My annual retail-in-review.
I do this to document the various trials and tribulations of being a retail entrepreneur in Dublin, Ireland. To leave some reminders for Future Matt and hopefully give some advice for anyone else starting a business in Ireland. None of these chapters are in order. I just scribbled notes as I thought of them.
THE MOVE THAT WASN'T
No-one outside of friends or family knew this but the first 6 months of 2024 was a behind-the-scenes roller coaster for me and my family. A live-work property in our neighbourhood that we had previously attempted to buy in 2021 (they rejected our offer at the time) went for sale again so we attempted to buy it again!
In 2021 we were the only bidders. The only ones. At the time we offered 50k below asking. No other bids. The property had been vacant for a decade+ and was in very bad shape. It had been stripped of all original features and had no floors. It used to be a solicitors office, so it didn't even have a kitchen, just a little counter to make tea. They’d asked us to come €20k higher, we considered it, but then they decided they wanted even more and took the property off the market instead of negotiating with us.
In the 3 years that passed the property fell into further disrepair, instead of a decade+ vacant now it was truly derelict with structural failures. €250k renovation quotes were floated around from multiple builders & surveyors. (This is up from our 2021 survey that said €75k for a renovation good enough to get us moved in swiftly)
But it was a live-work. One of the only in Stoneybatter. And one of the only live-works that would have enough space for a family of 4. Little Deer’s current building has a very small 1 bed apartment upstairs, not something we can move 2 kids into if we wanted to.
We really tried to buy this place. In the intervening years the owners had changed the use to residential, it had previously been zoned a commercial property; a designation that limited how much we could offer in 2021, commercial properties have much shorter mortgages (10 years instead of 30) and much higher deposits (30-50% instead of 10%), functioning to stifle entrepreneurs and incentivize landlords to exploit small business owners.
Now that it was zoned residential the bank would, in theory, allow us to bid higher. Maybe we could bridge that gap in 2021 when the owners decided to pull the property off the market. We could worry about changing the use back after we bought it.
We put our house on the market. We kept it secret from the kids, snuck them out of the house for every showing, rewarded them for keeping the house tidier than it’s ever been. It was exhausting. And the bidding was absurd. There was no reason for our teeny tiny terrace bungalow to command such high bids, it was grotesque.
At the same time, a full fledged bidding war waged for the derelict live-work. No matter how high the bids on our house reached the derelict property was commanding anywhere from 50k-100k higher. Insanity.
As the bidding ran away from us, family offered to help. The kind of help that would probably have endangered the financial security of multiple sets of parents and siblings. Everyone wanted us to get this place but the train was in danger of jumping the track.
The derailment came in multiple stages. When it was time to go Sale Agreed, all of the obscene bids for our house evaporated overnight. Weeks of bidding wiped out as every single party withdrew. There was no dramatic reason for the sudden exodus, simply people bidding on multiple properties at once and as they went Sale Agreed on other properties we were left holding the bag. The realtor offered to start over with more viewings and we turned him down and instead withdrew our bids from the live-work.
That the owners, after abandoning the property for 10-20 years were rewarded with some ridiculous half-a-million lottery winning because that's all homes are in Ireland anymore, gambling chips, remains upsetting to no end.
I hope folks who bought the property keep the retail aspect. One of Ireland's frustrating responses to the housing crisis is to push change-of-use from retail to residential, forcing suburbia onto our city centres and main streets and hollowing out our communities. A place to live where there's nothing to do.
The cherry-on-top epilogue came a month later when we got a very delayed response from our mortgage advisors because they had just noticed (6 months after they approved us for the property) that the property used to have a retail space, and so the bank rejected the change-of-use from Dublin City Council and would never give us a residential mortgage for the property anyway.
Because Ireland loves the myth of the owner-occupier small business, they put it on calendars and postcards and point out the lovely shops from their tour buses but if you're a business owner who wants to own the property their business is in, you're shit out of luck. I can pay my landlord's mortgage but I can't have one of my own.
A GUEST!
