Did that truck ever break down on a delivery route and leave you stuck with a load of product? That's the thing that scares me about going the clunker route. Like, I get the math works out on paper, but what happens when the alternator dies at 7am on a Tuesday and you got three stops waiting? Did you have a backup plan or did you just roll the dice every single day? Those E-250s are tough, but even tough needs parts eventually. I'm curious if the savings were worth the stress of wondering when the next big repair was gonna hit.

I read a piece in Comic Book Resources last year where a shop owner said the variant bubble popped around 2021, and that most common variants are basically just pretty newsprint now. I did the same thing with a Spider-Man run back in 2019, bought every store variant for like 8 months straight. Sold them all at a swap meet for a fraction of what I paid, and the only one that held any value was the sketch cover with the print run of like 300. That half price event in Portland sounds rough, but at least you got something back, some folks just donate those long boxes to the local library lol.