Double Agent

Desert Sky Games is approaching the ten-year mark in business, and most processes are approaching the point of being solved by now.  However, the market still moves and shifts as it likes, and it's up to us to adapt to that, or not.  We think we've adapted in a rather brutal fashion, and in the meanwhile moving forward behind the scenes, skating to where the puck is going to be.

Shortly after the success of Magic's Kamigawa Neon Dynasty release to start the year, we decided to plan our shots with what looked like a saturated release schedule.  This was before knowing Unfinity would appear in October, or that Warhammer 40K Commander Decks would delay from August into October also.

We loved the deco-noir motif of Streets of New Capenna and we expected (and got) shard triomes, so we expected ordinary business with that set.  Normal ordering volume.  In practice, what happened was that the set landed a little on the soft side, but it was within what we could afford and we saw only middling distress from the weaker competitors out there.

Commander Legends: Baldur's Gate (CLB) was something of a wild card at that point.  Collector booster boxes of the original Commander Legends set (CL1) skyrocketed in price and remain to date the only source of extended-art foil Jeweled Lotus, Vampiric Tutor, and various other cards.  At the same time, the main set would be in print for at least a year and we knew we could come back to it.  It made sense to go heavy on CLB if we didn't have anything else to be ready for, or risk missing another CL1 scenario.  Stores that were hurting from New Capenna were doubly vulnerable.

Of course, you all know what happened after that.  The very next release on deck, July's Double Masters 2022 (product code 2X2), projected as a runaway hit even that far back.  For August, the Warhammer decks were fixed (not a booster product) so would be a minor spend in all likelihood, and we have a 10th Anniversary celebration to be ready for as well.  We set our sights on Double Masters as our big "play" of the year, long before CLB ever came up for distribution number lock.

So, every store ordered 2X2 obviously, but we suspected most stores did not take our deliberate approach to it.  Knowing we wanted to be in and out of CLB quickly, we halved our expected quantities for what ended up being the flop of the decade thus far.  Stores around town are, even now, absolutely choking on Baldur's Gate, which landed sparse on power and missed at least one obvious reprint in Dockside Extortionist, which appeared instead in 2X2 where it wasn't needed to sell the set.  Meanwhile, we had no particular issue clearing CLB ahead on money, even though our hedge was still not enough, and we do still have quite a bit of excess stock.  It will be fine in the long run as the set becomes the Ancient Dragon Lottery for customers, but let me be very clear when I say CLB is the worst-received product in modern Magic history, since at least Global Series Mu Vs Jiang, and the worst-received booster set since Born of the Gods or maybe even Saviors of Kamigawa.

Looking ahead to 2X2 then, in addition to ordering low on CLB, we tapered down our general restock volume and started hoarding cash in advance of what we expected to be a large spend on Double Masters.  We wanted to be able to buy absolutely every last box we could.  Even after how well things went, I wish I had requested twice as much.

The final secret sauce was not taking pre-orders.  Most stores float from release to release on net terms, whereas since last summer's sudden store move settled out, we had managed to normalize cash flow to the point where we could be paying cash up front every time if we had to.  Your usual store will take pre-orders to make sure they can cover terms, and if business has been soft enough, they'll pay existing expenses from pre-orders and count on later transactions to cover open terms invoices.  Lord knows during the doldrums of 2018, I ended up having to do that a few times.  People love Rivals of Ixalan now, but nobody loved it when it first arrived, let me inform you.

Not taking pre-orders also let us avoid the inevitable race-to-cheaper optics war that happens out of the gate before spoilers, where the people willing to give a game store an interest-free loan the soonest, get to lock in low pre-order pricing relative to the set's release demand/market.  There isn't much risk to the consumer because if the spoilers suck, they can just cancel the pre-order.  The risk to stores is that the set won't be popular or will get overprinted, or on the other side, that the store will give up a bunch of revenue in order to have fast cash up front.  Based on the previous Double Masters set's success, we did not expect a bad product, and we didn't need the cash advance.

So there we were, all expenses paid and money ready going into July, and sure enough, the market price of 2X2 climbed to where we could offer best-in-town pricing and STILL make $100+ more per box than we would have at the beginning of pre-orders.  There it was, the gold ring we were grabbing for: setting up to make this release as beneficial as possible, using the power of patience.  Friday, July 8th set a new store record for daily sales before we even hit the 90-minute mark.  We ended up more than doubling the previous record.  Then Saturday, July 9th hit the top 5 of all time.  Then the following weekend we had two ranked days, an accomplishment that gets harder every time because the threshold to be on the rankings goes up.  We have fun plans for that revenue.

Even now as most local competitors have sold out of 2X2 product and are scrambling for fundraising schemes, and even as we enjoy fantastic release-week sales, we sit atop a massive hoard of 2X2 and it's all long since paid for.  We will be selling this stuff for months.  Longer, if we have our druthers.  We will ride the market price all the way up to the moon as we go.  Every box and pack we sell will be better than the last.  And when the cupboard is dry in the metro, only the behemoths will still have stock: DSG and probably Amazing Discoveries and Play or Draw.

The MTG price hike that goes into effect with Dominaria United in September isn't going to make us blink, and based on the logistical success of our 2X2 play and the colossal labor savings from doing it this way, we are going to come out of the gate for DMU with best-in-town pricing and no pre-order requirement.  Plenty of product will be available, just come in and buy what you need.  We hope to cause further distress to competitors as local players cancel pre-orders with them (or force discounts) knowing they can get their boxes from DSG for less on prerelease day.

Lest this blog article sound too gloaty, I should really explain the context.  For a number of reasons, not the least of which is my autistic personality that is the exact opposite of the gregarious extroversion more ideal for store owners in this industry, DSG has long been the local easy target, the store that gets no benefit of any doubt, no leeway for any mistake, and maximum pressure from any competitive move.  It got pretty onerous as time went on, and surely embittered ownership toward certain specific antagonists.  One of the lessons you learn in law school is that if you're going to punch someone back, do it hard enough that they will have a difficult time getting back up.  We took that lesson to heart throughout these years of scuffles and skirmishes.  Rather than simply fighting tit-for-tat, DSG turned inward and changed our position so that we could win outright, sustainably, on the exact aspects of business where our adversaries thought they could most easily crucify us, and were themselves the most vulnerable to reprisal.  This is not an unprovoked or unilateral attack by us in the great ongoing war of Business.  Rather, this is reprisal, a delivery of comeuppance.  It is a sort of justice.  They threw the first punch, but we intend to throw the last.

