The positive side of this infotech Renaissance is something resembling my electric car navigating around a blocked section of freeway for me, while I conduct a voice conversation hands-free over bluetooth with a distributor two time zones away, and then I arrive at Panera to pick up the lunch they already have waiting for me, and pay with a smartphone "bump" and fingerprint unlock. It's tantalizingly close to living in the world of Star Trek.
The negative side of this social connectivity overload is something best described by telling you to binge-watch Black Mirror on Netflix. A suggestion that is nice and meta. There are only 19 episodes and practically all of them are outstanding. Don't start at the beginning. Start with "Nosedive" and continue into "The Entire History of You" or "Be Right Back." It's an anthology show (episodes and characters all stand alone) so you can watch in any order. "White Bear" is the best one but it has a markedly different tone from the rest of the series so don't start with it.
In a far more mundane sense, the instant access to any index, catalog, or calendar has everyday implications here at your Friendly Local Game Store. It enables a degree of just-in-time logistics that was impossible as recently as a decade ago, and makes our store a living, breathing organ of the Digital Now the way no tree-corpse emporium rightly should be. But then there are the times when we can't seem to find the strike zone, and miss opportunities left and right. It's maddening.
The most obvious is product availability, of course. We're expected to have the new hotness on release day. It's a pretty fundamental piece of our job. And most of the time we get it done. But a streak of rotten luck with pre-orders, shipping dates, and logistics had DSG missing some crucial board game titles over the holidays: Azul, Kingdomino, and Sagrada, all monster hits, were no-shows for us. I had pre-orders in on all three. For various reasons I missed each one. It was maddening. Now I'm scrambling for the reprint waves, which always sell far worse than the initial shipments. Meanwhile we had far too many copies of Clank in Space and Game of Thrones Catan.
It's astounding that in a world where over three thousand new board games are released every year, the market expectation is for us to have all the most relevant ones in stock on time every time, and thanks to our ubiquitous and versatile connectivity, we mostly get there! But when we whiff, it just makes us look that much more incompetent.
In areas other than product sourcing, this comes up often as well. When close a comic subscription box due to the buyer failing to pick up after repeated notices, we look back and think how obvious it was on first glance that the guy was a deadbeat. Like, how could we not know? Hindsight is 20-20 and this is clear confirmation bias, but it seems like we're wrong practically every time.
Or, egads, employees who have ended up being terminated. Not every involuntarily-separated staffer has gone on to be "unfriended" by the store -- some are still on good terms and one even got brought back. But there are a few I've had to cut loose where I looked at it after the fact and can't imagine how I didn't see the problems coming all the way back at the interview stage.
The tiny things. Having every retro controller in stock except the one the customer needs. Having six versions of that card in stock but the player wants the seventh or eighth version only. Having three people call and ask if we have a Standard event on the three days each week when we don't have Standard. Getting calls one after the other for Legos, used DVD movies, and model rockets, none of which we carry, though all are things I could envision bringing in! I'll be shaking my head putting down the phone and wondering how I managed to miss carrying everything that anyone wants. Isn't my job connecting people with things they want?
We're not alone, fortunately. We aren't the only ones who miss seemingly obvious layups. Wizards of the Coast released the Grand Prix playmat images for the first quarter of 2018. They obviously used the Rekindling Phoenix art for Grand Prix Phoenix in March, right?
And where there is human judgment, there is always some amount of error. And that error is what jumps off the page and sears itself into the forefront of the obsessive mind.
It's just very easy to forget the first part, where the technology makes that judgment more effective and the judgment makes the technology more effective in turn. The benefit is still there. Only it's cold comfort when we see the frowny face from the customer who had a very simple need that we could not meet. However diligent we might have been, all that customer knows is that we dropped the ball somehow. They don't know, can't know, and shouldn't care that we only drop the ball one time in a thousand. They were the one. As far as they can tell, we're 100% useless.
So how do we deal with this interminable parade of Scott Norwood field goals? Aside from ongoing training and education to sharpen the active judgment of our crew at every opportunity, we build in safety in the system. Good restocking logistics are crucial, and are something I really need to make a software change to get back. Stocking deep is nice if you have the luxury; most stores use Open to Buy and cannot simply aggregate forever (and there are serious tax implications that discourage doing so anyway). Focusing or narrowing categories, the opposite of diversification, can certainly help, but of course that leaves the business at the mercy of its main revenue lines underperforming from time to time. Mostly process mastery and built-in redundancy serve as a substantial backstops against performance failures.
We've operated with only the most perfunctory of safety nets since the move, with so much of my attention in 2017 directed at things other than main store operations. I'm enjoying gaining back so much of that lost ground every day completing unfinished deliverables, and I think we'll start to see our batting average improve as I am able to give the staff a more functional infrastructure to work in. Until then, we'll just have to keep winging it as best we may.
