Our story starts with an email, as most of these pick-up tales do.
'Hi guys, i've got a couple of hundred longboxes that I need rid of.' Did I just read that right? A couple of HUNDRED? Yep. Heart racing, we made the call, and found out our new friend was local. Liphook. Less than five minutes in the car from our base, twenty from storage. What are the chances? In the van we hop, to his house we pop. Sure enough, we arrived to a double garge stacked floor to cieling with longboxes.
Now, this is where the issues begin. As I'm sure you're aware, despite being the UKs largest buying of comic books in the UK (where else would you even go when you're looking to sell comic books online?) we're actually a very small business - Just myself, my Partner, and our extremely newly arrived newborn son (4 days old as I write this!). So, the first, immediate issue.
1. Storage.
In total, there were four hundred and sixty three longboxes. That's roughly 138900 comic books. Now, let's get techincal.
A standard comic longbox is roughly:
If lined up end-to-end (single row)
Using an average of 0.77 metres per longbox:
463 × 0.77 m = 356.51 metres
So you’d need roughly: 356–360 metres of linear space
That’s over a third of a kilometre 😅
Luckily, we don't store things this way!
If placed side-by-side in rows (more realistic warehouse layout)
If you put them in rows of 10:
Total floor footprint:
So you'd need roughly:
About 2.2m × 35.5m of floor space ≈ 78 square metres
SEVENTY EIGHT SQUARE METERES
Of course this is a bit of an overdramatisation, because we would obviously stack the boxes atop each other, but it gets the point across. Whoever bought this lot, would need substantial storage space. This means that a lot this size is not purchasable by bedroom sellers, or generic resellers. This is a purchase that only a business could undertake. Luckily, we have the space. But that brings us to issue #2
2. Transport
463 longboxes being moved, not only means that I won't need to go to the gym for the next month, but it also means that it would take multiple trips and require a large vehicle. Our van can fit roughly 105 longboxes, but the issue here is that the weight would be drastically overloaded. A safe payload is an abysmally small 37 longboxes per trip. That means that it would take us THIRTEEN TRIPS to move this lot from the house in the nearby town over in Liphook, down to the storage yard back home.
3. Time
13 trips, 463 longboxes? Easy right? Wrong. Although these were in an accesible garage, to load up each van it would take an average of 45 minutes per load, 20 minutes drive to storage, 20 minutes back. That's roughly an hour and a half per trip. That means that 13 trips, is 19.5 hours. Now, an important factor, Time, is money. That 19.5 hours is essentially two working days worth of moving boxes, where we could be selling or buying. This, is something that needs to be incorportated in the buy price.
What happened?
Well, ultimately, we now have a storage space filled with 463 longboxes. Thankfully, our new friend had already done their research, and they already understood the above major factors. We didn't even have to explain, that by selling this incredibly sized collection in smaller parts, he would make more money, because it was him that let us know that he was aware. Great, doing our job for us! What it essentially came down to with our new Hampshire friend, was that he wanted the convenience of an instant sale. He knew that breaking it down would be the long term best way to make profit, but he was downsizing, and was aware that storing this immense collection would then become incredibly pricey as it would require external storage. In the modern day, who the hell has that sort of money!
Although this pickup tales landed us with a load of obstacles, and issues, it was all overcome by time, effort, and research. As you can imagine, we're pretty knackered from moving this lot, so the contents as yet remain a toaly mystery - but stick around, as we'll be posting our finds both on here, and on our instagram page