Probably the best part of all this, is that most of our current business initiatives are not externally visible, and are the greater part of what's really going on.  Our entire 2X2/DMU operational shift was just one of many things, and yet it has been so visible and so successful and so effective that I can even state right here in print that it is not that important in the grand scheme of things, and it doesn't matter!  Competitors cannot ignore it in the analytical calculus regardless!  That is OUTSTANDING strategic positioning.  It's a play-action pass on first-and-goal from the 1-yard line.  The defense cannot play both the run and the pass effectively, and is overwhelmingly likely to be scored upon.

Thus derives this articles title, Double Agent: our hat tip to the wonderful and profitable Double Masters, but also to how we've managed to set this up to achieve both goals of succeeding on its face, and disguising from competitors most of what we are really doing.  We wholeheartedly recommend the Rush song by the same name for your listening enjoyment.

Enjoy the Silence

I do owe my readership an apology.  I have been extremely sparse about new blog articles.  Some of my deadbeatery is excusable -- I do have a wedding coming up this fall, after all -- but part of the reason I haven't been writing is a deliberate decision that is tied to business prerogatives.  And not to be too meta, but that itself seemed like a pretty decent idea for an article!

In an absolutely great interview session with finance YouTuber Graham Stephan, automotive YouTuber Doug DeMuro explained that he keeps a grueling schedule of content production despite already earning plenty of money, because he doesn't know when it's all going to end, so he feels motivated to max out the earning capacity of this window of opportunity while it stands open.  That is to say, the boomlet of social media whereby a YouTube channel is, for this moment in time, a lucrative option.  Indeed, an extremely lucrative one if you managed to get situated right.  But it can't last.

Doug is absolutely on point with this.  Windows of earning opportunity are often a combination of preparedness, awareness, discipline, ruthlessness, and luck.  They can close without warning or remorse.  YouTube seems like an earnable conduit right now, but what happens when it's not.  It can absolutely happen.  For example, already Facebook provides far worse advert metrics than Instagram for the same content DSG puts out, for the reason of I have no damned idea.  It just does.  (Paid advertising campaigns on either platform feed through to readers on both.)  What happens when YooToob becomes "lame" and the earnings center-of-gravity for videos is on Twitch or (sigh) TikTok (in which case I'll be missing it because f**k that noise).

The situation for Desert Sky Games is a little bit broader and more general.  With the exception of a couple of blips now and then on the schedule (Innistrad Crimson Vow and Pokemon Fusion Strike, more or less), we have been on an absolute earnings tear since spring 2021.  I have barely taken any days off through this entire duration, not to mention during which we had a fire, a store move, and almost complete turnover of staff.  The bottom line is that most business is booming and on any given day or week I don't want to miss the chance to capture peak earnings, so I spend an inordinate amount of time doing "store stuff."  Pokemon is off its 2021 peak, but is still much hotter than the doldrums of 2017-2018.  Magic is a torrent of product that we can almost, kind of, keep up with.  Video games have been on absolute tilt ever since March 2020 and who even knows when that will slow down.  I've been pricing systems at above the pricecharting rate and they still sell as fast as I can prep them and get them staged.  Meanwhile on the buy side I've been turned down offering 75% of pricecharting in cash for Nintendo hardware, usually a severe overpay, and right now it's not enough.

Meanwhile, owing to the pandemic and the nursing shortage, Hannah, who is a registered nurse working overnights at a local hospital, has had the opportunity to bank massive bonuses taking extra shifts, and for that matter is in a profession that keeps getting market increases for her regular wage, so even though the work is pretty strenuous, she doesn't want to miss a peak earnings window either.  There are stretches of days where we complain that we miss each other.  It's a hell of a grind.  But wow, we feel pretty good about the bankroll we've been building.

There is roughly a two-week cadence to our work right now where Hannah and I spend mutual work days working, then we have one weekend with the kids where our non-work time is spent with them, then there is a day or two of relative downtime that we spend with each other (and also do household stuff, which is mostly the lowest priority) and then during the second weekend when we don't have the kids, we both work again straight through.  Essentially, any night when she's at the hospital, I put in extra hours after closing in the dark store, because my tiredness is offset by the ease of productivity in the peace and quiet.  I'm not inclined to just go home and stare at the cat, as cute as Store Kat may be.

This is also part of why DSG isn't a WPN Premium store yet.  Every time I send a new video, they send back a punchlist of what should be minor projects, but I just can't justify spending time on any of them when working on the store's existing deliverables earns me way more money and incurs less transitional friction.  Writing, which in the abstract I always want to be doing, is similarly outranked by monetizables.

The foregoing makes me sound like quite the money-grubbing greed merchant, but what I'm doing is really a far more conventional diligence.  The reality is that small business retail in the comic and hobby game industry isn't a career with a clearly shaped future.  We know sunsets are ahead for each of the three main things DSG does (video games, Magic, and Pokemon) but when those sunsets are going to hit, industry-wide, is a moving target we can only speculate.  And I think general tabletop is far worse off.  If you forced me to pick a year, right now, without any caveats, when the business model that DSG is running will become untenable?  For a variety of reasons, I'd pick 2028.  (Six years ahead, as of this writing.)  And I'm concerned I've placed that date too far ahead.  But let's just say 2028 for the sake of thought exercise.

Now think about your own career.  If a little bird told you, credibly, that you'd be fired six years from this very day, and nothing you could do would prevent it, and moreover your industry wouldn't be a viable income source anymore and you'd end up having to move on to some sort of adjacent work, and you can't yet know exactly what work that would be, and you were being offered unlimited overtime at double, maybe triple wage here and now today, what would you do?  I imagine you'd make hay while the sun shined, right?  You'd pick up every shift you could.  You'd cancel vacations, you'd put hobbies on ice, you'd quit the neighborhood bowling team, you'd stop going to church, maybe.  After all, God helps those who help themselves.  And you'd do ten years worth of work in five, and probably spend that last year winding down and organizing your transition out.  And you'd be financially well situated when the clock struck midnight, and that's exactly what I want for me and Hannah and ultimately for the kids.  

I decided decades ago that if I ever had the chance to compress a career like this, I'd do it.  "If you could work your ever-living ass off for ten years but then retire, would you?"  Absolutely the f**k yes.  In fact after a break during the early months of retirement, I'd surely find my way back to productive endeavors, not the least of which would probably be writing.  But just because I was willing to run that grind didn't guarantee that I'd get an opportunity to actually try.  I had preparedness, awareness, discipline, and ruthlessness, and now the video game and Pokemon booms and Magic's high-voltage itinerary are the luck that the recipe called for.  My championship window is open.  It's right there.  I have to take it.  And that means, unfortunately, instead of reading interesting industry repartée here on The Backstage Pass, I'm afraid most weeks for at least the rest of 2022, you'll just have to enjoy the silence. :)

Since my blog articles intentionally use song titles now, I would be remiss if I did not link a great rendition of same.  I've never been a Depeche Mode listener.  I can appreciate them on a technical level but their performances just do nothing for me, for whatever reason.  But compositionally they did a solid with Enjoy the Silence, and I can't pick between two splendid covers of the song, the first by piano prodigy Tori Amos and the second by goth-metal groundbreakers Lacuna Coil.  Words can be so very unnecessary, but I give them more credit than only to harm.

