Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comic shop, comic store in your future
Comic Store In Your Future – But Not The Shipping Store Next Door. How stupid are our phones making us anyway?
Article Summary
- A comic shop next to a shipping store keeps getting mistaken for a place to print labels, pack boxes, and send parcels.
- Customers now walk to the counter with items to ship, even though the store is filled with comics, figures, and collectibles.
- The mix-up raises a bigger question: are phones and doomscrolling weakening attention spans and basic awareness?
- What began as an occasional shipping mistake has become a frequent, awkward sign of how little people notice around them.
Technology is a part of life. Everyone is on their phone. I use mine to check everything from world events to comic book news. I try to be mindful of staying connected to the “real” world and not being on my phone too much. It is easy, though, to Victor Von Doomscrool. Our phones make us less intelligent, numbing us to the need to use our brains. Why think when one can ask? My comic store has been next to a shipping store for a while, and I have had more and more people stop in, mistaking it for the store next door. Mistakes happen, no big deal. But now people come right up to the store counter, thinking I can ship something for them.
At first, I thought people were coming in with a box of comics they wanted me to take a look at, but they thought I could create a shipping label for them and send off what needed to be shipped. Recently, someone came in with a large bag of something and brought it to the counter, saying they wanted to ship it. It looked about the size of a bag of mulch.
This is what the front door looks like to enter the store. That, to me, should be a clear heads-up that we are not the shipping store next door. DC Next Level and Spidey and his Amazing Friends are not a part of the company’s shipping advertisement.
This is a picture of our store window. I see nothing in the window that says we will ship anything. People keep coming in and still do not realize that we have nothing to do with shipping. Does the inside of the store scream “shipping”? Inside, it has comics, statues, action figures, and more. Nothing about shipping anything. Has technology diluted some or many of their ability to notice or perceive things on their own? I know many people talk about how their attention spans have shortened while watching TikTok and short videos.
Now, watching movies is a challenge because they run so much longer. At first, after the shipping store opened, it was rare for someone to come in thinking we were the shipping store. Fast forward to this year, and we have more people than ever coming in and approaching the store’s counter, wanting us to, I don’t know, post their Albanian rug back to Albania. I simply tell them the shipping store is next door. I still find it awkward and wonder why more and more people are not noticing that we clearly have nothing to do with shipping.
Is technology robbing us of the ability to notice our surroundings? Is it robbing us of our intelligence? How many people will come in next week wanting us to ship for them? If they bought something while they were here, I wouldn’t mind so much. They could buy several longboxes worth of comics, and hey, if they don’t have room in their car, they could have it shipped to them. And I know just the place to help with that…um, hang on, where is it again?
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