From the saddest thing that happened in 2024 to the raddest!
Bianca Xunise came to visit the shop! Easily the nicest surprise, an artist that I love, whose mini-comics were some of the first I ever imported to Ireland from America when Little Deer started in 2019, got in touch to say they'd be in Ireland and should they stop by to do an event at Little Deer!? Yes please!
Coincidentally, because our luck is hilarious, at the same time Bianca was going to arrive in Dublin, a new baby niece was born in the family, so Damhnait left town to greet the new baba and I had to be off work taking care of the kids while she was away, leaving the Guest Shopkeepers to welcome Bianca and run the show without me!
In the end I did get to briefly spend time with Bianca on their way to the airport but I felt terrible for not being able to play host properly.
Like someone comes to visit and you want to be able to offer them a room, take them to dinner, show them around. Thankfully Guest Shopkeepers Kat, Kate, Ken, Eli and Charlot were there to greet Bianca with open arms, even finding them a punk show to go to, which I'm super grateful for because I'm much too square to know where the good punk shows are in Dublin!
Had we known Bianca's dates earlier I would have tried to move mountains to change the dates of DCAF to coincide. I feel like DCAF is always a better opportunity for a guest. Workshops and signings and things are baked into the fabric of DCAF where as Little Deer has a hard enough time getting anyone to come to anything.
But Bianca still had a nice time and there's hope that more of the Chicago comics contingent may visit us someday. We're going to try to reach out to artists and publishers with our 2025 DCAF dates to try to get people to consider a Dublin leg during their Europe/UK tours.
One embarrassment in Bianca's visit is that their new book Punk Rock Karaoke isn't available in the EU/UK! I wish I better understood book publishing and international rights but I'm still continually caught off guard by which books cross the ocean and which don't. And which books get designated UK editions and which books just ship the American edition over.
Thankfully, Bianca was able to secure a book from their publisher and was kind enough to carry them across the ocean for us. They sold out that same weekend so we'll have to order more copies from Bianca in 2025!
MORE VISITORS
More-so than previous years, lots of comic folk are making Little Deer a destination in their Irish visits. Usually tied to holidays or destination weddings in Ireland and we're so grateful that artists take the time to stop in and say hi (and bring us books!)
Indie publishers stopped in to say hi (and bring books!) and happily point out their books on the shelves. Several artists that I admire stopped in while on holiday (one found their books on the shelves-PHEW but the other's book was sold-out that week! ACK)
Several times that happened while I was away with family and it's so funny to get FOMO for your own comic book shop? What do you mean Ryan North is in my shop?? Tell him I've loved his comics since early Dinosaur Comics days and if it hadn't been for the Truth & Beauty Bombs forum in the early-aughts there would be no Little Deer Comics!!
MENTAL HEALTH / BURNOUT
This year, moreso than my usual tiredness, I began to feel the beginnings of burnout from running Little Deer. I recognise the symptoms from organising DCAF solo from 2017-2019 before I started The DCAF Committee to help shoulder the responsibility.
I can't do the same thing with Little Deer because it isn’t a non-profit community event, it’s a tiny retail shop. People often offer to run the shop for free but I can’t accept. If Little Deer can only exist on the foundation of exploiting people then it’s not really of benefit to the community (this is also my hesitancy for starting publishing, if we can’t afford to pay artists then what benefit are we offering by publishing)
After explaining to her in simple terms how Little Deer's finances work, my 7 year old asked me why I do Little Deer if the only one who profits off of it is my landlord and there is no real answer to that. At 44 years old I make less doing Little Deer than I did sweeping popcorn at a cinema when I was 16. You can claim the books are assets but if I could sell these assets easily then I'd have more money, haha.
For the most part, whenever you see someone other than myself minding the shop, the shop doesn’t make money. We get a few surprise strong business days while a Guest Shopkeeper is there, but if you factor in the book costs and the rent costs, even the best days are break-even or minimally profitable. Basically any income I make in the year is completely offset by paying folks to mind the shop while I'm away. There isn’t anything to be done about it, it's still better to be open than closed when I need time off, and since I'm running Little Deer with a young family and family members spread across the globe, time off is a must.
