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To our Valued Customers and Friends,
Today our terms with Diamond were changed to C.O.D. Certified Check. We had a problem with one of our checks from a few weeks ago and I had hoped to clear it up with the shipment from this week. But Diamond decided otherwise. The comics are the backbone of our income. With our sales down significantly, it has been harder to keep up.
I am delivering this news today with a very heavy heart that is breaking in half. Barring a miracle (anybody have one?), Brainstorm Movies, Comics and Gaming will be closing its doors once and for all. As of this writing I am projecting that our final day of business will be Sunday, October 4th.
I am asking that all files be emptied by September 16th. With the exception of what is currently being held in the subscriber boxes, everything in the store is 50% off regular price.
As for the liquidation of our movie inventory, we will be making an announcement later this week. There are titles we have in the selection that are on loan to us, so we have to make sure we pull those out and return them.
We will have a booth at the Windy City Comic Con on Saturday, September 19th. It is our hope to liquidate our remaining inventory that day.
For those of you who have consignments with us, we can pull your inventory over the next several weeks or we can continue to sell your consignments and then settle up once and for all in September. If we don't hear from you, we'll proceed with that course of action.
There are a great number of you who have been coming in almost every week since the day you discovered us. I thank you for that continued and constant support.
So the question on everyone’s mind I imagine is ‘What happened?’ I will try to answer that as clearly and efficiently as possible. I realize that this is going to have an affect on a number of people and I feel you deserve to know.
In March of 2008 we saw our first dip. It wasn’t much, just a few hundred dollars. But in hindsight I think that is where it started. That was when those customers who worked in construction and real estate started to quietly fade away. Messages were left, sometimes we got responses, but they never came back.
As the summer of 2008 got going and moving season started, we had a number of people who left Chicago, either because it had gotten too expensive to live here or they got a new job in another state. Moving and starting over, sometimes without a new job, dictates how much money you can spend on nonessentials. Some of our customers moved away, but stayed with us and set up mail order accounts, which I was grateful for.
Still others had new additions to your families. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that babies need their parents to be the heroes. Batman and Wolverine can take care of themselves. I would expect nothing less and I have enjoyed meeting each of those up and coming comic book fans. I hope to stay in touch and see these little geeks become big geeks.
We’ve had friends who lost their jobs or saw their incomes diminished by mortgages that reset, or jobs that were redefined by economic factors. There have been various trials that everyone has had to endure as a result of this economic collapse from medical emergencies, to cars that stop running and furnaces that die out, to temporary layoffs. As a result, they weren’t able to pick up books anymore or they had to cut down to a fraction of what they used to buy. Many hoped that their setback was temporary, so they stopped coming in as regularly as they used to. The intention was there, but the money wasn’t. And comics can pile up very quickly.
Ten books at thirty bucks can quickly become forty books at a hundred and twenty bucks. Multiply any combination of that number by dozens of people who have every intention of getting their subscriptions, but have had to put off picking up books and…well, it does have its place in this turn of events.
Changes within the comic industry such as the price increases and all of the extensive invasions and crisis after crisis have slowly eroded the budgets of a number of people. When the hobby of collecting is set against higher prices and the recession, even with a discount and free bags and boards, it has been harder for people to continue buying the amount of titles they used to.
While sales might be booming during a big event, when that event ends, it creates a sales vacuum. Over the past years we’ve seen one event lead into another event, but even then, there is only so much that the buying public can take. And if the writing falls apart in the last issue, then you lose the reader. They approach the next big thing with caution, if at all. We saw a lot of that after those last events from DC and Marvel. Sadly the industry doesn’t seem to get this.
From the DVD rental perspective, shops like ours have recently become byproduct casualties of the war between the online rentals, video on demand and the DVD rental kiosks that have seemingly infiltrated every grocery store. No matter what the rental special is, a store like this can’t compete on that level. And the areas where we do excel, selection, customer service and smart people with tons of film knowledge, just isn’t valued as much as the belief that there’s no late fees on that movie sitting on the coffee table for six weeks.
