GeekNights Wednesday - Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045

GeekNights
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Tonight on GeekNights, we review the uninspired Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 anime on Netflix. It's... a show. Honestly, you're better off just dusting off your old Stand Alone Complex DVDs. In the news, Black Lives Matter, racist status are getting pulled down the world over, DC Comics ends its relationship with Diamond Distributors, and Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is a decent kids' show.

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Because I worked at Barnes and Noble for 15 years and I’m a huge nerd, I want to expand on a few points regarding distributors.

  • The “tear off a cover and report the book destroyed” only applies to periodicals and mass-market paperbacks. That’s why Mass Markets have a barcode on the cover as well as on the back. Trade paperbacks and hardcovers would get returned to the warehouse or the distributor so they could be moved to a different store or held until someone ordered it. I spent hours sorting books by distributor and packing them up to be shipped out. One pile for Random House, one for Scholastic, one for Penguin, etc.
  • The graphic novel trade paperbacks as well as some Manga, was boxed up and shipped to Diamond - they do have a different model for those than they do for the monthly issues.
  • The B&N Newsstand carries periodicals including floppy comics, and we got direct shipments from Diamond every week to fill those. When the new issue came in, we used to tear off the cover and send just the covers back, while the rest of the issue got recycled. Eventually they changed it so we sent the entire issues back to the warehouses together, where they would handle the recycling and inventorying all at once. We eventually started doing this for Mass Markets too. Which sucked because when we were still recycling them, old magazines, comics, and even Mass Markets without their covers would sometimes fall out of the recycle bin and into our backpacks.
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Very good info. The main point for normal people is the difference between the returnable and non-returnable markets. A book store like B&N can over-order and not care because the extras go away. A comic book store has to be extremely good at accurately predicting the amount they will sell, and they can only salvage their overage with bargain bins.

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For sure. I listen to a podcast where one of the hosts manages a comic store, and its clear they live and die by the pull lists because it helps them to know exactly how many copies to get without worrying about waste. B&N is so big that we could recycle over 150 lbs of magazines and floppy comics every week without a problem in just our one store.

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That being said, while the non-returnable market is a pain for retailers, I wonder how big the environmental impact is of the returnable one.

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Standalone review on Standalone Complex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0ju15Hiaa0

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