Brian Hibbs Pushes For Street Dates

The outspoken direct market retailer and columnist Brian Hibbs makes the case for street dates. I'm for street dates -- which means that instead of comic books arriving on Wednesday to be sold that very day they would be shipped an earlier date and then put out for sale on the date they're supposed to go on sale. It's an interesting issue for the direct market of hobby and comics shops because comics shops are notorious for pressing any advantage they can and a significant number of retailers believe that if someone out there has a greatly anticipated comic book, they are simply not waiting until the street date to provide them to their best customers.

What makes Hibbs' argument interesting to me is that he's really not arguing for street dates as most of understand it, he's arguing that all books should be shipped one day earlier. This creates many of the advantages of street dates -- like better set-up time for retailers, more time to prepare if something's gone wrong, and it puts everyone on the same playing field with retailers who already get their stuff one day earlier -- but doesn't achieve some of the things that many of us think of as systematic improvements, primarily the ability for the industry to rally around the fact that exact issue of X book is available on exact Y date and thus build anticipation for that book, or have better general planning within months so that 18 of 24 books staring teenage mutants or whatever no longer come out on one day. A couple of the advantages to simply advocating that everyone get the comics a day earlier is that it eliminates many of the more legit concerns of a more comprehensive street dates system, like all of the sudden requiring stores be able to store books that haven't hit their street date. It can also be sold as leveling the playing field as opposed to frightening change in the status quo. The obvious punishment of violating the street date -- having your books held until day-of -- would be severe but wouldn't put anyone out of business.

I would imagine that the there would still be widespread cheating and widespread accusations of cheating and protestations of innocence and demands for punishment and some folks declaring they were morally obligated to cheat and other folks extolling the virtues of playing it smart in a system that demands cheating and maybe an inability by Diamond to remember to ship one package in 17 a day later, mostly because everyone is crazy now. But it might be worth seeing if this could get done.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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