Fantastic Coffee & Banking

One is an addictive stimulant that leads to crashes, the other is hot, liquid, and life-sustaining...

A quick announcement about the store…

…before the essay portion which is also about the store: Uel will be keeping the store open an hour or so later on Wednesdays, seeing as how daylight is extending longer into the evening. He’s actually been doing it for some time now, and it’s still not super-official yet (call ahead if you’re planning a big trip out here in the wee hours), but if you would like to start a new humpday habit of hitting the store after your 9-5 grind, now’s the time.

And now for something completely similar:

Sometimes when we do giveaways, it’s a little disappointing how few people are excited enough to respond for free stuff — after months of posting our little Wrestling Pose challenge in the window, we had to twist Dave from the AWCW podcast’s arm here into doing an Orange Cassidy thumbs up and practically forced him to take home an awesome little effigy of Shinsuke Nakamura.

Happy Birthday, Dave!

But our little “Who would be a good mascot for Comics and Adult Beverages?” question must have touched a nerve, because we have five responses, all of them for coffee, apparently the adult beverage of choice.

Guessing which nerd characters/coffee mascots these are is an exercise for the reader…

Congratulations to Beck for being randomly chosen of the responses. Come by the store and pick up your Too Much Coffee Man mug, or if you’d like to follow a long tradition of rejecting Fantastic Comics Prizes, let us know and we’ll try to offload it to the remaining four.

But speaking of coffee…

…did you know Starbucks is basically a bank masquerading as a coffee shop?

Loan sharking banking is a lucrative business, or at least it is when they’re not going under from a run on deposits, and let’s just say they’ve made an obscene amount of interest and fees from Fantastic Comics. Though they can’t hold a candle to distributor who shall not be named (whom we celebrated getting out of hock to last year), the interest on one of our largest outstanding loans is over 17%.

No longer! Thanks to a super patron, we will soon (fingers crossed) be retiring the most egregious debt, leaving us with lower interest rates and a lower overall principle to boot.

One of the saddest realities of the American Dream is that when I ask most people, (and in Berkeley, these tended to be those in and a few years out of college) what their financial dreams are, it isn’t retiring at 30 with a megayacht, it’s usually getting back to zero.

In any case, the ship for Fantastic Megayachts has sailed (unless there’s another super patron out there), but we were on track to get to zero in five years. Our super patron basically cut that number down to three years.

But for most of those three years, we still have to give up hundreds of dollars in interest to the banks every month. We’d prefer to give up less, and if we have to give up anything, we’d rather give it to customers and fans of the store.

But that’s not a pie in the sky dream — that can very feasibly happen, and you don’t need to be a super patron. Here’s how:

Gift cards — like the Starbucks article said, gift cards are an interest-free loan to the store, and if you never cash it in, they become a different kind of gift — a gift to the store.

Patreon — of course if you want to explicitly gift money to the store, Patreon is one of the more convenient ways to do it, but there is a hidden cost to that convenience in the form of transaction fees. Some of these are quite unavoidable in that bank interchange fees for processing a credit card will always be there, but Patreon typically charges on top of such fees (they are a business after all), so your $1 a month donation might end up being closer to 80 cents.

It seems with these fees and interest charges, banks have it made, especially with the credit card and lending arms of their operations. But as recent events in our backyard show, banks can have a problem with the opposite side of their business, when the customers who park their money decide to pick it up all at once, they can collapse at the snap of a finger.

Here at Fantastic Comics, we often have the opposite problem — people don’t come in for their books! Comic stores in some sense have an advantage over banks — not as great an advantage as a coffee shop that can brew product on the spot — but any shop that’s been around has acquired an inventory of ready collateral in the form of key issues, omnibuses etc…

If you come in and cash out a fractional reserve bank — too many of you do it and you get the run on the bank.

But Fantastic Comics books aren’t in Joe’s house and Billy’s house and my house (well, some of them are, but…) They’re at Fantastic Comics. Unlike a fractional reserve bank, we actually have not 1/10th of your books, but 10/10ths of them — and that’s sometimes a problem because as time goes on, they tend to get buried under more books. Imagine a bank that couldn’t find your money because it was buried under stacks of more money. Inconceivable. If all of you come in at once, oh, it would be a madhouse, but at the end you’d get your books and it would help us out, because we’d have the space to order more stuff!

