{"id":5882,"date":"2009-01-05T01:07:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-05T01:07:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-07-28T03:08:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-28T03:08:23","slug":"january-always-perilous-month-for-shops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/05\/january-always-perilous-month-for-shops\/","title":{"rendered":"January: Always a perilous month for shops"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the vein of a <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.comichron.com\/2008\/10\/california-paper-reports-claremont.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">similar report<\/span><\/a> from California earlier, a report of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.contracostatimes.com\/california\/ci_11362340?nclick_check=1\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">a comics and games store citing the overall recession<\/span><\/a> as its reason for closure. Torrance, Calif. store <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Third Planet Comics &amp; Games<\/span> closes Monday, according to the <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Contra Costa Times<\/span>. &#8220;<span id=\"default\"><span id=\"CCT_Article\">The deciding factor in this decision is that sales have fallen to a level where we can no longer meet our obligations,&#8221; owner <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">Robert North<\/span> told patrons in an e-mail. The owner of a nearby store in Manhattan Beach told the paper that there had been a &#8220;slight downturn&#8221; in its own sales.<\/p>\n<p>Again, individual reports of closings and <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.comichron.com\/2008\/10\/balance-in-nature.html\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">openings<\/span><\/a> don&#8217;t give us the full larger picture \u2014 every store&#8217;s situation is different \u2014 and the macro performance for the comics industry in the 2007 appears to have run ahead of the general economy. But January is a month for comics industry watchers to keep an eye on. The first month of the historic &#8220;dead quarter&#8221; usually sees the slowest sales of the year, and back at the end of the last boom, something like 1,100 stores closed in January 1994, kicking off a six-year downturn.<\/p>\n<p>Product mix also deserves a special look in this time \u2014 there are a number of non-comics lines that are performing more weakly than comics, so the &#8220;diversify, diversify, diversify&#8221; call of the mid-1990s might be creating some additional downside exposure now for shops heavily invested in slow sectors. Something to keep an eye on as reports come in&#8230;<br \/>\n<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the vein of a similar report from California earlier, a report of a comics and games store citing the overall recession as its reason for closure. Torrance, Calif. store Third Planet Comics &amp; Games closes Monday, according to the Contra Costa Times. &#8220;The deciding factor in this decision is that sales have fallen to &#8230; <a title=\"January: Always a perilous month for shops\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/05\/january-always-perilous-month-for-shops\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about January: Always a perilous month for shops\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[116,78,60,102,33],"class_list":["post-5882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-comics-shops","tag-dead-quarter","tag-media-reports","tag-recessions","tag-state-of-the-market"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5882"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5882\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5883,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5882\/revisions\/5883"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comichron.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}