I hate all you people with money. It took me about a year and a half to get the entire Love Hina manga due to the fact that we only had enough spare money to buy one book every month or so. Granted, we've had less money troubles in the past few months (we're right back in the doghouse now that my dad got fired from his job in Iraq, however), which means I've been able to get my hands on all of the Negima! manga currently out in the United States in a short time, but that wasn't the case a year ago.
Completely unrelated and off-topic fact which I mean to use to hijack this topic: There are two stores which I go to when I'm on the prowl for a new manga, a local book store called Hastings and Fried Ant Anime, THE only anime store in a sixty mile radius that I know of. I've had a number of bad experiences in both - Fried Ant Anime has played musical ownership for a long time now, with a different owner popping up every six months or so. When we first went there, the store was owned by an old lady who'd gotten into anime after her son introduced her to it (I think she said her first anime was Voltron or somethingz), and she and her son were pretty friendly and knowledgeable about anime.
A few months later they disappeared and got replaced by some jackass who didn't know two things about any anime other than Dragonball, he disappeared within a month, another guy owned the place but he was killed in a drive-b while he was eating at an Italian restaurant across the street (local rumor is that the owners of that restaurant and their "associates" who owned another restaurant [both groups members of the Mafia, of course] in another town were fighting over who'd open up a new second restaurant of their franchise in a particular town... my town... the new restaurant up the way has great friggin food, though [another fun fact: the restaurant involved in the drive-by is called Luigi's, and they eventually won the "competition" and opened a second restaurant just up in town from where I live, we don't know for sure what the name of the other restaurant is but there's a place called "Mario's" up in another town nearby...]).
A few more owners came along, including one stereotypical overweight otaku who kept trying to get me into yugioh (which thing I hate) both times were were there when he owned the place, and finally it passed on to two more dudes who I'm pretty sure are both fags, due to the fact that the last time we were there they were too busy beating off to yaoi behind the counter to offer any customer service. We haven't been back there since.
The other place, Hastings, has it's share of problems as well... such as the fact that the manager and 95% of the people who work there are all rabidly anti-Japanese. Buying any manga or anime there means you have to sit through a ten-minute long rant about how you're "unpatriotic" for watching "trash made by those 'Jap' devils" and about how everyone there has a friend or cousin in the FBI who they're gonna call on you for being a terrorist. They have it scripted. I've heard the same bloody tirade each time I go there. They've rearranged the store several times, moving the anime and manga to different locations throughout the store (which pretty damn big... about a quarter the size of a Wal-Mart Supercenter) each time, currently the anime DVDs now reside next to the porn section (and they removed the older anime VHS tapes, including the entire first season of Slayers, entirely), and the manga section now sits between an aisle of Nazi literature and an aisle of white-supremacist literature (which is actually a place of glory for the ownership, apparantly). Several times they've removed both sections entirely before the loss of sales prompted them to put them back in.
Another little tidbit about Hastings (going back before the new, racist ownership came in) is that my mom used to have a bad habit of renting random anime from there, because apparantly if you like one anime you like them all. This resulted in a hit-and-miss thing (the first thing she rented was the mecha anime Martian Successor Nadesico, which rocks and I was grateful for, while the second time she rented something it was the Pokemon anime... I like the games, but the anime can be burned with fire). I finally convinced her to stop after she randomly rented the first thing she picked up off the shelf one day, which turned out to be La Blue Girl...
Anyway, now that my huge, off-topic post is complete, I declare this topic officially hijaacked.
Discuss.