Money 1 - Ethics 0

Yesterday I had a patron buy us out of Marvel Zombies #1. Five copies left and, based on my own mission statement prior to opening the store, I should not have sold him more than 3 or possibly 4 of those copies. I have no idea what his plans for those 5 copies were, and even if he plans to sell all 5 on eBay (fairly likely since it seems to have sold out from Diamond and I saw one copy going for over $10 online) that's his choice. But before we opened I wrote a little list of rules for how I wanted to run this business and avoiding every aspect of "collecting" comics as anything other than entertainment was high on that list.

The entire store, from the inventory to the layout to the leather couch is directed towards the idea of READING comics. Again I have no problem at all with this customer buying five copies of Marvel Zombies and I hope he plans to give them to friends who enjoyed both Spider-man movies and Shaun of the Dead. But the idea of this store is to carry as much variety as possible and provide as much opportunity as possible for our customers to read those various comics.

Problem is, that was my only sale yesterday. Yeah, I know Tuesdays are slow, but when no one buys anything Monday and Tuesday is looking just as bad, suddenly a sale becomes just a little more important than it should be. So, when the voice in the back of my head piped up and asked what I was going to tell the guy who comes in tomorrow looking for Marvel Zombies #1 I told it to shut up, I'll sell him Walking Dead or something. Because who knows if anyone is actually coming in tomorrow looking for anything?