The stack and the offer

“I'll give you eighty bucks for these.”

Anyone who has sold at a show knows this moment: a customer hands you a stack of books and an offer, and now you're doing arithmetic in your head with a line forming. What do these add up to? Is that offer fair? And the old answer, price-stickering every book, goes stale the week the market moves.

In Too Many Comics, every book in my show inventory wears a small label: a QR code naming that exact copy, on the bag, never the book. When the stack lands on my table, the app's Scan a Stack feature reads the barcodes in seconds and shows me the asking total, big enough to read upside down. Now the negotiation is informed: accept, counter, or pull a book out of the deal. One tap records the sale. Even a lump-sum counter-offer gets spread across the books, so my records match the cash in my pocket.

And the stale-price-tag problem? Solved by deletion: the labels deliberately carry no price. Prices live in the app, where a re-price updates every book at once, and freshness dates show me which asking prices are due a fresh look before the next show.

Behind it: the app generates label sheets as a PDF for standard Avery stock, so you can print anywhere. Labels scan with any plain QR reader, no network needed, and the same labels power Audit Box, which puts the inventory back to truth after the show.