This was the first year since Little Deer open that we kept the same hours whenever I was away, no more half-days with the Guest Shopkeepers. It cost more money, but was less confusing for customers, and even though we perpetually struggle, Little Deer has grown too big to be randomly changing our stated hours anymore. It's bad enough when I'm late back from a midday post-office run and finding customers waiting or a frustrated "I crossed town to reach you but you weren't open" message on my social media.
Another source of burnout is that as the shop continues to grow within such a confined space, my personal space within the shop has shrunk dramatically.
When I started Little Deer, I had fantastic daydreams about how much space I'd have beside the desk to work on my own comics. I really imagined a drawing board and my own comics perpetually in-progress in between helping customers. But before I could even make that dream a reality, the amount of stock in the shop grew and pushed out any space I had to draw, creating a sense of claustrophobia for me in my own shop.
This gets compounded by our space at home, we're a family of 4 who live in a teeny tiny house with two growing kids and a remote working space for my wife. I said goodbye to the idea of having a little drawing table in the house years ago and now it feels like I'm saying goodbye to the idea of a drawing table in Little Deer too.
Being able to create some sort of art is vital for my mental health and I'm not sure how to make it happen in the time and space I have. I talked a bit about lack of time in last year's write-up and free time continues to dwindle. I need to schedule and enforce time to read comics simply so I can recommend them for customers, so now I need to figure out if it's possible to do the same for my comics.
It's always terrible thinking about this during winter, when she shop is near 0º but I've got to figure it out now so that some healthy routines are in place before the weather improves so I can take advantage when my wrist thaws.
A carpal tunnel attack in late autumn combined with several elections and the general global socio-political outlook left me pretty depressed. I'm back in meditation classes now and doing my stretches. I'm still tired and sad but the work continues.
The debt Little Deer carried really weighed on my mind throughout the year and stressed me quite a bit in the ramp up to Christmas. I know a lot of small businesses run on debt but I need Little Deer to be mostly debt free. We don't have the stability of a long lease so I need savings for flexibility in case the shop needs to relocate again. We also need savings to weather any coming storms. Right now I'm typing this with a cracked phone in my pocket and I don't have the savings to replace it so Little Deer will just be running on a cracked phone in 2025.
DEBT
Little Deer’s debt troubles started with the 2023 Dublin race riots that killed holiday business for 3 weeks at the end of November and start of December. We carried that debt into 2024 and then it grew throughout the year every time we didn’t quite make rent, which was more often then it should have been. €1000 in debt came from my catching covid again, and more debt when I had to take care of other family members with Covid, which is why Ireland’s “no vaccine boosters for anyone under 60 unless deemed vulnerable” policy really fucking sucks.
I don't get paid time off.
The debt and lack of savings continually hindered my ability to stock the shop. Kickstarters would come and go and I wouldn't be able to back them. Self published works were published and then sold out and went out of print (likely forever) and all I could do was watch on social media.
In 2025 I'm going to try to keep a small amount of money aside every month in case a limited release comes up and I want to pounce on it before it's gone. Watching releases fly by like telephone poles out the train window is stressful. People come to Little Deer to get unique books and the debt prevented me from getting those unique books.
FLOOD (AGAIN)
The shop continues to flood at the drop of a hat, or in this case a drop of moss that fell off the roof during a summer dry spell and into our drain, causing perhaps the worst of the 4 floods we’ve had, with standing water nearly reaching from the back door to the front door.
Eli had the bad luck of being in the shop that day. I threw on my wellies and ran down, we borrowed an extra mop from Slice and mopped the floor and bailed out water for 4 hours. Then ran dehumidifiers for a week.
We were lucky in that the water level nearly reached the bottom shelf of books but fell just shy. And all our major electronics didn’t get wet, so we only needed to replace a damp power strip.
Our kind audience bailed us out again with an influx of orders and donations to take the stress off a stressful event.
