Over Two Weeks Ago, Our Store Had to Shut Down

Nothing like a surprise flood to really kick things off hot for 2024.

It is Wednesday, January 24th.

I usually work out before work, but I’ve been skipping Wednesdays. Tuesday is a 14 hour work day (minimum) and Wednesday is exhausting on its own. Plus, the lanes available for swimming are always packed with folks getting their mid-week work out squeezed in, and I like a bit of solitude when I get my laps in.

So I’m at home, feeling good after sleeping through my morning work out time, and fresh from an energizing shower. I open the store’s e-mails on my phone to see if there’s anything pressing we’ll have to deal with when we get into the shop.

I see an e-mail from our property management that includes the word “flood” in the subject line.

I open the e-mail, heart thumping. A portion of it reads:

Good morning,

If you have not already done so, we would like to ask you please get in contact with your insurance company as soon as possible and inform them of the flooding incident that has occurred.

There is little other information.

I run out of the bedroom and ask Danica how soon we can be ready to go, waving my phone around. She’s just started her breakfast. She reads the message. Breakfast is discarded, and we drive.

We get to the building. We’re located in a strip mall, with businesses on the main floor and a few in the basement. There are crews. There’s water being pumped out of the space directly below ours. We see our main contact with the property management standing solo with crew moving busily around her. As we approach, I see a full cigarette get sucked into ash in what feels like an instant.

We catch her attention. We get the lay of the land. The basement has been filled with water. In the days to come, we’d learn that portions of it had five feet of water. Over 1.2 million litres of water would be pumped out of the area and into trucks.

On the day of the flood, we’re not told much. Our space is fine in terms of water damage, but at around 3:30pm we’re told that we’ll have to leave the building. The electricity needs to be turned off. The water needs to be turned off. Everything needs to be turned off. We’re told that in 36 hours, we’ll find out about next steps. We take in this information - closing on a Wednesday with no notice!??! - and take it for what it is: a point of safety for the future success of the building, and our business.

We are thankful that in the grand scheme of things, we are fine. Our store and our product are fine. Yet we are upset we are not in control of this situation and have to close. We are comforted by the 36 hour timeline. We’ll know things soon, right?

…

…right?

Thursday, January 25th: The Start of a Pattern

It is the start of the day. We’re told an electrical inspection will take place later in the day, and the results will determine the opening timeline. We ask if there’s a chance we’ll be able to open on the weekend as we are to host a fantastic young artist’s first comic shop signing on Saturday. We’re told we should try and come up with a contingency plan.

The electrical inspection doesn’t happen. After a few hours of panic and contacting different folks, the owner of the art supply shop just a few blocks away agrees to host the signing. Each step of the way, we contact the artist, keeping her informed so she knows things are being taken care of in real time. We put things in place and let everyone know about the venue change. Danica and I go to sleep and hope for better news in the morning.

Friday, January 26th: The Floating Timeline Emerges

We’ve been in contact with one of the other businesses in the building - an amazing plant-based vegan bakery - and we start hatching a plan to reopen big the next weekend. I contact the property management to see if they can’t help coordinate something. We’re told it is a nice idea, but the timeline is changing.

This is the when the whole thing starts to become unbound from any sense of measurement. For two whole weeks, there is nothing solid that can be offered to us - only notes of meetings whose aftermath offer us nothing but delays in anything resembling structured time.

We are told the electrical inspection will be happening on Monday, and we will find out more then.

This is also the day when Danica heads off to see her parents who moved across the country last year. This was planned for weeks, and the tickets are not refundable. We are somewhat confident this will be resolved before she comes back.

It is not.

Saturday, January 27th: The Big Signing

We have never cancelled an event when things go sideways.

One time, in an old location of ours, we came in to a much smaller flood of water. This would happen somewhat regularly, as the owners of the building refused to fix all the corroding pipes that serviced the apartments above us. They would just fix things as they would break and damage our product.

Anyway, we were hosting a small community gathering that day, and moved hell and earth (and almost the entirety of the fixtures in the shop) to make sure the event went on without a hitch. When the organizers came in and found out what happened, they were flabbergasted.

“You could have just cancelled, it would have been fine.”

But of course we couldn’t. We wouldn’t. There were solutions, and we found them.

For the signing, there was a solution, and we found it.

I park at our closed shop and check the space. There are industrial heaters and dehumidifiers running on generators. Our product is being kept dry and safe. It feels like I will die from heat exhaustion if I stay in the store longer than a few moments.

I walk the short walk over to the art supply store and get there when the artist does. Her and her mom set things up in the agreed upon space offered and in short order, we’re off to the races.

The extremely talented Sami Francis - who also has a great handle on a lot of “business” parts of comics already. She’ll be at a lot of conventions this year, keep an eye out!

The day sees a steady stream of folks pop in for the signing. Someone drives over 3 hours for the event, as it involves an exclusive cover for TMNT #147, and they are quite keen to grab it. Despite the change in venue, things seem fine. The community shows up. The art supply store gets some extra eyes and sales. I leave feeling pretty good about things. I am certain we will be getting a solid timeline on Monday - one that might even let us return to the store on Wednesday. If not, I’m going to spend the next few days bringing parts of the store home to cram into what little space we have available.

