Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment

When A Retailer Gets FOC'ed Over

Titan Comics is the latest comics publisher to join the FOC system. Standing for Final Order Cut-Off, it was originally established by Marvel and Diamond after a successful class action suit by retailers against Marvel for breaking their agreements over lateness and penalties. Instead of making comics returnable because they were late, or were different from solicited, retailers were given the opportunity to amend their orders a few weeks before release, with new accurate information.

Initially in place to stop retailers ordering product they could no longer sell, at also gave Marvel a new promotional window for retailers to increase their orders. DC Comics also saw the benefit in this, and signed up, as did all the Diamond Premiere publishers. Other publishers also joined the system, leading to the current marketplace where there are three promotional windows for most big publishers, solicitation, FOC and release date. That is, when FOC works…

Dennis Barger of Quickstop Comics and Wonderworld Comics in CCCC, wrote yesterday after a rather unsuccessful FOC day,

Dear comic publisher participating in Diamond's FOC, today our fabulous retail partners diamond comics have cost us all a lot of money. As most of us retailers do on Monday I got to the store early to do my weekly FOC, for the first two hours we weren't able to log in due to the server being down. Then when we finally get in we proceed to start 4 hours of reviewing all of your fine comics available to us. We increased a lot and only dropped the numbers on a few titles. We finally finished just before close. When we hit the commit button an error msg popped up telling me nothing was saved. Tech support apologized that they had to reboot the server again after we started which disconnected us and probably all retailers doing it at the same time….poof and there goes our perfectly planned out order and all the data deleted.

So now it's after 6, my lovely children are waiting at home and have made me pizza so we can watch a movie together.

I increased my order over $1,000 wholesale, I took advantage of your offers and variants and additional trade paperbacks. After the reset and skimming through the FOC order all I could remember was the books I reduced and now that order is net -$500 less. I have no idea what the $1,500 differences were.

I will not stick around and force myself and my employees to do our job twice so that people who can barely do their job once can collect their percent of the increases. I highly recommend you have a discussion with Diamond how they will compensate you for the money they just cost you. I for one am sending them a bill for the 18 wasted man hours today.

Sincerely
Dennis L Barger Jr

Good luck with that Dennis. I'm sure Diamond regrets the error…

His post was followed by a number of retailers, some sympathising, but others pointing out that Dennis could have done the figures at an earlier time than last minute, to prevent just this kind of situation. And another always makes sure to screencap his FOC changes for just this eventuality.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!