FLOOD (THE ALBUM)
I can't believe I missed They Might Be Giants in Dublin. Every once in a while the unprocessed trauma of the pandemic rears its ugly head and catches me off guard!
I was unreasonably depressed to miss a concert of a band I've already seen several times before.
There was just something about how much I had looked forward to their Flood tour in 2020 before it was cancelled, only to find out they rescheduled to 2024 and played and I didn't even know it.
A customer heard me playing Flood in the shop and noticed the record in the record section and asked if I'd gone to the show. It hit me at a time when I was already feeling like my work-life was out of balance and I took it particularly hard.
This mirrors my 2023 wrap-up when Little Deer was keeping me so busy (and broke) that I couldn't walk down to Proper Order for donuts on Fridays anymore.
UNCERTAINTY
Where will we be in 2025? We still don’t have any agreement in place beyond that our landlord isn’t going to decide on the property for a few months. Little Deer hasn’t had a proper long lease since it started. All our previous leases were 1 year or less, and now we're over a year into informal verbal agreements.
I don’t know if commercial rental rights exist. I know if this government actually wanted to support small businesses they would incentivise long term leases and discourage short term lets and having tenants without leases.
We want to stay where we are and we want to own our building. Neither of those wants might be possible but we’ll try until those possibilities are taken away from us.
NOT COMICS
In 2023 I stocked a few records, mainly It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, It’s Christmas Charlie Brown, and the My Neighbor Totoro soundtrack, they all sold, so I thought I’d expand the idea a bit!
I probably expanded too much though.
While I can usually only afford 1 or 2 €20+ books a week, nearly ALL records are €20+ these days so even though I was only ordering movies & music once a month instead of once a week, that once-a-month was a real kick in the wallet.
I also made a few seasonal mistakes, thinking folks might want horror movie soundtracks around Halloween or Christmas records at Christmas, but NOPE what the people really want is It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and It's Christmas Charlie Brown and the My Neighbor Totoro soundtrack.
Now that the movie and music section has established itself in the back of the shop I'll probably scale back my monthly buying a bit to keep my budget under control. I've 100 films and 200 albums in stock! which I know sounds small but it's currently the largest selection of movies and music you can find in the Dublin City Centre west of Capel Street if you can believe it! It will always be insane to me that Dublin is an international city with over half a million people in it and yet Little Deer's piddly 25 square meters represents one of the only places you can buy comics, movies and music!
The price of movies and music is continually upsetting! Especially since, a few older films and albums are still in-print from earlier pressings so you can see what things used to cost in the distributor's catalogue! One movie would have a wholesale rate of €3-5 but then you watch it go out of print and the new pressing has a wholesale rate of €10-15!
Records are doubly and triply worse! And comics are following the trend!
I know that manufacturing costs have been going up as print runs get smaller but it's hard to watch art become unaffordable. There’s so much benefit to physical art. It can be gifted, it lives on, it changes hands, it’s preserved, it supports not only the artist and the publisher but an entire ecosystem of retail shops and second hand shops and flea market stalls and online sellers.
I know Little Deer can offset these high costs with a used section for movies and music same as I do with the comics, but the opportunity to buy old movie and music collections hasn't presented itself yet and while people often donate old comics to the shop, we've only gotten a few movie donations thus far.
The small print runs for records is really difficult for me to wrap my head around. Some indie comic publishers have really small print runs, but nothing compares to a niche vinyl house. I've wanted to stock a Bee & Puppycat vinyl for years and in 2024 it finally got a release! But the import cost was so high from America I could only afford 1 copy, and in the time it took for that one record to travel from it's boutique vinyl pressing studio in California to Dublin Ireland, the pressing was entirely sold out. Will there be another pressing? If the Over the Garden Wall soundtrack is any indication the answer is never.
