Customers of the Labyrinth on Bloor Street in Toronto's Annex district already know that unlike most other stores, our manga is organized alphabetically by category. The original thinking was that a person could find like items next to each other without having to search the entire manga wall of thousands of books. This means Action is with Action, Horror with Horror, Fantasy with Fantasy, Shojo with Shojo and Yaoi with Yaoi.
This also means that titles like Yu-Gi-Oh (action) that younger fans enjoy, are not directly next to titles like Yellow (Yaoi).
We are revisiting this idea however, after a new customer showed some frustration with trying to learn our system. The argument is that some titles can fall into multiple categories -so where should one look? (I get his point, as this was always something that bothered me at Blockbuster when I was searching out old movies.) Traditionally we solved this problem with customer service. You don't know where something is, you ask us, we find it for you. Next time you come by, you know where to look.
Still - we are thinking about going Purely Alphabetical. We would love your input. You can leave comments here or tell us what you think in person when you stop by the store.
