We've Got Lots of Issues

The question of back issues has begun to rear it's less than attractive head. We're not a back issue store. That's not to say that we have none, rather we have only as many as can fit on the relatively thin shelves behind the most recent issue (i.e 4 or 5). This pretty much serves the purpose we have for it, namely that if someone picks up issue 27 of The Walking Dead on a whim, realizes how wonderfully soap operatic it is and wants to read the whole thing, well we have the whole thing available as four collections and the three latest issues. But we are not the store to come to looking for the first issue of The Walking Dead. We're going to hand you the first trade. That's not to say that we don't sell plenty of singles, but we don't keep them as backstock.

Which leads to our current circumstance, in which we have multiple copies of several issues of some title which we simply do not have room for on the shelves. Once there's no room left for, it where does it go? We don't have back issue bins, for the most part they have almost no value on eBay, we've sold what we can to other stores that are running low or want particular back issues, but if we simply take them off the shelves and store them somewhere, well that's capital that is simply sitting there screaming to be liquidated. At the same time, I'm not a huge fan of devaluing the merchandise by selling off inventory at a deep discount just a few months after release. Which is all a longwinded way of saying that, we've come up with a couple of short term solutions and possibly some long term ones that I'll go into in more detail tomorrow. Until then, a couple quick notes:

Go check out the Isotope Legal Download Fest, running virtually all week.
Yesterday they premiered a first look at B. Clay Moore and Jeremy Haun's The Leading Man from Oni and today we get a look at Tony Consiglio's 110 Percent. Something certainly seems to be in the air.

Finally, I mentioned that the search feature wasn't working very well -- here's how bad it is:
Our most searched for title is True Story, Swear to God (I'm assuming that's what anyone just searching for "true story" is actually looking for). Unfortunately, unless the searcher puts quotes around the words, True Story, Swear to God doesn't show up in the results. Not exactly ideal, so if anyone is particularly adept at writing search code, let me know.