Putting two and two together

And this got me thinking… we could start a bank¹… for comics! You can deposit your money towards comics in general, much like in the Starbucks gift card example. But whereas at Starbucks, if you cash it in towards a specific coffee, they will toss it if you haven't picked it up at the end of the day. I say being a comic store, we should hold your comic purchases in a portfolio indefinitely, not in the sense of forever, but more like, we don't know when we'll run out of space, but you can hold it with us until then.

Now here’s where it gets interesting. A lot of people are reading comics digitally, but much fewer are buying them as specific digital issues rather than a subscription, for a very understandable reason that it feels really awkward to buy something that is conceptually a physical object but in reality a very complicated and revokable license that can evaporate as soon as the service goes kaput (or someone complains about the content). While the actual laws you can get sued over might say otherwise, most people would agree that if you’ve bought the physical comic, then you shouldn’t have to buy it again to read a digital version of it, and you’re well within your moral (if not necessarily legal) rights to read it on a pirate site, if that’s the most convenient way to consume it, and lately, that’s beginning to feel like the case. Digital media are subject to post hoc censorship, but more often than not are casualties of companies no longer wanting to pay rights-holders, leaving people who paid for the thing in the first place in a lurch. You can imagine a future where generations of fans who hardly ever read physical comics are still very interested in buying them just to be able to own something that won’t disappear.

Probably the closest media in purchasing, collecting, and consuming habits to comics aren’t books, but rather CDs and records. A business called Murfie charged money to store people’s collections, and to rip them to MP3s for you. Pretty intriguing! Unfortunately, they went belly-up, and if you’d like to go down another sinkhole of time you can read about the eccentric character who bought it up then proceeded to generate a crime podcast’s worth of mis-adventures.

Meet John Fenley, Digital Folk Hero

But bizarro antics and dubious business models aside, I do believe there’s an untapped audience out there who want to buy real, physical comics with way more frequency than they are willing to make a trip out in the world to go get them. Our old poll said so!

Numbers don’t lie! Except when I tell them to…

By the way, Uel hates, hates, hates this idea. I think he will hate it much less when he sees Fantastic Comics remaining debt paid off completely by such a harebrained scheme revolutionary new way of buying/selling/auctioning comics. But until he comes around, there’s going to be a bit of a wall between Fantastic Banking and Fantastic Comics. A wall is probably a good idea, considering that the last big fiduciary experiment to come out of Berkeley was the infamous FTX, whose US headquarters was apparently right around the corner from our old downtown location!

Did Sam Bankman-Fried and his cohorts shop at Fantastic Comics?

Conveniently, we already have a separate store in the form of our Half Price Comics and Auctions experiments. I’m working procrastinating on reviving that by making a custom system that wasn’t built mostly for restaurants. If you ever found our half price store hard to navigate, it’s because the website was mostly optimized for ordering tacos and ramen. It’s finally time to shave that yak and build ourselves an online comic shop/bank from the ground up.

We may not have venture capital seed money to play with, but we can take advantage of a year of free credit card processing for startups — meaning we will get to actually keep 100% of every dollar deposited, as opposed to having it chiseled away like a lowly brick and mortar retail shop that deals with tangible goods. Capitalism has often been criticized as being Socialism for the few, and it’s nice to get a taste of what it’s like for the few!

Speaking of making millions of dollars, say congratulations to Uel for having recently hit 1000 subscribers on the Fantastic Comics channel, a first big step towards monetization (and demonetization), and a precursor to knocking ComicTom off the charts.

P.S. If you’d like to avoid the inherent trappings of capitalism and processing fees therein, you can toss the odd tithe to Gizmo’s personal Venmo now for doggie treats and dogtor visits.

Gizmo is skeptical of the entire enterprise of free market capitalism in the 21st century, until doggie treats make an appearance…

1. Of course, it would not be a true bank in any sense that would require intense regulatory oversight and restrictions, of which all actual banks surely have in a non-sarcastic way.