Tuesday, June 2, 2020

Rot


"The most disgusting lies are dressed in beauty that'll rot."

Upon lease execution with a five-year personal guaranty, the hobby game store tenant discovered the real reason that suite was empty for as long as it was, at the bargain price it was offered.

After a torturous migration and thousands of dollars in sunk labor, the whiz-bang point-of-sale system that was promised to be fast, accurate, and rugged, turned out to be about the same as the one the store was using before.  In some ways, worse.

"Capital Funding" provided the partners with a fast deposit of $30,000 to cover the shortfalls from slow sales of overlapping high-profile TCG and wargames releases, money fronted with barely any questions asked and no credit check.  Two years later, the store was finally clear of the principal, having repaid a total of $52,516.

Two hot #1 spec books appeared on comic invoices for the week, and boxholders were lining up to pay a premium at their Friendly Local Comic Store to be sure they locked in copies without having to buy on eBay at ten times cover.  The comic distributor shorted all 50 copies of hottest spec book, and sent damaged copies of the second-hottest spec book.  The store filed a timely damage report, and was credited the wholesale price of the books.

The popular indie publisher touted the Friendly Local Game Store as the preferred channel for resale of their white-hot title, but then kept the entire next print run for themselves to sell on Amazon.

The wargame publisher offered generous terms and a top-flight IP.  The store discovered only later that most of the local player base for the game was content to play the figures they had already long since purchased from previously existing game stores, and that effectively sole distribution by the publisher meant any order error caused chaos with the store's efforts to impress the faithful players that remained.

A distributor promised generous allocations of the hot limited edition box set, and on delivery day provided its client stores with a modest quantity.  Plenty of stock was available to the public at market price on the distributor's backdoor direct-to-public website.

The enormous orders for hundreds of long-since-rotated staples seemed like easy money from somebody's silly spec, with none of the cards being factors in Modern or Legacy.  A week later, the Pioneer format was announced, and each of those cards looked likely to debut as metagame all-stars, and spiked tenfold in listed median price.

The rising star employee taking home that game without adding it to their tab was totally inadvertent, a complete accident.  Such a trusted individual would never steal from the company.

The eager beaver with Uncle Rich's bequeathal stood ready to change the tabletop world with their innovative game store idea.  Their $85,700 discharge under Chapter VII of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code will remain on their credit report until 2027.

Crowdfunding seemed like a natural way to ensure a title never lost money.  Only upon completion, when the final bills came due, was it apparent the "wild success" was financially catastrophic.  Game stores the world over fielded angry phone calls from buyers who wanted to know when stock would be delivered, and whether the store would match the original Kickstarter backer discount, even as the publisher prepared to crowdfund the second print run as a pyramid scheme to pay off obligations from the first.

He was the bright young prospect on the store's qualifying circuit team.  After coming close to the money and falling short due to inferior deck selection, he went on a grinding tear, living from deck to deck with the store and maxing out an entire rotisserie of credit cards before suddenly disappearing entirely. Conflicting reports from other players say his parents were on the hook for five figures in co-signed credit cards, or they had forced him to attend Gamblers Anonymous, or both.

She grew weary of her family asking when she was going to "get a real job," and stopped telling them about the tight budget weeks and about the trials and travails of the industry.  Soon, she stopped telling them about her successes as well.  Eventually, she and her family stopped talking at all.

Nobody picked up on the cues at first.  The edgelord player nobody liked was suddenly the soul of courtesy.  Under the façade, the player was angry about being shot down for his unwelcome advances on the new female employee.  Then one night he tried to follow her home.  She says she feels safe for now, but ownership worries she's just putting on a brave face, and that the store ban, trespass order, and injunction won't be enough.

The sole proprietor turned to substance abuse as a brute-force means of fighting exhaustion, desperate to bottle lightning from the hot new release cycle before the revenue slowed.  And it worked!  The cash register sang and the customers happily spent.  He soon found himself turning to substance abuse as a comfort.  And then, eventually, long after squandering the windfall profit, he turned to it out of agony, because he couldn't stop.

Art credit: Varvara Snegiriova
Details have been altered/anonymized for references in this article to the experiences of individuals

No comments:

Post a Comment