Throw in the banks cutting off access to credit, the collapse of the housing market, the jobless rate and all of the factors I’ve outlined above, I’m grateful that we managed to hold on for as long as we did. And lately it truly felt like we might turn it around. We’d been getting new subscribers, some with quite substantial lists.
But then there was the week when we had a large Diamond shipment, payroll, payroll taxes, rent, property taxes and credit card processing charges all due in the same week. It was more than what we could bring in and we never pulled out of that hole. While the talking heads say that the recession is over, we’re hearing from our people that they are in still in the same situation, staring at a stack of bills wondering where the money is going to come from.
And all of that has brought us to this point.
I will always look back on this time and I will smile because there was a time when I was one of the owners of what I truly feel was THE BEST DAMNED COMIC SHOP IN THE CITY OF CHICAGO. We created something special here that I am very proud of. We tried to raise the bar on what to expect from a comic shop and I think we succeeded. We tried to educate people with facts and honesty and you showed your appreciation with loyalty. I like to think that we brought a little bit of class and integrity to what we did here.
We couldn’t have made Brainstorm what it was without all of you, our customers, our supporters, our friends. Thank you all for helping make our dream come true. This will always be a very special time in my life and I will treasure all of the friendships we have made here. I intend to stay in touch, one way or another.
I asked Matt to include anything he wanted to say, so please keep reading.
I wish each and every one of you all the best that love and life and hope and faith can bring.
Thank you so much for your support and your friendship. You’re all heroes in my eyes.
Robert
I think Robert said everything that needed to be said about what has happened to Brainstorm, and why, so I will just add a few personal thoughts of my own.
When I was growing up in southern Oregon, I had it all planned out. Big dreams. I would grow up, go to high school, win an academic scholarship to get me the hell out of that Podunk burg, become a famous novelist, and conquer the world. And I did accomplish at least three of those things, but along the way, my dreams started to change.
When my family got their first VCR in the middle eighties, I quickly fell in love with a thrilling new sort of venue: the local video store. There were a few in my home town, but it wasn’t until I found the one with ten million horror movies that I’d never heard of, displayed in a dusty labyrinth of seven-foot-high shelves, that I began to realize the possibilities. I love movies. But more than that, I love to share movies with people who haven’t seen them yet. I love to help people remember the name of that movie they’ve forgotten, and to trade stories about the first time we saw Heathers or Evil Dead 2. I wanted to be the guy who had the video store.
The other life-changing experience I had at this time was that my favorite used book store – The Bunker Hill Book Exchange – started to carry comics. Not a whole lot, but enough to be worth a look. I hadn’t had a comic subscription since I was in the single digits, but when Ramona started bringing them into the Exchange, I started to shop there a lot more frequently. That’s when I began to collect what became my very first complete run – the 100 issues of Firestorm that ran from 1982 to 1987. I still have those issues, and though they are far from the best stories I’ve ever read, they are extremely special to me. They re-invigorated my love of comics, a love that got me through the bleak years of puberty and high school, a love that kept me drawing and writing stories.
When Robert was managing Specialty Video in Lakeview back in 2002, he interviewed me for a job. During the interview, he had a handful of comic books sitting on a case of HeroClix figures on the floor behind him. I knew that we would get along.
When he started to talk about his dream of opening up a comic book shop of his own, I certainly shared his enthusiasm, though not a lot of hope that it would ever really happen. But he was determined to see it through, and I was excited to be asked to help make Brainstorm a reality.
I would have been happy just to work for Robert. But I was given the opportunity to become co-owner of a store that seemed tailor-made to my own specifications! Here was a beautiful comic book shop that was also a local video store, where I had a chance to turn the movie collection into everything I wanted it to be. I will always be proud to be a part of Brainstorm, and grateful that I was asked.
I’d like to thank all of our customers for allowing me to spend six wonderful years here, helping to build what I still believe is the greatest store in Chicago. For the first time in my life, I found myself in a job where I liked coming to work, enjoyed what I did there, and could go home at the end of the day to work on my art without feeling like something had been carved out of me. I love this place with all my heart, and I know that many of you feel the same way.
This has been a dream come true for me, and I don’t know what I’ll do without all of you.
Matt
PS: I need a job.
6:22 PM
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