Even with the absurdly high price I had to put on that Bee & Puppycat album to recoup import costs, it still sold! It sold and multiple people asked me to please restock it. But I can't, because before I even got it it was gone. GOOD GRIEF
So unfortunately a downside about adding movies and music to the shop is that I now alongside watching my favorite comics go out-of-print one by one I also have to watch my favorite films and albums go out-of-print as well. Choosing to run a physical media retail space in the 2020s is a meditation on impermanence. It's heartbreaking watching art become lost media in real time.
Something I didn’t think through is that stocking movies and music triples the amount of assholes I need to keep track of.
It's hard enough keeping tabs on which comic artists released NFTs or embraced AI or got outed as a sex pest but this year I had music backordered and then purchased and then on route to the shop only to find out just before delivery that the musician is an asshole that personally harassed comic book artists I stock in the shop! What the fuck!
And if you think you don't need to pay close attention to asshole artists as an art seller, you haven't seen the tidal wave of Neil Gaiman books into my used section this autumn.
Even with the blossoming of the music and movie sections, I still only consider this dipping my toes into Not Comics. There was loads of stuff I wanted to stock and restock in the run-up to Christmas that I couldn't afford to. I miss stocking chocolate in the shop like I did our first year, and I didn't get to restock puzzles in time for the holidays. I had entire lists of art supplies and notebooks and comic/animation related gifts I wanted to stock before Christmas that I just didn't have the budget for.
Hopefully now that my debt is greatly reduced I'm hoping to add 1 purchase a month outside my usual comics and media distributors.
GIVEAWAY GOVERNMENT
Panicked by the rapid closing of restaurants and cafes and small businesses all over Ireland, the government started throwing money at small businesses in an effort to stop the social hemorrhaging.
These were presented to businesses as "rates grants," to offset the rates small businesses pay to Dublin City Council.
Customers are often shocked by the rates we pay (around €2000 / a year) but compared to rent I don't really mind paying rates. Rates go towards the city and are supposed to be invested in Dublin infrastructure.
Rates stay in the community.
During the run-up to the election, even Social Democrats who knocked on our door leaned on cutting rates as the main option available to government to provide relief for small businesses.
But I'd argue rents sabotage the success of Irish small businesses more than rates do. And slashing rates just feels like hampering city budgets and promoting austerity.
The government will say they can't force landlords to lower rents, but there are so many tools available to them to disrupt the property gamblers holding Dublin and Ireland back. Eviction bans, rent freezes, commercial renters rights, squatters rights.
Almost every commercial landlord I know in Stoneybatter is also sitting on a vacant/derelict property as part of their "portfolio." In 2023 I found out from one landlord that landlords get discounted rates on their vacant retail spaces.
Vacant and derelict retail spaces should be paying 10x as much in rates. And that money should subsidize small business rentals in government owned and run buildings like the Fruit Markets and the Iveagh Markets. Create competition to force rents downward.
At the moment, Dublin City Council doesn't even force developers to include realistic retail spaces at reasonable rates in their new buildings. Smithfield Square is now home to several brand new enormous empty retail spaces. Grangegorman has some silly retail space available for "community use" for the low low price of €3000/month. Empty since the building was built, the community can't use it because it's so outrageously expensive. But the builder checked their "community" box.
Will O’Devaney Gardens have any functional retail space? Or more 400sqm Tesco pipe dreams? Or more "community use" that the community can't afford. Or like Newmarket Square, non-functional "market space" that no market can move into.
Developers are given absurd leeway to check their boxes and walk away and leave communities desolate.
The last deposit of the giveaway government, funnily enough, came so late in December as to be practically worthless despite it being a lot of money. Too late to invest in my Christmas season, too early to be realistically factored into my 2025 financials even though it's intended to be the winter support.
So I spent the last giveaway deposit on paying off some debt. Which is the most boring (and least efficient!) way to use stimulus funds. Better than having more debt right now but not much real help for the long term struggles of Little Deer.
LIGHTS GOING OUT (LITERALLY)
In the last few months of 2024, the overhead fluorescents started to blink out one by one. A hilariously apt metaphor for the future of the shop. Fluorescents were end-of-life'd in Ireland some time ago, so the bulbs can't really be replaced anymore. And I can't renovate the electrics for alternative bulbs because I can't spend money on a property I don't have a lease for.
