Mile High Comics Is Still Open! Howdy! Late Sunday afternoon, the Governor of Colorado held a news conference during which he announced even further measures to guard the health and safety of all the citizens of Colorado. While those initiatives stressed the need for self-imposes isolation for all who are in high risk groups or who are in any way feeling ill, they do not yet force Colorado businesses to close. Effective Tuesday, however, we have been told that we will need to reduce our Mile High Comics staff by 50%. 5 customers showing how easy it is to practice safe social distancing in our huge 45,000 square feet Mega Store What this means for those of you who shop with us online is longer wait times for your packages to ship. Lynne and Noah were pulling and packing orders all weekend, so a significant portion of our existing backlog will ship today, but online orders received this week will take a bit longer. Our volunteer staff (myself included) who remain on the job this week will work diligently, however, to get your comics and books on their way to you before the (seemingly inevitable) order finally comes for us to shut down entirely. To be clear, we do fully recognize that comics and books are by no means ever going to be deemed “essential,” but we also know that weeks (or months) of forced isolation with no new reading material can be quite depressing. If that is the case for you, please try to get your order in to us ASAP. The same holds true if you want to shop at our Jason St. Mega-Store, as we are anticipating a shut-down order to arrive at any time. As you probably already know, ten days ago I implemented historically generous discounts of 65% off on almost all of our back issue comics, and 50% off on all 300,000 of our in-stock graphic novels. Those massive discounts have spurred a deluge of orders from around the world, for which we are all very grateful. I am now implementing a bold initiative to vastly increase the number of our 5 lb “mystery boxes" that we have available, by sacrificing our entire strategic reserve of 500,000 sorted back issues to this important cause. Truth be told, I am really averse to giving up my sorted reserves, but this difficult decision will greatly increase the speed at which we can select issues, while also vastly improving the overall diversity and quality of the titles available. With very little time (and manpower) left in which to get mystery boxes pulled, sacrifices need to be made in order to serve as many people as possible before closing our doors. Cambridge protecting the Mystery Boxes A couple of positives arising from this new decision are that 1) we can now offer our “mystery boxes” by letters of the alphabet. Brian and I staged all 60 of our reserve long boxes of titles beginning with the letter “A” last night, and we will be staging B-D today. If we can find the time (and table space), we will add more letters tomorrow. A mystery boxes will now contain entirely titles and issues from a single letter, so please order whichever letter you would most like to receive. We should have 100 pre-packed “mystery boxes” boxes of “A” and “B” titles ready to ship by this afternoon. Cambridge with a Mystery Box In addition to sacrificing our reserve stock in mystery boxes, we are also going to allow fans visiting the Mega-Store to select individual issues from our sorted reserve at the rate of $2 each, 6/$10, or 40/$50. Business in the store this weekend was only about half of normal, so we do not expect much response to this offer, but since all the reserve comics are now being staged on tables in our events area, I figured that we should at least provide the opportunity for those still willing to visit us. Because they are completely untouched, our reserve stock contains many issues that have a list price of $20+. Sigh... For those in high risk groups or who are seeking to absolutely minimize any contact, we can also provide mystery boxes curbside at Jason St. Call the store at 303-455-2659 (9 AM - 6 PM), and we will gladly make arrangements to facilitate your picking up. We can, quite literally, leave your mystery box on the front steps for you if you totally want to avoid any human contact. Presuming that our new comics shipment arrives from Diamond as scheduled this week, the same holds true for your N.I.C.E. new comics subscription. Our goal at all times is to help you, in whatever way you deem best. Nanette & Chuck Nanette and I thank you, again, for all your kindness and support for the past 50 years, and we both send you our very best wishes for good fortune during these difficult times for us all. Happy collecting! Chuck Rozanski/Bettie Pages, President - Mile High Comics, Inc. March 23, 2020 Current Newsletter