Get On This Deck!

I never thought global war would be a real possibility again in my lifetime, but here we are.  Last week, Russia invaded Ukraine, my family's ancestral homeland.  

That's right, I am of Ukrainian descent.  I was originally a Rossman, before that an Ursuliak, and follow an immigration trail from my present-day home in Arizona to the Great White North of Alberta, Canada, to whence traveled the family from Ukraine in 1903, three generations before me.  (I am in the 4th generation of American Ursuliaks.)  Fun fact, Ursuliak and Bahr both mean "bear" in their respective root languages.

But enough about my grizzly bloodline.  Anyone who knows me knows that one of my life causes is fighting against bullying.  The Russian invasion of Ukraine is about the most gargantuan bully move that has occurred in many years.  Even if I had zero ties to Ukraine, taking Ukraine's side in this war is a very easy and obvious moral decision.

That's where The Backstage Pass comes in, because it turns out two of Magic: the Gathering's all-time good guys in the Pacific Southwest, Dave Magenheim and Adam Romney, are ponying up in support of Ukraine and have set up the means for Magic players everywhere (and, indeed, anyone else who cares to join in) to do the same.  I am on board and I hope my platform here, humble as it is, may provide some amplification.

I'll let their words serve as the best explanation for this campaign:

We're asking MTG players everywhere for something small: buy one less pack and send the five bucks to Ukraine. Then tell your friends to do the same.

On the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, thirteen brave soldiers found themselves surrounded and defenseless by the Russian Navy on a small island in the Black Sea. After firing on the island, Russian warships demanded their surrender. These true heroes of Ukraine recognized Snake Island as their personal Alamo and refused; responding "Иди на хуй!'" The precise translation is not suitable for a family fundraiser, but serves as our inspiration and our calling to the community:

"Get on This Deck!"

Buy Ukraine a Pack. Honor those Legends.

Our starting goal is for this community to cover the cost of a case of cards - equivalent to two months salary for the average Ukrainian. Your small sacrifice will go a long way. 100% of donations go directly to United Help Ukraine - which distributes food and medical supplies to Ukrainians affected by the Russian invasion.

We are not in any way affiliated with Wizards of the Coast ... but we'd like to be! We've given you money for years Hasbro; it's time to send some back.

GoFundMe Link HERE.

I vouch for Adam and Dave without hesitation.

Morale on the ground in Ukraine is very high right now.  Unlike Russians with their unfortunate fatalist mentality, Ukrainians are a scrappy, self-determined lot, and are used to having to make their own way and solve their own problems.  Ukrainians are thrilled to know that anyone, anywhere, especially Americans, are taking their side, whether in material form or otherwise.  Obviously the material form of taking their side is the form that's going to help the most directly.  And since most of us aren't in the munitions shipping business, we then turn to financial support as an effective means.

Thoughts, Part 16

So that was a bit of a hiatus.  Apologies to all who missed me.  Here is a photo of Store Kat (Snuffy), DSG's latest semi-celebrity pet and the source of much merriment at the Bahr household, to distract you from how long it has been since the last blog article went up.

Desert Sky Games has bounced back nicely in the wake of our store fire and suite move last summer.  The year 2021 broke all records for us, and was in fact our best to date.  Imagine if we hadn't been closed for a month right during peak season!  These good results continue despite the tables being closed again at the time of this writing, due to the COVID Omicron surge.  We spent the entire 2020 pandemic cycle and most of 2021 as well, building up inventory and assets in key narrows and disposing of everything else.

Right now we've got depth and breadth across video games, sealed Magic, sealed Pokemon, singles, and accessories.  Racks and racks of all of it.  I am nowhere near satisfied but the results are definitely paying off this effort; we have a regular flow of players from other stores coming to get the cards, sleeves, deck boxes, etc, they need from us, and trading in singles as needed.  It doesn't even matter where they play.  We've earned their business.  And we're going to keep pushing in this direction for the foreseeable, adding more and more stuff they want with the resources freed up by our sweetheart lease and consolidated staff count.  And we even get to undercut their regular watering hole on price.  Booyeah.

This success has not come without a strenuous workload, though to a great extent I don't mind it because the monetization has been so proximate.  I have a ledger of one-off projects that will reach well into 2023 at this point, but that almost all serve to directly cash out some asset or position that DSG took or had to hold for one reason or another.  For example, with Dungeons & Dragons no longer supported, we've been allowing our overbought dice inventory to cycle out gradually without replenishment.  The stuff that's too niche has been ending up on eBay.  I still despise eBay but it's the correct tool for the job right now.

Meanwhile, on the personal side, I can't catch a breather.  It's an exciting time but a tremendously busy time.  On September 1, 2021, I asked my beloved girlfriend Hannah Bondiek to marry me, and she said yes!  So there is wedding prep on top of everything else, for later this year.  It's tax season right now for both the store and my household, and that's always a labor-eater.  My custody calendar with the kids is not tight in raw hours spent, but the days I get to have them tend to block out what would otherwise be opportunities to work in a dark store, so a lot of my infrastructural work tends to pile up, the stuff I can't do while the business is open.  Hannah works overnights at a hospital and is a day sleeper, and as expected, my active hours have been syncing up with hers to some degree, which means I'm not at the store early in the morning knocking out any of that dark-store task work.  She will eventually go back to days, but right now the shift differential and night bonuses are too lucrative to pass up, so we're soldiering on through, with me handling extra household labor to free her for extra shifts.  And on top of that I'm getting older and can no longer grind the midnight oil as extensively as I once did, so every part of this exhausts me.  Oh, and we bought a bunch of cars, and we need to buy a house.

It's an uncanny unison of factors that tie me down from available work time and slow down progress on things I need to do to advance the business.  As you've seen, it also means there simply isn't a ton of time for me to spend writing, which is not great either, writing is something you have to do regularly to keep the skill set sharp.

