>>115479340Sounds about right. Still way too high for non-specialist retailers to handle.
>>115472929There's a few different things going on there, though.
Archie never went Direct Market-only, so their output as a publisher remained relatively small and suited to the way the periodicals market works within general retailers, not that it helped them in the end.
The overabundance of floppies is a relic of the pre-crash market - publishers realized they could put out hundreds of titles on special order and someone would buy them; this was the genesis of the Direct Market itself, where order-only titles with foil covers could live in harmony with obsessive dorks who would order them from solicits instead of browsing the publishers' ranges as they hit stands.
The problem with that being a problem for retailers is, uh, well those retailers have already bought those titles by the time consumers see them. That's the deal - if they're not selling, retailers should order fewer (so you're right). There's no reason for Diamond to be offering a buyback scheme at all, in fact - it's demented. Makes no business sense at all for Diamond to be doing that and reflects how amateurish the retailer base they serve is.
Outside of the Direct Market almost no periodicals are sold this way - you have a sale-or-return basis, where retailers pay a fraction of cover prices as deposit, and after the agreed sale window of an item that item's barcode is scanned if unsold, the item is collected by a third-party recycler for pulping (because Conde Nast or whoever don't need to warehouse old editions, as there's no financial sense to doing so, which is the opposite of how an LCS allegedly works), and because its barcode was scanned the publisher refunds the deposit. This is basic point of sale data that helps publishers and retailers finesse their offering to consumers and keep overprinting down, but the Direct Market/LCS model doesn't offer it decades after everyone else switched over.