So I put out a call for lamp donations. And we got some! We got some lamps, we got some string lights. Our kind community is literally keeping the lights on.
I'm going to see about hanging enough string lights from the ceiling to turn off the fluorescents for good, but as much as people hate fluorescents, people need light to browse books, so I need to make sure whatever I replace the fluorescents with is as bright as the fluorescents.
And as lovely as the shop looks in lamp-light, I need to be careful to not get sucked into buying lamps because I need to keep my buying to a minimum until the shop has a new lease.
STORM DARRAGH
I thought my 2022/2023 delivery troubles were behind me until Storm Darragh hit. When UPS gets hit it goes down hard. A week without deliveries in the middle of December, YEOWCH
The loss of deliveries contributed even more debt to my debt troubles as I needed to ask my book distributor to send me books on credit since I couldn't pay for my last order of the year while I was still waiting for the previous delivery. Another thousand lost.
BREXIT KEEPS BREXITING
I can't begin to grasp what's happening on the island beside us. I follow so many UK owners and small businesses and it seems like a continual nightmare.
The glimpses I get are horrifying: Royal Mail preventing books from going back and forth between Ireland and the UK despite there being no VAT on books between the two.
I'm still unable to wrap my head around the EU postal liaison requirement that's now being imposed on every single small business and entrepreneur in the UK, effectively cutting them off from Europe and Northern Ireland??
When that crisis broke I was so sad that Little Deer wasn't in a better financial position to help. I wondered if I could speed along the dream of Little Deer Publishing or act as a fulfillment centre for UK artists, or I don't even know what. But all that brainstorming actually showed me was that Little Deer isn't in any position to do anything but barely remain open.
SOCIALS
2024 signaled the death of Twitter and the rise of BlueSky. And from the looks of things, 2025 might bring the death of Instagram.
BlueSky was very good to Little Deer this year. More people were sharing and promoting us there than any other social media accept sometimes Instagram.
Our posts going viral on BlueSky actually forced me to change my postage options on the webshop.
We were getting so many Americans sharing our posts that we would get these influx of American orders, that while helpful, were also a lot of work because posting to America is not cheap so it would often require multiple trips to the post office to get quotes, approve them with the customer, wait for more money, then post the parcel.
It's fine to do this for Irish comics, or European comics, or rare out of print books. But more often than not, it was books readily available in America, to customers who lived a stones throw away from much bigger and better indie comic shops.
So I created new, more expensive postage tiers to discourage frivolous international orders and make sure the customers abroad REALLY wanted to buy from a comic shop across the ocean in Ireland.
The "Attention Economy" has gotten noticeably more difficult to navigate this year. BlueSky is better for us than Twitter but still isn't as big as Twitter or Instagram. The days when I'd post a pile of books and get a nice bunch of sales seem to be in the past. If anything these days it seems more like we need to continually remind everyone that Little Deer exists in the hopes that they won't forget in that brief moment when they actually have some disposable income they want to spend.
Funnily enough the Rent-O-Meter seems to be the only posts that Instagram wants to show anyone but also put us in a position of seeming like we may have gone out of business? If Instagram only shows a follower our Rent-O-Meter at €0 and then the algorithm doesn't show them our posts for weeks or months afterwards, we found out people think we've closed for good!
OTHER SHOPS
In 2024 I watched a tiny UK book/comic shop in London close. They started near the same time as Little Deer and I always felt like we were sister stores. That they couldn't make a go of it is worrying.
On the other side of the Atlantic, seeing Desert Island comics successful move and fundraiser was encouraging.
Little Deer isn’t established enough to hope for a viral fundraiser. But maybe that's the only hope for businesses these days. Stay open long enough and be well liked enough that maybe during some future crisis your viral troubles will rally people all over the world to support your business.
It's very similar to my current long-term business plan for Little Deer which is simply "maybe I'll win a Prize Bond someday."