There's an undertone in all my mentions of projects and cashing stuff out that suggests we're looking for a wrap-up in the not-too-distant future for DSG.  The answer to that is "not exactly."  I am ruling out ever returning to the large store deployment that DSG enjoyed from 2017 to 2021.  For a lot of reasons, I think that setup in a major metro market is obsolete now unless you're also restauranting.  I could stand to get back into a footprint like DSG Gilbert had from 2012 to 2017.  But the reality is that today's labor shortage and constraints are going to get worse before they get better.  It has never been more difficult to get a good hire, or more expensive to make a bad hire, despite offering the highest pay rates we've ever had.  Our existing staff keeps getting market wage increases just because we want to make sure we're keeping them on a competitive basis, but it's not enough, ordinary attrition is still happening.  Making matters worse, 90% of the people who inquire about work still think they are going to be paid to play cards, so they just aren't prospects.  So right now we're looking for structural adjustments that reduce labor loads while not sacrificing throughput or the customer experience, within the scope of the smaller square footage we're using now.  Not the easiest things to achieve at the same time, but we need to try, because it's a great position that's achievable.  We don't want to waste the opportunity we have under our extremely favorable lease that runs through 2025.  It's like having an elite quarterback on his rookie contract.

Microsoft has been on an absolute tear, buying Activision, Bethesda, and whatever other studios they "have only to close their hand to possess," as Jerry Holkins phrased it.  Xbox Game Pass is the greatest value in the entire game industry, and that's saying something against the actually-also-awesome offerings that both Nintendo and Sony have available, to say nothing of everything going on in the world of tabletop.  I've discussed here before at length that digital subscription play of video games does not wipe out the physical game resale trade -- there are still vast, immense lists of titles that are not on the subscription catalogs, are de-listed digitally, have some physical premium experience, or in the majority of cases, exist orphaned on legacy consoles.  But the Game Pass status quo does give us an increasingly clear sunset off on the horizon.  If you had asked me before Microsoft (and Sony, for that matter) went on their recent studio acquisition sprees, I would have pinned that sunset about 15 to 20 years out.  Now I'm thinking more like ten years.  The shape of that sunset isn't one where physical video games become worthless, but one where the physical video game resale trade becomes baseball cards, focused almost entirely on collectors and the niche extreme of hardcore players, and forfeiting the blue ocean of ordinary players who are our bread and butter now and today.  By 2030 I think the number of independent video game stores in North America will reduce by half.  I don't really want to fight that riptide, but at the same time I will make sure we are positioned durably to do so in case that is the most favorable line of play we approach.

Pokemon is still booming, though surely it's not what it was 12 months ago at this time.  We're delighted to be cashing in on it and have no intention of stopping any time soon, but realistically, we will be back in 2018 at some point when the boomlet dies down.  Stores that haven't figured this out yet need to recognize that Pokemon, the highest-selling IP in human history, is a mass-market product and there is no such thing as a local game store Pokemon community.  Even our most ardent regulars spend more through the Pokemon Center Online and at Wal-Mart than they do with any given local store.  Make hay while the sun shines and don't leave a dollar on the table for future loyalty that will never really be more than empty talk.  Pokemon doesn't really figure in to my preparatory work toward DSG's future, because if it's selling, we'll sell it, and if it's not, we don't care about it.

Magic: the Gathering... ah, Magic.  The pace of product output is now literally more than Hasbro's manufacturing capacity will allow, as we've had repeated delays in product arrival, from Crimson Vow set boosters to UnFinity.  But more concerning than that, Mark Rosewater and the other powers-that-be have confirmed that they don't actually expect anyone to be able to keep up with what Magic is becoming.  The notion of audience tailoring isn't a bad one as such, but to service those audiences, local game stores have to be able to keep up with the product, and as of right now even cataloguing singles is a burdensome and frustratingly complex endeavor.  When even focused Magic stores can hardly achieve professional-level coverage of the product offering, what chance do diversified stores stand?  (For this exercise, you can basically count DSG as a Magic-only store.  It's not entirely the only thing we do, but it's the overwhelming majority of our focus and revenue.)  So, this is a problem if Wizards of the Coast, by which we mean Hasbro, still intends for local game stores to be the focal outlets for the game.  Not so much of a problem if Hasbro intends to disintermediate such stores.  Money talks, I guess.  For DSG's purposes, even if the front end of the Magic market becomes untenable, it will still be possible to sell singles in some shape, manner, or form, which brings us back around to known factors: Singles are highly liquid by collectible standards.  Singles are easy to ship, store, and move.  A store can go right up until the day it closes and never bother to sell out its singles if they don't want to (and aren't hurting for the cash).  But they absolutely could liquidate singles during wind-down if desired; the full spread of options are on the table.  Post-closure, it is trivially easy to long-tail out the singles via TCGplayer or some online marketplace at leisure.  Thus, for planning purposes, DSG doesn't need to change its approach to Magic: the Gathering, basically ever.  As I've said here before, for the right price, we'll sell the category outright, but nobody who needs it can afford it, and nobody who can afford it needs it.

TCG accessories are among the things hardest hit by the supply chain crunch, but this is something of an anticlimactic factor, because once containers have come in for Ultra-Pro, Ultimate Guard, and Dragon Shield, we place enormous orders and are well situated for months to come.  Right now with the tables rolled up and put away, DSG has rack after rack of the best accessories in the industry, and we've seen record sales of them.  It really does help that there's no format rotation on matte sleeves or premium zip portfolios.  I order as deep on this stuff as my available storage allows.

And that's it!  Those are our only product lines.  I have a rounding error worth of video game soundtracks, plush, movies, and doodads, which I count as all belonging to the video game category.  There is some tiny diminishing remnant of our board game and RPG inventory still in the store, but I largely don't have to pay attention to any aspect of those categories now.  And let me tell you, even though I still like Warhammer as such, I really, really love not having to give the slightest sh-t about what's happening in the Warhammer business.  Warhammer is this intensely excellent thing that scratches the narrowest gamer itch imaginable, so to depend on Warhammer sales to sustain your revenue is a lot like having only one person know where you live and depending on them to want to keep bringing you food, as either Paul Simer or Gary Ray once observed, memory fails me which.

That's all I have for now, and hopefully it won't be six months before the next installment!

Take Hold of the Flame

On the afternoon of June 19th, we were having record sales for the fifth day in the last ten, with a house full of players for the Modern Horizons 2 release weekend, in a 6k+ square-foot store that was approaching end-of-lease.  If you had told me at that moment that the store would be closed for the rest of the month, I would have laughed at you.

Less than 30 days later, we re-opened in just under 2k square feet, in a gorgeous fully-renovated suite on the other side of the same building, where our lease is renewed through 2025 at an occupancy cost so much lower that it's practically operating for free (and for the short term, "practically" is more like "actually").

But wait a minute.  Hadn't I posted right here on this blog that I was 95% confident the store would remain where it was through 2022?  (Amusing that in that same article, I forecast a "pandemic" as one of the "apocalyptic" scenarios that might throw all assumptions out the window.)

So what happened?

Fire.  Fire happened, and a supportive landlord who was willing to work with us to turn a loss into a win.