Sunday-Monday, January 28th-29th: Just in Case

Before I wake up, I have a nightmare that the property management will have their Monday meeting and inspections, and lock down the building. Plans are made to get files and next week’s issues out of the shop, just in case.

I head to the store and grab our point of sale. I need it if I’m going to have any chance of getting my final orders for that week squared away. I try my best, but without the ability to sell this week’s comics, there’s very little helpful data. I hope that it will be the only instance of weird orders I will have to make.

I wake up fairly early on Monday and drive to the store where I pack a few more things. While I’m there, I catch the property management and their insurance adjuster. There is no news yet, as their meeting will start shortly. I am given some platitudes about timelines, and I leave feeling hopeful. Maybe this week?

I have a school presentation to do in the afternoon (we never cancel anything), which gives me a small window to run errands. I catch one of our delivery drivers out in the wild and chase him down to a Chapters. He has a section full of our deliveries for the week, and I explain to him what is going on. We hadn’t redirected shipments, because at the start, this was going to be hours. Then days.

He hands over our boxes and I take them home with just enough to time left to get to the school. The presentation goes well (I talk about how much community helps you see your goals become reality) and I fill the rest of my day with tracking down all our other shipments, and organizing our employee’s tasks for the next little while.

We get an e-mail from the property management. The electrical testing has been done, but results are unknown. We are then told the timeline for return will be “a couple of weeks, which may be extended”.

This changes things.

Tuesday, January 30th: Processing Day

The file boxes move into our house. Space is cleared out in the living room and kitchen. Work stations are created. The Tuesday process has the same bone structure of any other Tuesday, but the creature is clearly a different beast. Customers are e-mailed updates with every new bit of info that comes in. While comics are being processed and put into files, I try and put a few things into place. We are going to greatly expand our delivery program, and we’re going to run pop-up spaces for folks to pick up their books in person. Our community hall comes through with a few days, and we are extremely grateful. We get everything through, minus a few straggling boxes that can be picked up and processed the next morning.

At night, we run our weekly New Releases stream, with Danica checking in from Nova Scotia. We do our best, but we’re already so tired.

We don’t yet realize this is still early days.

Wednesday, January 31st to Wednesday, February 7th: The Void

This week is a gaping maw. Time routinely refuses to form anything resembling meaning. Every business day, an update comes from property management. Every day, the timeline is promised to arrive fully formed during the next.

On Thursday, our employee is sent to the store to nab books to fill out online orders as well as a few different supplies. He is greeted with fencing around our front entrance, and security that tells him he is not allowed in. I phone the property management and I’m told extra measures were put in place due to a break-in on the property(not our bay). While this did in fact happen, a communication shortly afterwards suggests there could be potential environmental concerns that need to be tested, and that tenants will be allowed in by appointment.

Our front door, currently.

We never get back into the space during this time, and we eventually find out that no one is allowed into their properties at all until proper testing is done. On the following Wednesday (the 7th), we get an e-mail stating the management “have not been provided even an estimated time frame where we can let the tenants know they can go in and remove content or if we can get temp power in place so main floor can start operating again”.

Two weeks into the original 36 hours, and the only thing we know is nothing.

My mental health deteriorates significantly during this time. Danica comes home on the Friday during this stretch, and things do improve. Instead of slowly creeping further and further behind in communications and delivery set up, we start moving forward.

On Monday, we have our first Pop-Up event, and it is very well attended. The store is still doing okay, financially. In fact, the bank account has looked worse within the last calendar year. We are maintaining our footing, at the expense of every hour being taken up by the whirlwind with small breaks for food and longer breaks to sleep. If there is any other task to do that is not related to keeping our cats healthy and loved, it is not accomplished.

The Wednesday the 7th e-mail from the property management is the low point. Part of the e-mail states that “insurance has our hands tied right now”, and at this point, I am sure this means we will be waiting for months. Someone suggests to me that whatever the insurance company decides on could lead to a complete tear down of the building. While that had always been a possibility in my head, hearing the words placed it in my gut.

It has been two weeks, and there is nothing to hold on to.

I decide to try and set up more pick-up dates when I can, now that I’m sure we’re just adrift for the foreseeable future. We start looking at what spaces might be available in the area. Not that we can actually approach these spaces until we know for sure, but how long will that take? Nothing is solid. I’m gasping. What can you do when there’s nothing you can do?

And then, we get a message.

The Turnaround

There’s a board game shop in this city called Pe Metawe Games. They’re a place that runs quite similar to ours, very community minded and outspoken. They ask if we need any space for a pop-up. We excitedly contact them, and in short order, we have a working plan for us to start operating in their space on a permanent basis during the closure - we just have to get things in order on both ends.

For the first time in two weeks, we touch ground.

