A customer walked in, found the shop small, bought nothing, and left with a list of other comic and toy shops in the area to try, because the owner had recommended several of them.
Then he went home and wrote a review saying that it said a lot.
It does. A shop owner who points a customer toward competitors is choosing the long term over the transaction standing in front of him. It is also the sort of thing that produces reviews from people who did not spend a cent.
What is Feed Your Imagination Comics?
A comic shop at 7213 Central Avenue in St. Petersburg, well west of downtown toward the beaches. The phone is 727-710-6189 and the site is fyistpetecomics.com. One hundred and twelve Google reviews at four point six, which for a shop this size means it has been there a while and people keep going back.
The stock covers vintage and modern comics, graphic novels, action figures and toys drawn from iconic films and television. Customers describe a strong showing of both older issues and current releases, organised well for the footprint, with prices repeatedly called great.
It is small. That comes up in nearly every review, usually paired with a note that the selection is better than the size suggests and occasionally with a wish for more room.
The shop buys as well as sells, though at least one seller has written that the offer on a collection came in lower than hoped. That gap between collector value and dealer offer is universal in this trade and has nothing to do with this particular counter. I wrote about it at more length in the piece on The Comic Book Underground in Largo.
Why does a shop recommend its competitors?
Because in a region this size the comic shops are not really competing with each other at all.
They are all competing with eBay, with online back issue dealers, and with the general drift of collecting onto a screen. A customer who finds what they want locally is a customer who keeps driving to local shops, and the shop that sent them across town this week gets the visit next week.
It also builds something no advertising buys. Another customer called ahead about a comic-related project he needed help with, was told to come down, and got the problem solved without being charged for it. He was not buying anything either.
Two of the most useful reviews this shop has came from people who spent nothing.
Where it fits among the comic counters
The region has three comic specialists in this series and they are genuinely different businesses.
Emerald City in Clearwater is the large one: seven thousand square feet, open since 1989, four rows of standing-height back issue boxes and a separate gaming room running sanctioned tournaments. It is where you go when you want to spend two hours on longboxes.
The Comic Book Underground in Largo is the vintage toy specialist with glass cases of Mego and Star Wars figures and a comic pressing bench. It is where you go when the thing you want is behind glass.
Feed Your Imagination is the neighbourhood shop. Small, west St. Pete, classic-leaning, priced to move. It is the one you stop at because you were passing, and the one where the conversation is with the owner because there is nobody else in the room.
Wilson’s Book World, also in St. Petersburg, runs a comic room at the back of a fifty-year-old used bookstore, which is a fourth option again and a completely different visit.
Why a reader should look in
Because comics solved problems that prose is still arguing about.
A shelf of back issues is a structural education at a few dollars a chapter, and the reason is that in comics the constraints are visible. A novel hides its problems inside paragraphs. A comic puts them on the page in a grid, where you can count them.
Look at a bronze age run and you can see the exact panel where somebody realised they had two pages left and three things still to happen. You can see which scene got cut to a single wide frame. That is craft under pressure, shown on the page instead of described.
The toys and figures do the other job. Objects from a specific decade, in their original packaging, are period detail you cannot reconstruct from a search. What a toy aisle promised a child in 1984, in the typography and the colour and the price sticker. For anything set in living memory, that is research sitting on a shelf.
Hours and getting there
Monday through Friday from eleven in the morning until six, Saturday from ten until five, closed Sunday.
Central Avenue runs the full width of St. Petersburg, and at 7213 the shop sits well west of downtown, closer to the beaches than to the Grand Central District. Parking is on and around the avenue.
From Clearwater, around twenty-five minutes straight down. It is an easy addition to a beach day, which is genuinely how a lot of people end up here.
Small shops and long memories
There is nothing this shop sells that is not available online, usually cheaper and with better photographs and a return policy. That has been true of every comic shop in America for twenty years and it has not closed them all.
What survives is the counter. Somebody who knows the stock, will talk about it, will take a phone call about a problem that earns him nothing, and will tell you to try the shop across town when he cannot help.
None of that ships, and none of it shows up in a price comparison.
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