For a week in mid-June, a heat wave blasted the Phoenix area that was so onerous even we locals were hatin' life.  DSG had HVAC interruptions, brief outages, and other unpleasantness.  We even shut down the vintage arcade for a few days to try to reduce the power load.  Sometime around 7pm on June 19th, the heat blistered our external power junction assembly, and a bad connection arced many amps of power into ignition.

We cleared the store of guests and nobody was harmed.  It is testament to the great construction of our building and the safety measures therein that the other power phases continued uninterrupted despite a literal electrical fire burning inches away from their connection points.

Alas, the fire destroyed the entire junction, and replacement took weeks of parts procurement and installation, followed by weeks of city and utility certification before the suite could be used again.  (As of the publication time of this article, it was still not done.)  DSG faced a potential business outage right in the middle of our hottest streak in company history.  In fact, despite being closed from June 19th to the end of the month, June still came within a few percent of being our biggest month ever, and instead sits in second place behind March 2021.  The stakes could hardly have been higher.

To our immense fortune, we had already been working on our exit plan from Suite 7, which was approaching end-of-lease, as I mentioned earlier.  The other partners and I had spent months sketching out the branches of our potential site scenarios.  Through this preparatory work, we had already reached a provisional agreement with the landlord to move to Suites 11 and 12 for our lease renewal, but it was supposed to happen months into the future, closer to the Suite 7 lease terminus.  The landlord already had an inbound tenant signed on for Suite 7 who was ready to start construction whenever we happened to be out of the way.  We all figured late 2021 or early 2022 would be Go Time.

When the fire occurred and we learned how seriously it was going to disrupt business, we were able to amend the agreement with the landlord to just proceed with the move immediately, and give the inbound tenant a chance to get started and pass through Permit Hell sooner.  The inbound tenant was thrilled.  I can't disclose their business since that's not my information to share, but the entire DSG crew is looking forward to it being there, and we will be eager customers.

Moving immediately meant doing things on a tight calendar and some extra expense from not being able to slow-walk some of the renovations, but thanks to this spring's stimulus boom, we were positioned sufficiently well to proceed using cash on hand, and insurance is going to defray some of that cost later.  And we sharply minimized lost time.  I cannot stress how different this move has been from the last one, which ran way over calendar and way over budget and required us to borrow an inordinate amount of money at lousy interest rates.  This new move required us to borrow zero dollars and zero cents, and on top of that, again, insurance reimburses some of the expense.

So there it was.  We had a plan already in place, and what the electrical fire let us do (or forced us to do, depending how you look at it) is start before we were ready, and finish before we had preferred to, but ultimately move forward right away and reap the long-term benefits of that.

The MTG Forgotten Realms prerelease stood as a pretty hard calendar milepost that we didn't want to miss.  Under the original plan, we'd have hosted that and one or both of the Innistrad events from this fall in Suite 7, and then we'd shift all activities to the new suites seamlessly between major dates.  Instead, after coordinating with Wizards of the Coast and getting the appropriate permissions, Forgotten Realms became the first event in Suite 12.

We know the new location is smaller.  I've been telegraphing pretty heavily here and elsewhere that something like this was going to happen, so it's worthwhile for me to give some insight here on the business aspects of reducing our store footage in this manner and the business reconfiguration that goes along with it.

Having the largest store in the Valley was fun, but in many ways it was overkill, and it absolutely was not cost-efficient.  We had a huge and happy player base, and Suite 7 was certainly big enough to accommodate them, but during the long slide of tournament indifference that preceded the COVID pandemic, we discovered that it wasn't necessary to have that kind of capacity, since that river almost never ran bank-full.

Indeed, even at our fullest, we never even reached 50% of our imputed maximum occupancy.  Over the years, I had to get really creative to monetize surplus footage, and that's part of why Warhammer and D&D lasted as long as they did despite the organized play deployments for both categories failing to perform sustainably.  I had more space than I could fill, so things that were using that space inefficiently got a partial pass.  That partial pass finally expired when growing business components started making more beneficial use of that space, such as our TCG singles processing office.  It started to make sense to take those categories out of the equation if we were not situated to be top-tier in them.

That said, we are still positioned to serve the lion's share of our everyday player volume from before.  Obviously it will be a bit of a pinch at prerelease time, since we routinely seated double or triple our typical FNM player counts for that.  We've got about a 48-player max in Suite 12, and we can stretch that from time to time to about 64 players using additional space in our section of the plaza, including parts of Suite 11, once we've had time to set that up.  (We only need seating for 32 players to host WPN Qualifier events, if those ever resume.)

More importantly, we are poised to do a far better job serving our players than we did before.  Suite 12 has been fully renovated, from newer LED ceiling lights to awesome stone floors, and it's beautiful and comfortable.  Our WPN Premium application is already on my itinerary.  We hit a jam with the new tables we had planned, our understanding was that they were about three inches wider than needed (good) but it turns out they are three inches narrower than needed (not good).  But we still have the eight-footers in place with sweet covers and comfortable space around.  And obviously our HVAC system will have fewer cubic feet of space to cool during the hot summers.  Meanwhile, singles processing in its entirety takes place in Suite 11 and requires no additional steps from the player.

We have been telling the regulars who ask, that there is a long term plan in progress and it will make sense as the final pieces fall into place.  We're definitely at the 80%-85% completion level now, with only a handful of major moves (each containing its own array of sub-moves) remaining to get DSG to where we believe it should be.  It should all be starting to make sense now to those of you who have been observing all along, though you'll gain even clearer insight as we push those last few building blocks into place.  The recent "Great Narrowing" of DSG's focus from full-spectrum hobby gaming to just video games, Magic, and Pokemon, explained at length in various articles here, was a prerequisite condition to a broader structure of efficient facility deployments, starting with the one we've built now in Suites 11 and 12.  We've been working on, as I put it in a previous article, "steering the store's cone of influence to a narrower range of things, so we can craft an offering that is increasingly 'no excuses.'"

Before the move from Gilbert to Chandler, we had maxed out a 2400 square foot suite and had our Tempe location also on lease wind-down at just over 3k square feet.  The 2017 lease for Suite 7 was cheaper than both Gilbert and Tempe combined, and also larger than both of them combined.  It seemed like it was a complete win on all fronts.  Instead, we found ourselves out of position.  We had been running a Mario model that suits rural and mid-major areas well, spreading a wealth of categories and play space to cast as wide a net as we could.  While we were busy with steep efficiency challenges in an attempt to be better than a jack of all trades and master of none, in our major metro region, laser-focused smaller stores took leaps forward and proved to be running the better structure.

In fact, the Bahr Haters out there now get to experience the one thing they wanted the least: a DSG with near-zero overhead that can exert tremendous competitive pressure on them through pricing, supply, and our ironclad reputation for doing everything above-board.  Feel free to throw in the towel and close up any time you're ready.  (This is especially sweet after how some of them stoked the rumor mill during our closure suggesting that we were done for.  Yeah, you wish.)

