The Governor's stay-at-home order for the month of April ended up lasting until just after the end of the month. Most mass-market businesses never closed, so there was a real element of unfairness that I think we're going to see fallout from for years, in terms of how much the competitive table tilted against small businesses.
But in any event, on May 4th, small stores were allowed to open to shopping by appointment and curbside sales. These were actually not permitted during the April shutdown in Arizona, but many stores just broke the rules and did whatever. Given that none faced any penalties or consequences, it sounds like they guessed right.
Then, starting May 8th, we were allowed to open outright. However, the 10-person-gathering limit is still in place, which makes it pointless to try to open the game room. I am well aware that events can be run with as few as eight players, and that we would have two staff members at the front and shoppers wouldn't be near the players if we seated them deep in the room. That calculus unfortunately misses the point that a game room is only cost-effective to have at all, if it is being filled and used with sales-driving events to a substantial amount of its capacity. Even our reduced game room needs to see 20 to 30 people seated throughout a day to be worth opening and maintaining and so forth, and that's a scrape minimum. So until we see significantly more lenient guidance on gatherings, our tables will remain off-limits.
The MTG Ikoria combined prerelease and release fell short in sales over the course of the weekend against the Theros and Eldraine prerelease weekends, but looks much better once I start correcting for differences. Ikoria's release Friday of May 15th set a new record day for in-store sales. The previous record was set on Mystery Booster release day, which had almost no pre-orders because Mystery didn't heat up until it was practically in our hands. Ikoria had the most pre-orders we've fielded since probably Dominaria, possibly War of the Spark (they count differently but both did very well) and still posted a record sales day. It was sweet both to set the new record and to have it break a record that only stood for two months, after that record had finally beaten the one from the release Friday of Modern Masters 2017. But sure, Arena is killing paper Magic. Whatevs, horse. Anyway we're closed Sundays right now for a number of reasons and the Saturday fall-off for Ikoria wasn't too awful but put together it definitely made the weekend's entire take lower than that for a proper three-day prerelease, and in a few days we'll have a Memorial Day weekend that won't see the same voltage as a Magic release weekend following a prerelease, but Ikoria is still basically non-stop holy water after the enforced thirst of April.
One quick side note on Ikoria. With the entire COVID mess, this may quietly go without a lot of notice, but the way that Wizards used an "overlay" to re-skin cards for the Godzilla IP is a huge step forward to bringing great licensed IP to the Magic: the Gathering universe. Since every overlay is tied to a normal Magic card with Wizards's own IP, there is no danger of mechanically-unique reprints becoming impossible by means of an expiring license. The game can use Hasbro's IP outright, and they can license basically anything else, and have it work without it ruining Magic as it otherwise could. I posted the other day to Facebook that the team responsible for this idea deserved bonus checks. I can't wait to see how far they take this. Dungeons & Dragons? Almost too easy, they could just print those cards outright but I suspect they want to future-proof that move. Star Wars? That's not especially Magic-esque, but possibly. World of Darkness seems ideal, with very flavorful overlays on the Innistrad plane. I think the richest vein will be those licensable properties that already overlap the most thematically, such as Harry Potter. But they just did Godzilla and it was great, even though Godzilla has nothing to do with Magic, so what do I know.
Anyway, we started bringing the staff back on April 27th, the week before the re-opening. Griffin and I had spent basically an entire month shipping online orders and doing store renovation projects, like upgrading our central video game merchandise "island" (photo above) and installing real cabinets for all the video game media. The game room is smaller now but looks way nicer. There are now color display cases on the racks for almost all cartridge titles, a subtle upgrade that adds tremendously to the shoppability of that merchandise. The sales floor has been reconfigured to make more room for human beings during what we assume will be a prolonged period of social distancing. The arcade has been under maintenance, but it's also not yet re-opened so that part isn't done. And we have pleasant lighting effects added throughout the store with more still to come. With the staff back on hand, we were able to restart most of the normal business processes and get ready to serve human beings on the premises. That meant a bunch of quick cleanup of tools and materials and postponing a few upgrades for later.
Most of the staff was back in action by last week, and all our full-timers will be back by the start of next week. Business does not support this staffing level yet, as one record sales day is unfortunately not a full offset to many very quiet days, so we went ahead and took the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. It wasn't a ton of money, we could have survived without it, but the COVID pandemic absolutely had a substantial negative effect on our business, and with the loan fully forgivable if you spend 75% of it on payroll and 25% of it on rent, it was a no-brainer for us. Our payroll and rent figures through June 30th easily exceed the PPP funding total. It could end up being a bit of a mess when we go to have it forgiven, same as when we went through the process of getting it, but in the end it worked out on the front side, so hopefully the same will remain true when it comes time to close it out.
Many of my peers are taking the Emergency Intervention Disaster Loan (EIDL), and there is a business case that anyone who can qualify should take it as a gigantic hedge, particularly against the possibility of a late-2020 COVID resurgence. I probably should be taking it too, but I really just don't want the debt. Our balance sheet is pretty decent lately and should only get better as business returns to cruising altitude. For the moment it seems like the funding has run out anyway, or is close to it. If Congress reloads the trough, I'll reconsider pulling the trigger.
Distribution is finally like 90% of the way back. We did get deliveries during the shutdown, despite that there wasn't a need to get some of that product, where the product in question is mainly meant for in-store discovery and purchase. I would love to have gotten triple the video game consoles that were shipped in, but as it happens I'm glad we got what we got because it all has been selling quickly. I wish I could say it has all been selling easily, but nothing is ever easy when you're a small business, and the shopper who has only ever bought from Amazon and Wal-Mart comes in expecting concierge service and abusable returns, all at impossibly low prices, and tends to end up unhappy with the experience that we delight our everyday visitors with.
Meanwhile, it has now been 90+ days since the last time anyone traded in a Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, or Xbox One S or X. Take that information as you will. Have a great week!
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