Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Bring On That Seasonal Business

We are now ramping into our first summer at the Chandler location, and it's a little unsettling to realize that we have no idea what kind of business we're going to see.  Hot summer nights and our Pandora Radio are going to result in... what?  A mobbed game room and all the concessions business we can handle, on top of regular sales?  Or crickets and tumbleweeds?


The Gilbert location loved summer.  Deep in the suburbs, when school let out for the year, all the kids and teens had a bunch of allowance money and nothing to do.  All the college kids drove or flew back home to stay with their parents, and typically had part-time work money and nothing to do.  It was a perfect storm of making June consistently one of our best months of the year, and July near the bottom of Tier 1.


But the clarion call that School was Out For Summer that DSG Gilbert thrived upon, had precisely the opposite effect on DSG Tempe.  Arizona State University's main campus stood two miles northwest of the store, and once finals were over, it was "Hey thanks for all the Magic tournaments, we'll see you at the end of August!"  And lo, there were months of most visitors being bums Transient-Americans taking a break from riding the light rail back and forth all day every day.


What will happen in Chandler?  The store isn't deep in the suburbs like Gilbert was.  It's shallow in the suburbs.  The ASU factor should/might? function roughly the same inasmuch as the modal building in our halo, near to far, is the single-family detached residence.  But it might not.  We already saw a number of regulars bounce out of town to head back wherever and spend the summer living rent-free with their folks.  So let's call the college audience a To Be Determined on that.  The younger set is where we have other interposing factors...


The Chandler Unified School District, which envelops our store and extends far to the east and south, is on a modified year-round school schedule.  Autumn, Winter, and Spring Breaks all run two weeks apiece so we had a bit of a traffic bump during those times.  The semester finally ends on May 30th, and for a little while it's going to be just like in any other area... but then school starts back up on July 18th or something like that.  So whatever summer break business bump we enjoy from that point on will have to come from the smaller Kyrene District to our west and the smaller Tempe District to our north.  Fortunately, the Kyrene District, which encompasses all of Ahwatukee, is basically our turf now.  The younger players won't realistically enjoy bike access, especially with 117-degree highs.  But mostly people can get to us, and we're right on the main bus route through the east half of Tempe.


Our new next-door neighbors, the Swingin' Safari Mini Golf LLC, appear to be betting big on a summer of heavy business, because they pulled out all the stops to get open last week after a compressed buildout.  The East Valley Crossfit that had formerly occupied the suite was delayed in departing for their new home at a bigger facility.  The golf folks got their contractors into high gear in a hurry, an art I wish I had mastered around this time last year, and they're open for business now and drawing families to the plaza.  Their arrival basically just doubled the advertising potency of both of our marketing efforts.  Our arrivals radiate to them, and vice versa.  I'm tremendously happy about the way this played out.  During prime time, we've already seen substantial foot traffic from people who had just been mini-golfing.  And it's mainstream foot traffic, making it safer for me to bring in an even more diverse inventory offering and worry less about the fiddliest 1% of the merch we're dealing with now.


We have some senior staff members moving onward to greater things in the month ahead, and our part-timers who have waited patiently to be handed tons of hours are about to get them.  This changes the dynamic a bit as we'll be spread thinner on management.  Couple that with the increased traffic both seasonally and due to our new neighbor, and the staffing dynamic might just lurch to a configuration that's uncannily similar to what we wanted to build toward anyway.  A straighter chain of command, with the shift managers having more direct oversight over mainline staff.  More process-based workdays and fewer "night watchman" shift postures.


There is still plenty that can go wrong this summer that has nothing to do with business tempo.  Air conditioning is not optional and we haven't yet gotten a great mix of performance out of our facility's equipment on that mark.  For all we know the Magic Core Set 2019 could suck.  (But I doubt it.)  Vagaries of weather might send everyone outside for activities, or conversely, keep them at home and uninterested in making the drive over.  I don't think any of these are extremely likely scenarios.  But when you're running your own business, it's easy to imagine reasons things won't go the way we want.  As always, planning for the worst but hoping for the best is our answer.


We're a retro video game store, so obviously I have to wrap this article with The Ataris performing their cover of Don Henley's "Boys of Summer."  Because they called their band The Ataris.


Keep cool out there!

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