Voyager Magazine Excerpt

Jamie Newbold (Store Owner)

Our store thrives on word-of-mouth recommendations and glowing social network reviews from customers and critics. Our shop got off the ground 24 years ago with a shaky start. We had little money and no store operational experience.  Twenty-four years later we are extremely popular across the country and overseas. We learned that retailing old, back-issue comic books was, and is, a vibrant, popular hobby and potent business platform.  My family is small, but my employees are many and they have become my family. Each person that works for me becomes a character at the store with their own fan following. Our customers are tremendously supportive as illustrated by Google business comments alone. We have over 300 comments, many 5 stars, and a 4.7 rating.

The reviews have impact on our business. A grand number of customers discover us through various pipelines of communication. Many curious people transit over to review sites to see what we are and what we have before they commit to a trip to the store or our web site. The most thoughtful of them leave comments that often flatter our shop and our workers.  We stubbornly refuse to accept the very few posts that label us negatively when the comments seem one-sided and without viable merit. That’s part of the business, though, and we watch those posts get buried under new reviews that praise and like us. The ratio of good to bad is roughly 300:10 on Google alone. Yelp tends to conceal many of our high ratings, labeling them “redundant without contributing anything new.” This is their policy and I believe they prefer the drama of near-libelous comments over the numerous strong comments they claim add nothing.

I rarely follow the review posts anymore. I’ve had conversations with many businesses that stopped looking at their reviews because of needless anxiety over things said that are written in unfair environments and has created undue stress and anxiety.  We hear about the things we do right straight from our customers. Nobody comes to the shop to discuss what they believe we do wrong. The critics use social networking to “assassinate” us as they do other businesses.  Such is the case of the accusation of racism against us.

We have a lot of high-dollar back issues. They are the fruits of our labor to acquire inventory. Collectors frequent our store to make money off their comics. We pay well since those choice comics are our bread-and-butter. Possession of the comics is risky in a store where customers have access to our display items. We chain off particular areas, post employees and hang signs instructing customers to hand particular items over to them. All these precautions are based upon the habitual behavior of occasional customers that see shoplifting as a viable option to payment.

Kristin, an employee of the store since 2004, recently encountered two customers leaving the sensitive area containing costly comics. Kris is always happy and upbeat. She enjoys the customers and treats all of them with the exact same friendly tone and gusto. These two men ignored the signs and seemed perturbed at Kristin’s request to hold onto the comics for them at the register. She calmly pointed out the signage to them as our theft-prevention rule. They must have grumbled and stewed over the minor confrontation because they hit our Yelp account with a big negative. Their complaint: Kristin singled them out as Asian-Americans because she was racist. They accused Kristin of targeting them even though they acknowledged the signs.  Racist accusations are business killers. The facts had better be irrefutable for a disgruntled person to take it to the publicly-posted level.  There was one inarguable fact the complainers alluded to: Kristin is also Asian-American. The complaint tried to stretch the racism to include me, a White male and that Kristin acted as my avatar of racism purely to torture the two complainants. Ridiculous, yet Yelp refused to remove the silly post.

Yelp provides a list of acceptable reasons to dispute negative comments. Since racism defines itself as, “…predjudice between different races,” I thought we were on a strong footing with an appeal. Yelp denied the comment’s removal, forever tainting my store and my employees with the stink of racism.

In a nutshell, we survived two years of Covid-19 and gained some retail ground with our internet face drawing in greater sales. These customers don’t personally know us. Their impressions may come from brief e-mail contact and a few phone calls. The allowance of two cyber-bullies to color us with hate can cost us some of those new customers. We mock those jerks to this day for their swipe at our business. In all likelihood, the two complainants were more likely to have been put-off by a woman halting them than a man. We tried to understand the trigger for their vehemence and that seems to be the most probable outcome. They played the “race card” because it was nasty and it was easy. My business goal, like all of us in self-employment, is to make a living. If one is blessed with great employees then the job is to keep them and allow them to make the business their home, as well. That is what Southern California Comics has done despite the spitballs that attack businesses from afar with BS just to get a feeling of getting even with perceived damage to their fragile psyches.  Luckily, Yelp sees less activity than Google Business reviews. Seems reviewers prefer anywhere but Yelp to leave their thoughts. Thankfully, the bullies don’t. My Yelp review profile is largely ignored by the majority of the customers that do want to publicly share their regards for our store. I believe Yelp’s reviews lost some of their punch when the television show South Park mocked the cyber bullies in a 2015 episode. Perhaps Yelp’s relevance has been reduced since then.

The pandemic tested our survival and the current inflationary cycle is providing some worry again.  We did well over the past three years. I have one employee, Caitlin, who has elevated to our social networking specialist. Under her control the store’s airwave presence has become popular on FaceBook and Instagram. She controls the narrative and refreshes our presence daily. She follows trends and then makes us trendier. Currently, we’ve joined the Whatnot family and apply that addition to our retail outlets. The social media lives on 24-hour a day activity. Caitlin does her best to keep with the inquiries and conversations.

We don’t need a team when we have a Caitlin, and she’s on payroll! Commentary is sometimes added by other employees have developed their own social media followings. If your business has energetic, dialed-in employees adept with their phones, tablets, I-pads and laptops, you don’t need high-priced experts!