Since the impetus for our big move forward amounted to us essentially seizing an opportunity provided by a fire, I couldn't resist the reference to Queensrÿche's masterpiece "Take Hold of the Flame."  Indeed, fire or no fire, it was time for DSG to make a definitive move, to hard-shift from the store we thought would be pretty good for many in general, to a store we knew we could make excellent for those who wanted what we were focused on doing.  We took hold of the flame; we had nothing to lose, and everything to gain.  And so that you can enjoy it in all its glory, here is the best metal vocal performance ever filmed.

DSG Events Resuming Questions & Answers

Welcome back, everyone.  We've missed so many of you.

There is more to say than a quick social media post will cover, so we're going to have a quick info dump first and then I will address some questions that we know will (or already have) come up.

(For those of you who have never read The Backstage Pass before, it's our business blog related to the comic and hobby game industry.  Most of the articles here are meant to be business-facing, but everyone is welcome to read on if you're curious about the inner workings of DSG and stores like it!)

EVENTS AND OPEN TABLE USE RESUME FRIDAY MAY 28TH

NEW STORE HOURS: OPEN MON-WED 12pm-7pm; OPEN THU-SAT 12pm-10pm

EVENT SCHEDULE:

• Thursdays 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Legacy;
• Fridays 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Modern;
• Saturdays 1pm & 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Standard and Pioneer;
• Pokemon League Saturdays 3pm-6pm;
• Special events will typically pre-empt the Saturday 1pm Draft;
• Booster drafts and constructed sit-and-go events will be available on demand as capacity and clock permit;
• Commander play is available any time the store is open but may have space limits during paid events.

OTHER CHANGES:

Facemasks are no longer required as of May 28th.  The science says once you're in a room for half an hour with someone, you have aerosol saturation and masks no longer help (in either direction).  This means if the tables are open, facemasks become a matter of personal preference rather than business policy.  However facemasks are still permitted and we will not tolerate any harassment of visitors or staff for opting to wear a mask.  Some folks have immunovulnerable family members or other circumstances where they may wish to have every last grain of potential benefit.  We at DSG respect this and we will insist upon this courtesy at all times on our premises.

All sanctioned events require Wizards EventLink registration (for capacity management) and we will waitlist players in-store when events are full on EventLink.  Any EventLink registered players not present at the start time of the event may be dropped in favor of enrolling a player on the waitlist.  Note that this means you must have a smart device or phone to play in sanctioned events.  Wizards's rules, not ours.  You receive pairings and enter your results through your device.  We are new to this too, so bear with us as we all learn together how this stuff works.  Wizards Event Reporter is defunct now and there are no more DCI Numbers.

There is now a venue fee.  Event entry covers the venue fee as it is a component of the entry price.  Admission to tables without entering an event (i.e. Commander open play or Pokemon League) costs $9.99 per day (after tax) OR ONE DSG STAR per day.  (The cost to acquire a DSG Star is essentially $2, as you are awarded one for every $20 in purchases, and ten DSG Stars may be redeemed at any time for 10% off any purchase.)  DSG Stars are our electronic reward system that is automatically maintained by Square, our credit card processor and point-of-sale system.

The venue fee won't go into effect until June 1st.  Holiday weekend fun!  But also a chance for everyone to return and get used to the new event layout and let us shake out any glitches.

Events will get priority seating.  With our seating reduced to 36 (regular) or 48 (high capacity), paid events will be allocated reserved tables, and open play will have capacity limits going into event times.

Event entry fees are changing.  Booster Draft entry is now $19.99 after tax, including venue fee.  Constructed daily event entry is now $9.99 after tax, including venue fee.  Special events will be priced on a case-by-case basis.

Tables are exclusively reserved for Magic, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and video game play.  We are no longer supporting in-store play of any other games.  Nothing against those games, it's just not part of the DSG business plan moving forward.

REALLY GOOD NEWS STILL TO COME:

We have some awesome special events coming up.  In addition to the official stuff like the Modern Horizons 2 prerelease week, the Chilling Reign take-home prerelease, and the Forgotten Realms prerelease week, we are setting up even more fun events: DSG stowed a lot of surplus product during the pandemic so that we could all play formats that never had a chance for in-store play.  Time Spiral Remastered drafts, Zendikar/Kaldheim/Strixhaven Prerelease sealed deck events, and more!  Stay tuned for scheduling on these great experiences!

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:

That's all the news for now, so if you learned what you needed to know, you can skip the rest of the article.  Below, I will set out some additional details and some of our rationale for these decisions for those who are interested to know.

Q: Why only three evenings of events every week?

A: We think there needs to be time to ramp back into full operation.  Also, before COVID, events early in the week often did not fire, while events later in the week generally did.  We don't know if that trend will continue, and we will be monitoring event results over the months ahead to get a sense of the player community's mindset.  If we do have to make a change later, it's far easier to add events than to take events away.  And for things like prerelease weeks, we can still run pods earlier in the day on Mondays through Wednesdays, for those players who aren't at work or school.

Q: What's with the venue fee?  I want to hang out and play Commander all day for free!

A: We expect a certain amount of unhappiness on this because a thing that was free is now not free.  However, this is the new reality.  We learned during COVID that the "sea of tables" game store business model is just flat-out worse than the shopping-only model.  The old way is labor-inefficient and space-inefficient and makes it more difficult for us to provide a good customer experience in a multitude of ways.  But we are players too and we always intended to bring back in-store play.  It just can no longer be a promotional expense now.  

This change is also extremely overdue in the tabletop world.  Venue fees are commonplace in e-sports and nobody even thinks about it anymore.

We deliberately crafted a venue fee structure that is effectively free for players who do business regularly with us -- many of our long-time customers have hundreds of DSG Stars on their accounts, and are often event players anyway who will not incur a separate table charge.  By contrast, the venue fee might be cost-prohibitive for players who do not typically transact with us, whether buying or selling, and who do not enter paid events.

Q: Can I use store credit to pay the venue fee rather than earning and spending a DSG Star?

A: Yes, of course!

Q: Can I use store credit to pay event entry and have it still include the venue fee?

A: Yes, of course!

Q: Have you considered a membership plan rather than pay-by-day?

A: We did evaluate this extensively.  We found that, on balance, memberships look like a bad value for most of our players.  The biggest problem is what happens when life gets busy and you don't get to come in very often.  You feel like you had to pay (often on an automatic credit card charge) and didn't get your money's worth out of it.  Feelbads, plain and simple.

And let's face it, there are too many subscriptions dripping each of our credit cards every month.  We don't want to encumber you with yet another recurring bill.