UNPROFESSIONAL
In my search for a more permanent home for Little Deer I accidentally made an enemy of a landlord from one of the 3 families that own all of Stoneybatter.
I didn't set out to make an enemy of him, though I'd already heard a lot of stories about this particular landlord family.
A property came up that had come up previously, around 2019. I had a memory of this property going on the market in 2019 for €1200 a month. I'm not a rental savant by any means, but I've been looking at Stoneybatter, Smithfield and Phibsboro rents for more than 5 years so I'm pretty familiar with all of them. So when the property came up for rent for €2800/month, I decided to place an offer for the 5-years-ago-price of €1200.
After all, business hasn't become 2.5x more profitable in the last 5 years. There aren't 2.5x more customers in Stoneybatter. The street the property was on recently lost 4 businesses! It was currently bookended by vacant properties!
Normally I don't put much thought into sending lowball offers.
Listings are usually run by property managers or agencies. They don't care what you offer, they'll either ignore you or pass the offer on to the owner. You can't insult them.
But in this particular case it turns out that the person reading the emails was the owner himself and he did NOT like my offer. I'm not sure if he thought I was accusing him of something by remembering the cheaper rent (did I even remember it correctly? he never refuted it) but he called me unprofessional for my offer.
I replied once to say ah well I guess the rent's not negotiable but he took that as a further insult and on the day he took down the listing (I assume because he rented it to someone happy to pay €2800/month) he felt the need to send me another angry email to let me know he'd never rent to someone so unprofessional.
Funnily enough, a month or so after that happened, I ended up talking to people about another vacant property that ended up being owned by the same family. I'll just cross that off the list so.
I think it's corrupt to allow 3 families to control the future of 15,000 people in the Dublin city centre but the current government believes it to be a success story and rewards it at every turn. When I talk about this to locals, they both shrug and then tell me a new horror story about these families of landlords that I hadn't heard before.
BURGLED
The big topic of conversation going into winter was the break in that occurred during The Great Stoneybatter Cat Burglar Crime Spree of 2024. 4 or 5 shops hit in the span of a week, including Little Deer! Flattered that they thought our indie comic made enough money to steal.
Like the flood or Bianca Xunise's visit, this landmark event also happened while I wasn't in the shop! Kat was in that day so they had to piece together why the window was open, why the sink was broken, why the back door was open, why the till was empty. Updating the chat with photos and messages until they pieced together that the shop had been burgled.
It's weird to say we were lucky but we were very very lucky. The till at the time of the robbery only had float in it, not profits. I generally don't leave profits in the shop, and not enough people pay in cash these days to really warrant buying a safe.
Besides breaking the window bars and the sink, the burglar didn't break any shop fixtures or damage any stock. It appears that they gave themselves a fright when the sink beneath the window broke under their feet and crashed to the ground, so they grabbed the money in the till and ran out the back door.
Had they stayed around they might have decided to try to steal more than just cash, or knock shelves, or break stuff, and that would have been 1000x worse than just stolen cash.
In the end, the only damage done was to the building, which I considered to be the landlord's problem and the landlord sent his repair guy in to remove the sink and re-bolt the bars onto the back window.
And thanks to donations from our kind community and an influx of sales, we recouped what cash was lost.
The conversations with folk after the burglary were a bit funny. Lots of people asking if I was going to install cameras or somehow upgrade security. I don't think people grasp how much security theatre costs, how useless it is and how much it prays upon irrational fears.
Cameras and installation would cost far more than what was stolen. Several other Stoneybatter businesses were able to video/photograph the culprit(s) on their security cameras, it didn't get them their money back or help catch the person(s). I don't need to watch a burglar break into my shop live on my phone. That's none of my business.
A neighboring business had one of those live-streaming camera systems. He watched his restaurant get ransacked and robbed live on his phone for 30 minutes. The garda showed up a half hour after the burglar left, an hour after the emergency call.
