dvandom

I remember someone at Crossgen as it was going under claiming that Diamond had a secret agenda: because the vast majority of their business came from big-city megastores ordering hundreds of copies of DC and Marvel books, small-town stores and indy publishers become almost more trouble than they're worth. So if those small fry shops go under, some customers drop out of the hobby but others migrate to the mail-order services operated by Midtown, Mile High, Lone Star and their ilk, and the economics scale more favorably for Diamond. I don't remotely think it's true (in that while they probably didn't shed a tear when Alan's shut down in July, I don't believe they are actively conspiring to screw small retailers as a class) there are enough tales of petty malfeasance on the company's part that I remember that screed a couple times a year.