Okay so i know this is going to go both ways by point of view but i think this is ridiculous. I have tried in the past to buy variants and after today i remember why i stopped. Lets use an example. Wonder Woman 600 was released today and i attempted to buy the variant. The cover price says 4.99 and the shop wants to charge me twenty dollars! They claim its because of how many they have to order. So if they are buying it for 5 dollars and charging me 20 then isnt that price gouging? Are the stores being charged higher for the variants by the distributor? This is idiotic! I am not paying 15 more dollars for a cover that has the same comic inside it. If this a nationwide practice then all the comic publishers need to print 20 dollars on these variants and not the 4.99 that was on the comic i saw today.
Our economy is never going to recover because we have a habit towards idiocracy. The consumer has an easy choice to choose what comic to buy. Half the reason i feel that the prices on comics gets higher and higher is because of the extra cost to print these variants alongside the other thousands and then only a fraction of us have the pockets or desire to buy at that outrageous price.
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Lets assume this shop always orders 20 Wonder Woman comics and they get the 35% discount. So they spend $3.25 per comic for a total of $65. They normally get to sell these for $4.99 each for a total of $100. Thus they have profited $35. Now they get this free comic they sell for $20. They normally had to sell 13 comics to break even (all things being equal). Now because of this variant they only need to sell 9 comics to break even ($65 - $20 / $4.99).
Well I mentioned before they normally sell 20 comics. If they double their order to 40 and they sell their 2 variants for $20 each, they now only need to sell 18 comics to break even...but they have an additional 20 comics that are just "gravy". This is the ultimate problem with variants. It encourages stores to order more than they need to which essentially floods the back issue market making these books "worthless".