Even when I tell people that story, they still ask if I'll be installing cameras, or calling the police, or my insurance company. The cost of claiming insurance for what was lost would be dwarfed by the increase in my insurance rates if I dared make such a claim.
The garda stopped by the shop, not because I'd reported the theft, I hadn't, but because so many places in the neighborhood had been burgled they were setting up a neighborhood garda-business watch group, that I definitely do not want to be a part of.
So in the end it was just an odd small business milestone. I'd never been burgled before, now I have. I'm more afraid of the milestone we haven't reached yet, which is the in-person robbery. Maureen before me was frequently robbed, our corner shop guys up the road are regularly robbed. Not every robber will be satisfied with the free Beanos I leave by the front door.
COLLECTIONS
For the first time since I started the Cheaper Used section in 2019 Little Deer bought a few giant lots of comics off of people. Nothing dramatic and nothing on the scale of most comic shops, but instead of buying 5-10 books at a time for our used section, I was buying almost 100 books for a mix of used and new and out of print.
They weren’t all a success, some I still have a lot of copies left and may have overspent. But a few purchases were so successful they ended up changing my regular ordering by showing me folks were desperately looking for this artist or that artist that I hadn’t gotten around to stocking yet.
I'm tempted to do the same with movies and music (and video games?) but need to be careful with my budget. This is why I've been desperate for the flexibility brought on by savings.
TREE
If one good thing comes out of my time on Manor Place, it might be that in 2025 I'll hopefully have successfully lobbied Dublin City Council to plant a tree in front of 57 Manor Place.
It's not there yet. And I worry that I'll be forced to leave the space and the owner or the new tenant will protest the tree planting.
I'd been emailing Dublin City Council about the tree since the Greening Stoneybatter strategy had started planting them. It was A LOT of work to get trees planted on the street we live on, so when I saw Manor Place was next in line in 2025 I sent messages repeatedly so they'd know they had a very vocal supporter at number 57.
A bit of public space in front of the shop would be lovely. A tree would be picturesque. My imagination runs wild with the possibility of a bench or putting the Dublin Inquirer newspaper vending machine out front of the shop.
Anything would be better than the current loading zone.
That loading zone has been a killer this year. Several of the big houses on Manor Street have been renovating and as a result Little Deer comics is buried behind massive construction vans.
One of my biggest unfinished to-dos of 2024 was repainting and lettering one of my sandwich boards to put out on Manor Street to try to get past this invisibility behind the commercial vehicles.
People who walk past Manor Place all the time are still arriving in the shop asking when we opened. As the years go by it feels weirder and weirder to admit how long we've been there and how many years we've gone unnoticed.
So I need to reach out more.
DCAF
A funny thing about DCAF in 2024 is that by chance, almost all of our DCAF dates fell AFTER rent was due that month. So I was left scrambling for rent multiple times, knowing that a huge weekend was just ahead of us out of reach.
Two wonderful things that DCAF did last year was bring in a French literary agent and the Arts Council. Both were about trying to get more artists paid.
I really hope something comes of it. I hope someone gets signed, I hope someone gets a grant. There seems to be an appetite in the Arts Council to support comics right now.
More and more I feel like the challenges around Little Deer and DCAF are that no one seems to have any money anymore.
It was this lack of anyone having money that inspired me to restart the DCAF Printing Prize with Way Bad Press. I couldn't really afford it, and it contributed to my debt, but I just really missed the DCAF Printing Prize. I thought it was one of the cooler things DCAF did in 2019 before we shut down for the early pandemic days and I'd always hoped it would become a regular feature.
Well now I'm in some sort of position to try to make it a regular feature. We'll do it again in 2025, maybe fiction this time since coincidentally, the three winners we chose this time were all non-fiction.
Baby steps towards Little Deer publishing.
THANKS
I don't know what's coming for the shop in 2025 but I know that we have a wonderfully supportive audience, a group of very kind Guest Shopkeepers in Kat, Kate, Ken and Eli, a lovely DCAF community and a very friendly neighborhood in Stoneybatter where I hope we get to stay.