Hello you amazing Comix Experience customer!

Starting this week, the City of San Francisco is allowing some retail stores to open again to walk-in business, with several restrictions.

We are going to take it slowly, for now, and proceed with caution, and only partially reopen for the moment as we feel out both the safety as well as the economics of returning to regular business.

From 6/15 to 6/30 our schedule will be:

DIVISADERO

Mon, Tue: CURBSIDE PICKUP ONLY

Wed: 11-6 (except 6/17 where we need to shut at 5, sorry)

Thur – Sun: 12-5

OCEAN

Sun-Tue: CURBSIDE PICKUP ONLY

Wed: 11-6

Thur-Sat: 12-5

We are hoping/expecting that our hours will expand afterwards, but we’re taking this two weeks at a time to see how things will work.

At BOTH stores:

• YOU MUST BE MASKED (no exceptions)

• You must sanitize your hands upon entry (no exceptions)

• We will remain touchless payment only, so we will not touch cash. You can give us cash in an envelope, but we are not giving any change at this time.

• We will have physical limits on the number of people allowed in the store at one time, and we will limit your browsing time to 15 minutes. Divisadero will limit to five people at a time, while Ocean is going to limit to two people.

• If you are sick, PLEASE STAY HOME, even if it is minor. We will ask folks coughing or sneezing to leave.

• You must endeavor to stay six feet away from other customers.

We know this is a lot; it’s a lot for us, too. We ask you for your patience as everyone adjusts to the new pandemic-driven realities of stores. We are doing this for your safety as well as ours and our extended families.

We will still be offering pre-purchasing books and comics for curbside pickup through our website. You can find these links on www.comixexperience.com in the pull down menu for “Locations”, but for a direct link, Ocean’s webstore is https://comix-outpost.myshopify.com/ while Divisadero’s webstore is https://comix-experience.myshopify.com/ Those both have each stores individual non-back issue inventory.

If these hours don’t fit your life, we’re going to offer an extremely limited number of pre-scheduled private shopping times outside of these hours. Please contact either divisadero@comixexperience.com or ocean@comixexperience.com to enquire about availability. And give us at least 72 hours to schedule.

Again, we apologize for these rules and restrictions; everything is a Work in Progress right now!

# # # # #

In other news, many of you have heard that DC Comics has withdrawn itself from the normal comics distribution process, and instead is only selling to us via two of our largest mail order competitors. With history as a guide, we strongly suspect that these businesses are going to have a difficult time scaling up to handle Wholesale distribution (it’s much harder than it seems), and it will absolutely be adding to our costs and time to handle DC periodical comics at a time that no retailer anywhere has any time, nor profit, to spend – but we’re committed to filling all customer pre-orders that are placed on time. We have no idea how available reorders are going to be for DC (we suspect it will be extremely spotty), so if you want to be 100% sure that you are getting 100% of the DC single issue periodical comics that you want, do yourself a favor and set up a subscription order. You can inquire about this in person, or through the location-specific emails above.

This should have zero impact on how we carry graphic novels from DC, just the individual periodical comics.

In general, from all publishers, we will be severely reducing the risk we take on periodicals going forward, so setting up subscriptions is going to be the smartest thing to do in any case. You’ll notice we will be especially thin on new periodicals at first because we were still closed to walk-in by the City when we ordered the next week or two of comics, and we were further really unsure how many of you are going to come out and shop. Periodical comics are usually non-returnable to comic book retailers, so we bear 100% of the risk if they don’t sell, so you will please understand our caution in these early days until we understand how the new world is actually going to operate (as opposed to our theory crafting)

Things are going to continue to be weird for a little while, but we strongly think that comics is a community and that you’re all members of our comics family. Families look out after one another, and every change and policy we implement right now is designed to protect both you as well as our astonishingly awesome staff. We truly appreciate your patience.

If you’d like to support the stores more broadly, we’d like to continue to recommend any of our three Graphic Novel of the Month clubs – www.graphicnovelclub.com/start -- because the income from these go directly to paying staff wages (and have kept everyone at full hours and pay throughout the shut-down)

If we don’t say it enough: thank you for your business. It truly means the world to us and while it might be some time yet until we’re able to share a smile with you again, there’s nothing we love better than sharing our love and passion for comics with YOU.

Yours, in the love of comics

Brian Hibbs, Head Cheese, Comix Experience

On behalf of:

Zoe Hu, Divisadero Manager

Jeremy Talamantes, Ocean Manager

Emma Munger, Art Director

Nathan Williams, Back Issue Manager

Tony Guzman, All Around Swell Guy