Many people have been asking me why I haven't done a posting in a while. I could say I've been busy which is true but not the reason for silence. The real answer is I've been unhappy recently over a couple of other major thefts and my general inability to stop these things.

The first was another regular customer, whose name I don't know, who came in frequently to buy 25¢ comics from the bins. After a while I quit counting what he had and just asked him what he had counted up and took him at this word. He continued coming in, bringing his own bag and filling it up with cheap reads. We had talked about which comics were not part of the deal and he seemed fine with that.

One day he did his usual thing picking up 200 - 25¢ comics and I rang up his total. When he left was looking for some recent comics when I realized several boxes of new comics were nearly gone. They had been there the night before (I just filled them) and he had been the first and only person in the store. He did seem more in a hurry than usual and now I haven't seen him since. If they were nearly all new comics with a few cheap ones sprinkled on top, then I probably lost between four and five hundred dollars on that deal, just because I trust people too much. And this is the small theft....

I shipped books to Montreal for WorldCon at the beginning of August. Since Neil Gaiman was guest of honor I decided to just bring his books with me. I couldn't get firm prices from the broker which should have stopped me right there. I know it's expensive to get books into Canada but I wasn't sure how much it would be. It turned out to be a LOT. Between exorbitant shipping charges, broker fees, extra taxes that even the Canadian government can't explain and several other extras, it ate up more than any profit I might have made at the convention. But the real insult to injury was the return shipment.

Someone along the way stole books out of the shrinkwrapped pallet of sealed boxes (of course it arrived unshrinkwrapped and boxes re-taped) . About $2500 worth. They knew which ones to pick - first editions of Neil's Graveyard Book as well as the special Subterranean edition of the same title. They took 'em all. What can I do about it? Not much. Sue the shippers/broker? The expense and time wasted pursuing the case even should I win could not justify any compensation I might see. I've been stewing over it for a month but I think just writing about it should help me clear my mind and (ever-so-slightly) forget about it.

It just bothers me how much I've lost to shop-lifting, employee-theft, vandalism, robbery, carelessness with my stuff, etc. I can trace over $300,000.00 in losses and that's just the stuff I know about. It could easily be double that or more. Since whoever keeps track of such things has suggested that as much as 7% of retail items are stolen, It could exceed a million dollars in my 33 years in business. I've never made a profit of 7% of sales in any year yet.

So if anyone reading this has ever stolen anything from me, bring it back. I'm broke.

Greg