Membership timing also sets up bad incentives, like if you have final exams this week and summer break starting next week, you don't want to start a membership right now because you don't get to really use it until afterward... but what if the night you REALLY need a break is TONIGHT?  Or if you are about to change jobs and you don't have a firm schedule yet, it's a major feel-bad to pay for table time you might end up unable to use.

With the DSG Stars option for venue fees, it's a breeze.  Your DSG Stars don't expire for a year, so you can wait to use them, and the system automatically keeps track.  And you can always just redeem them on purchases if you go a while without needing any for table admission (or you are mainly playing in paid events anyway).  Talk to our players who have been using the ten-DSG-Stars-discount regularly, especially for booster box purchases and pre-orders and such.  It's an ongoing discount that keeps renewing.  It's a reward to everyone who keeps coming back to DSG.  It's probably the single best thing we've ever done in terms of successfully setting up win-win incentives for doing business with us.

From a logistics perspective, using DSG Stars for venue fees works great because we have a star redemption in the system showing who paid for open play table access that day.  So we will be able to verify pretty quickly if someone tried to sneak into the play area.  (Don't do it.  The rope and stanchion is there as a polite way of deterring this.)  We don't have to keep lists or anything.  For busy nights we ordered up a bunch of wristbands we can use, like at a concert.

Q: What if I pay my admission into the 6:30pm draft at 12:01pm?  Do I get table access all day for no additional cost?

A: Yes.  We will watch to see if this presents any issues, but we don't expect it to.

Q: What if the draft then doesn't fire?

A: Your draft admission will roll over to a future draft.  Event admissions are non-refundable (and always have been at most game stores, so this is nothing new).  Seriously, though, we're not jerks.  We want you to get your money's worth.  In the unlikely event drafts continue to come and go without ever launching, we will figure out a make-good transaction for you.

Q: OK then, what if I pay my DSG Star for table access and then decide to enter the draft that night and it does fire.  Do I get my star back?

A: Yes.  Again, you really don't need to worry about these kinds of things, but we've already been asked by people who we discussed the changes with and these sorts of concerns were in their feedback.  We get it, the first worry is whether something basic like this is going to become a problem.  

Like I said, we're not jerks.  We have no need to double-dip, and the venue fee plan is intended as a cost that will only apply once per day per person.  Whatever we might have to do to reconcile that if some weird circumstance comes up, we will take care of it.  We got you, fam.

Q: Did you upgrade the tables?

A: Yes!  We ended up doing it a little differently than planned, though, because we are less than two years from end-of-lease now and we wanted to make sure the tables we bought would work at the prospective locations we are already evaluating.  (Most are very close to where we are located now.)  The long and short of it is that we went with heavier-duty tables that are eight feet long, so that standard capacity at three players per side was comfortable, and max cap at four players per side was no worse than max cap before.  Multiple spots we've surveyed lay out very nicely with eight-footers but would be too crowded with pairs of six-foot tables per section, and not have enough seating with single six-foot tables per section.

The boutique tables we originally planned to bring in didn't look like they were standing up to wear and tear very well in the stores that had them already (in other parts of the country, not local competitors).  Based on feedback from those store owners and their experiences, we decided to double down on ruggedness and let tablecloths and table mats provide the aesthetics.

Q: What's up with the game exclusivity?  No more Dungeons & Dragons?

A: I'm afraid so.  In fact, D&D is already being phased out from DSG, including this week's enormous dice sale on most specialty dice and dice packs, and soon the last of the sourcebooks will be sold off and not restocked.  So 2021 is the end of the line for RPGs at DSG; we've enjoyed having them (and I have been playing since 1st edition and the basic red box) but the pandemic accelerated the market's move toward virtualization, remote play, specialized play venues, and other market segments DSG just isn't in.  Even discounting the books hasn't mattered.  And as a matter of course, we're not supporting gameplay for TCGs we don't carry.  We see the appeal of new hotness like Flesh & Blood and Digimon, but right now we're focused on continuing to improve our Magic and Pokemon offerings, and we keep Final Fantasy TCG around because we have a special relationship with that player community and with the publisher, Square Enix.

Board games are basically gone except for a small remnant that are video-game licensed or related; we moved away from general tabletop in 2020 when it became clear that our Amazon sales of board games etc were far higher than our in-store sales of them would ever be, and labor constraints and publisher channel restrictions made it unfeasible to continue in the category even as a local/online hybrid.  We discontinued miniature wargames in 2019.  We discontinued comics in 2018.

This years-long process is something we internally have been referring to as DSG's "Great Narrowing" and it's something of a controversial move in the industry where diversity of product is promoted as axiomatic.  I believe that approach works in different markets, especially smaller metros and rural areas where high labor efficiency can couple with a broad product spread to create a strong unified hobby offering.  In Phoenix, a tech-heavy major metro with high competitive saturation, I think an independent store is best positioned if it dominates a single category.  In 2022, DSG will be splitting into two companies, one for trading card games and one for video games.  (I have been foreshadowing here on the blog that this split was coming; it's just a matter of timing now, and is likely to be the major shift at end-of-lease as I discussed above in the answer to the table upgrade question.)

Q: Why are you still closed on Sundays?

A: That decision is subject to change later but it has been an enormous quality-of-life improvement for our staff and ownership.  We do like money, so it's possible that as business ramps back up to full power, we will find that being open on Sundays is unavoidable.  And as with the event days in the first question, it's a lot easier to add an open day later than it is to take one away.

Q: What will you do if the venue fee plan doesn't work?

A: That depends on what's "not working" about it.  For business purposes, empty tables during non-event times are preferable to having non-monetized open play taking place.  If we experience significant problems with logistics, enforcement, or other aspects of venue-fee-supported open play, we will probably close the tables except at event times.  As players ourselves, we consider this an undesirable step and we don't want to move in this direction.

Q: Where are you getting your facemask science?

A: I saved this one for last because there's a lot to say here.  But first, credentials.  DSG's managing partner, yours truly, worked for almost a decade at the Arizona Department of Health Services as a senior analyst.  I have extensive familiarity with public health, epidemiology, and health policy administration.  Our decisions throughout COVID since the very earliest days of the pandemic have been close to flawless in terms of reading the data, assessing the news, reading the trends, and making the best decisions for the protection and safety of visitors and staff.  Long story short, we know what we're doing and we stand on our record.

Moreover, the CDC has released guidance within the last week that vaccinated people can cease masking indoors.  We're not going to police peoples' vaccination status, but if you're genuinely worried about catching COVID... well, you should probably get vaccinated.  Just go to CVS, it's call-ahead or even walk-up in most cases now.  I took a chance on a walk-up a few weeks ago and missed an open service window by minutes, and they just had me come back the next morning for the shot.

