Sorry, when I read that question originally, I thought you were tired of hearing from me.

Someone recently quoted Tom Brevoort as saying that a profit per square-foot analysis done by one of the convenience store chains in the 1980s led them to the conclusion that replacing the comics rack with a video game was trading up for them.

Returnable magazines have also become more difficult for small retailers over the last 20 years. They formerly had to sort stripped covers by price and report the totals returned that way. During the mid-eighties, many magazine distributors started requiring that returns be reported by title and issue number. I know of several newsstand/coffee shops that just dropped magazines altogether at that point. (One added a pizza oven and never looked back.)

The distributors were just as happy to focus on chain stores, where things like the profitability measures such as I mentioned above are a major obstacle to comics distribution.