On Friday, February 9th, we walk through the space we’ll have. It’s great. An open room they generally use as spill-over space with a side door that we’ll be able to use as an entry point. We agree to land there on Tuesday and “open” on Wednesday - the first time we will have been open for a full new comic book day in a whole month.

We also agree to pretend like this is the first time ever comics and board games will be sold at a single location, because why not have a little fun with it? Worst case scenario, people spread the word of our temporary move by arguing against our little joke.

So that is sorted, for the most part.¹ That has us feeling pretty good.

And then, after we’re done looking at the space, we get message from the property management stating that some testing had finally come back, and main floor tenants such as ourselves will be allowed back in their stores as on Monday, February 12th. Environmental and structural concerns are no longer concerns. The timeline for full operation just depends on the restoration of power and water to the building, and then we are well and truly back in business.

The intangible starts becoming more and more tangible. Power and water restoration is infinitely more solid than vague, barely specified insurance timelines and concerns. Plus, in the interim, we have a space to function that isn’t crammed into the middle of our living room.

We’ll also be able to grab more books for the book fair we have scheduled for this week - which was a huge concern as product we ordered to fill the gap stands a solid chance of not arriving in time.

This put us in a great mood for Saturday, February 10th when we held our second pop up. With something solid surrounding us, we also placed an order with King of Tarts - another business effected by the building closure - to provide free, delicious tarts for all the folks who came in. We ended the day grabbing take out, finally taking a few moments to truly relax.

As I’m writing this on Sunday, February 11th, we have decided this is our day to work as little as possible, as a small treat. There is still a lot to do, and much of that work will begin again on Monday. We have some personal stuff to tackle that will require significant effort, and we have a great big list of things we will be grabbing from work to both complete some orders, and prepare for a school book fair we’ll be running on Thursday and Friday. Tuesday will include the regular time spent processing as well as landing in the temporary space as well as we can. Then Wednesday, we’re open again. Mostly.

And while we will be in a better space and a better position, we have a lot of work to do to make sure the bills that occur at the end of the month won’t obliterate what we managed to keep. All this while people still work out where they can possibly find us despite our diligent communications.² Then, we’re going to have to convince people that we haven’t just permanently closed, and come back when we’re allowed to return to full operations. There’s a lot of work ahead… but this all could have been so much worse. Our business could have been located in that basement, and we could have been left with absolutely nothing. The building could be marked for demolition and deemed unsafe for folks to enter and remove product. In the end, we are pretty lucky… but very tired.

Now. That all said, I want to take some time to see if some of you fine folks can’t help us out as we go through all of this. If some of you can do any of these things, it would be a great help:

• Local to Edmonton? Please help spread the word! We’ve been putting updates on our website, Facebook and Instagram (we’ve all but abandoned Twitter and BlueSky isn’t great at spreading the word locally just yet.) Let people know we’re not gone! We’ll do our best to make sure we’re not forgotten.

• Are you a creator? Please consider helping by recording a video introducing yourself, and tell people that “Variant Edition is back!” in some form or another. We would run these everywhere on our socials, and combine that with a link to your products on our website for people to buy! You promote us, we promote you, and we all win! If you have more time, we’d love to feature you on a stream as a “store guest”, where we can talk about whatever you want: new projects, old projects, no projects at all, just chatting - and we’ll use that to ALSO tell people about where we are and what we’re doing when that comes out. If we’re not already in contact, please send an e-mail reply to this post. It will get to me, and we can connect from there!

• Are you a publisher? Do you offer some type of recovery program for shops in our position? Or, would you be open to a representative coming on a stream to talk about awesome upcoming or past projects? Or sending creators in our direction? Any little bit would be awesome! If you don’t already have my contact information, please send an e-mail reply to this post.

Truly, I’d be doing more outreach myself (and I will), but I’m still pulling myself back to some sense of normal and find myself with very little spoons to work with at the moment. Any little bit - even just some kind words in the comments - would be appreciated!

For now, it is about time I wrapped this tale of woe and small triumph up and tackle this week’s final orders. Another week with somewhat unusable numbers, but like I said before: things could be a lot worse. We have the support of our community, and I have you wonderful folks here who have always been so encouraging. I am thankful for all of you.

We’ll talk soon.

1. We will have to “close” on Thursday and Friday as we have a school book fair to run, and our full time employee has an unexpected commitment that will take a few days to clear up.

2. An anecdote that I need out of my head: we got a call today from someone who arrived at our store location today, and asked if we were closed. There is fencing around the entire building, construction digging and fixing the parking lot and security everywhere. We tell him briefly that we have been closed due to flooding. He asks if we still got our shipment this week. We tell him “yes, we’ve still been getting comics”. The guy then has the audacity to ask, in so many words, if that means we have extra copies of Ultimate Black Panther to sell him. I bit my tongue. Outside of the fact that we’ve been getting comics to people all week and those folks who were supporting us got our “shelf” copies, the only thing this guy could think to say after learning about this closure was “do you have Ultimate Black Panther?” If you’re reading this (you are not), please politely find whatever hole the trucks took all the water they pumped out of the basement, and jump in it.