Small businesses spent the last year getting a great deal of public pushback against facemask requirements, regardless of whether those requirements were imposed by state or local laws or orders, or whether they were put into place by the business owner.  We required facemasks at DSG from May 4, 2020 (the day we were allowed to reopen the doors) to May 27, 2021.  Over a year.  We took a lot of heat for it even though for over 11 months of that time, the policy wasn't even our choice, but was a governor's executive order, and then a City of Chandler municipal order.  For the last few weeks we have continued the mask requirement as a business policy on our own decision, because we follow the science and there was still a non-granular health benefit to being masked with the tables closed and most visitors being in the building only a short time.  The negative response in recent weeks has been significant and reprehensible, including a visitor bullying one of our staff members over the matter.  (If that person returns when I am in the store, they are getting a lifetime ban from DSG.)

So now that the long year of facemasking at DSG is over, we hold everyone who harassed us about facemasks in absolute contempt.  This is a private business on private property; respect our rules or don't come in.  Is that libertarian enough for you?  DSG has been, from the very start, a politics-free entertainment space.  No harassment.  No bullying.  No discrimination.  No proselytizing.  I shouldn't have to say this but I just spent a year having the public prove to me that I guess I do have to say it.  No matter which jersey you wear, park your politics at the door, and then come in and play some games.  Let's get back on track.

For those of you who showed immense support during these last 14 months of uncertainty and upheaval: Thank you.  Thank you so very much.  We see you.  We remember you.  Moving forward, the decisions we make and our efforts to make DSG better, are done with your enjoyment in mind.  Yours specifically.  We specifically want this place to make you as happy as it reasonably can.  We want it to be the place that was worth you going the extra mile to make sure you would get to enjoy again.  Hopefully we will live up to that commitment.  You are awesome.

See you all at DSG!  Shuffle up and draw seven!

Thoughts, Part 15

We just hit the one-year mark for the COVID lockdowns.  I say "lockdown" because the fundamental customer interaction value-add of the FLGS, which is our tables, have been closed this entire time while the mass market has been free to do whatever it wants and has reached new heights of stratospheric profitability.  I hope you all like working with name tags and smocks because those are the jobs that are going to be left after all this.  

But anyway it's probably a good time to remind everyone that card tables are/should be among the LAST things to reopen, because of the specific hazards that our particular hobby and industry bring to that equation.  Sitting in a room for hours, many hours.  We literally had Commander players who would show up when we opened and hang out until we closed ten hours later, and they are going to be the first people back at the tables because they have nothing to do right now.  Then we're also talking about gamers, and though we've made progress on the hygiene thing, the stereotype of the smelly neckbeard still contains some truth.  And of course the reality of playing face-to-face.  There's more than that, but as you can already see, we're talking about a very bad viral transmission vector even with the store taking steps to create distance, airflow, and cleanliness.  Realistically we're likely to open the tables sometime in May, because the COVID stats and vaccination rates suggest that we're going to be at a point of diminishing returns by then to remain closed.  But it's essential we don't jump the gun on this, and the stores that are already hosting card tournaments are doing their player communities a dangerous disservice.

Likely because of the mass-market nature of Pokemon, we're getting bombarded by bad reviews these days, and there isn't much for it; a mass-market consumer just wants all the things at none of the price, and has been relentlessly trained by the marketing propaganda of Wal-Mart and Amazon that they can have all of this with no trade-offs.  Side note: There ARE trade-offs of course, some of which we incur but do not always see, such as narrowed selection band, and some of which get imposed on others, like warehouse workers who have to pee in bottles because if they stop moving they fail to make rate and end up getting fired.

Anyway, the core complaint of most of the reviews is that we're not offering bottom-dollar pricing, and of course they can't know that we do that all the time on product that is not in shortage, readily replenishable, and available in quantity.  The thing THEY came for is in shortage, distributors are sold out, and restocks are allocated.  Without pricing to market, we end up with no wares to sell, and if your shelves are bare, your price doesn't matter.

So they don't know what they don't know, and we're the bad guys, the gougers, despite that those retail saints over at Target always sell out to Johnny Trunk-of-His-Car and the other scalpers when they have stock at all, unless they enforce punitive limits.  Whatever.  We are still absolutely taking the Steve Miller Band approach to Pokemon right now, which is to "take the money and run," and once things die back down we'll continue supporting our small and devoted Pokemon PLAYER community the way we always did.

This spring has been marked by the emergence of "meme stocks" and quick money for anyone who knew to get in on the gig beforehand.  Combine this with the YouTube-driven Pokesplosion and we're seeing the emergence of a scad of new game stores and media conduits, from flea-market consignment booths to promise-the-moon startups to box-break streamers.  The thing many of these wannabe-stonkbronkers aren't recognizing is that by the time everyone is doing something for quick money, it's already too late.  You aren't in on the ground floor, you're in at the penthouse, and the elevator mainly moves in one direction from here.  But hey, you do you.  It ain't MY money you're flushing down the rat hole.

My money, speaking of which, is going almost entirely to stocks these days, but not the meme plays.  Being out of debt for the first time since I was a teenager is a level of relief I can't fully describe in words.  You just have to do it so you can enjoy the feeling too.  And now that I have my modest expenses more than covered by my modest income, the surplus isn't doing anybody any good just sitting in a checking account, so I buy up techs, industrials, materials, financials, whatever, as long as I see enough ruggedness in the underlying security.  I'm not a true expert, with only novice experience doing it firsthand despite a lifetime of experience understanding how businesses work.  Nevertheless, I've managed to gain more money from stock trading this year than if I had worked minimum wage full-time, meaning this investment thing is already paying for itself and I'm freerolling.  That's a pretty sobering thing to realize because my bankroll hasn't been THAT big for this.  Obviously in a bull market we all look like geniuses, but I'm not too worried about that either: Sufficiently diversified, the market always gains in the long run, economies always expand with an increasing population, and I'm starting to see why people have aspired to investment finance as a career.  Until recently with the rise of no-fee apps, we amateurs literally couldn't do it this way.  A few short years ago the only app available was E-trade and you paid seven bucks a transaction and that put small positions out of reach and made it impossible to build up a portfolio unless you cashed in big to start with.  None of my stock trading would be net positive if I were still servicing a bunch of consumer debt, so if you're living in the red, fix that problem first.  Once you do, the world of investment is more accessible to you now than it ever has been, and with diligent research and careful planning, you have the power to build your own future.  Disclaimer: I'm not a financial advisor.

The Backstage Pass has been unseasonably quiet so far in 2021, and it's a combination of court-caused divorce red tape, the mayhem of wrangling a store that's on a historic sales run, getting acclimated to split child custody, and other factors devouring my time.  Don't panic; the Pass is not finished by a long shot.  However, article posts might be sporadic for the foreseeable until we regain cruising altitude.