannot' -- I did not say that it would be harder to be as timely, I did nto say it would be a challenge to be as timely, I am saying it has become an impossibility to be as timely because one group of businesses are being held to a date that the others can apparently break without recourse.So here is Derek in his store, trying to tell people "I know you can buy these books a week before I receive them, and you can get them for more than 15% less that I can afford to sell them to you -- but please, wait and buy from me instead! Same books, more expensive, and a lot later!"So how, in such an environment can a small business compete?And herein lies the problem. If such a scenario is allowed to continue unchecked, then this will be the end of the small business within our hobby. Will this kill the hobby? No. The hobby will live on.It will break it though. If you want to know what I mean by breaking the hobby, then we can talk in another thread. I have discussed it before, and I am sure many of you know what I mean by that. The hobby will go on. But it will not be the same. And the changes will most definately not be for the better. (imnsho, ymmv, yada yada yada)</blockquote>

Verification