Building For Tomorrow: The Commitment Quotient

This is a followup of sorts to my article Building For Tomorrow: Finding New Things to Sell from waaaay back in May 2016.

One of the most important things in business is to avoid spending resources that will not provide a return on that investment.  To avoid that spending, you have to be able to say "no."  And if anything, I haven't said "no" enough.

Desert Sky Games benefits from being full-spectrum, but is also spread thin from being full-spectrum.  As the Chandler location's construction costs taxed our budget for the past year and counting, and as we saw a drop in customer traffic upon the initial move that we then had to recover and rebuild, we put resources into the merchandise that was paying off the most dependably: Magic, video games, Dungeons & Dragons, and board games.  It was simple retail Darwinism and coffee was for closers.  Those four pillars are the foundation of our revenue right now.

Accordingly, we have categories that have sunk beneath the "commitment quotient," or "CQ."  That's a term I just invented out of thin air to describe the level and mix of stock and the amount of fixturization/merchandising and product knowledge and promotion that is sufficient for a store to carry so that an average customer with a greater-than-trivial interest in that category will take you seriously as a retailer of that product category.  The CQ boils down to a money amount a store needs to spend, but because that expenditure is made up of interlocking pieces that a store may, in some respects, already have deployed, it's not quite as simple as quoting one number.  It really is a resource and expertise collection, that is only consequentially expressible as a monetary cost.

To meet a category's CQ, it is not necessary to have a stock level to shock-and-awe the most hardcore of devotees, though that surely meets the CQ if you can.  If you can't meet the CQ in a category, you're going to lose some sales and some money.  It becomes a question of degree, and depending on the particular economics of any given category, such a failure can be anywhere from relatively painless to horribly expensive.  You're not a "real" seller of Thing X.  People will immediately realize that Other Store Y in town is better for them, if Y has even a modicum better spread of Thing X, even if, objectively speaking, Y's offering is not that great.  Other Stores have gotten away with this grass-is-greener the-devil-I-know effect for some time, especially when incumbent.  I've been the Other Store in some instances.

To give an example, the commitment quotient for Dungeons & Dragons would set you back around six or seven grand at wholesale.  Sourcebooks, accessories, dice, dice accessories, miniatures, paints, rack and fixture that presents it professionally, and finally some furniture to facilitate gameplay.

We're talking about shelf levels of half a dozen starter sets and Players Handbooks, half that in Monster Manuals and Dungeon Master's Guides, one of each of every other sourcebook, and however many screens and spell cards you can get because Gale Force Nine appears incapable of printing them with regularity.  I use old newsstand racks for this so I can face everything out, but IKEA Expedit/Kallax are also an acceptable solution if you're OK with spine-out display.

We're talking a couple hundred different colors and finishes of plastic dice and a handful of premium options, plus dice accessories like bags, dice towers, and so on, as well as marker-friendly grid table mats.  It's almost impossible to stock too many dice.  Just when I think I've surely ordered more dice than we can sell through, they're gone.

We're talking WizKids's pre-primed, unpainted, officially licensed "Nolzur's" D&D miniatures line, a case pack of half a dozen of as many of them your distributor can get you.  (The difference between GF9's perpetual outages and WizKids's perpetual outages?  Each time WizKids finally restocks us, they really restock us.)  If you're lucky enough to strike paydirt on those, it's very easy to have over 100 different figure packs on your racks, including their Deep Cuts and Wardlings branded figures, both of which are perfectly good for D&D.

And you'll need a line of paint and tools for people to use to customize their figures, and for dungeon masters (DMs) to customize NPCs, monsters, enemies, objects, and terrain.  Army Painter provides a full line with commercial rack, and a bunch of distributors have it.  WizKids also produces pre-painted miniatures in blind boosters that you'll want on the shelves to the tune of a booster case plus the case incentive premium model.

Then you'll want to have some tables that aren't taken up 24/7 by TCG players, so that adventurers can play in your store!  It helps a great deal if at least one store owner or employee understands how Adventure League works and can coordinate with DMs for a monetized high-quality organized play offering.

To be really healthy with D&D, you'll want double or more of that sourcebook count, a seriously huge inventory of dice, somewhat more of the other stuff, and more organized play.  But if a D&D player walks into your store and sees the stock I describe above, they know you're for real.  Your risk of losing money because of an insufficient entry into the category is in the very low percentages.  You absolutely will attract D&D players to your store to buy from you.  You met the CQ.

So, what happens when our coverage of a product category doesn't hit the CQ?  We have a few that are failing to do so now, and a few that I'm concerned are headed that way.  And there are products I want to get into right away but where I know we won't be able to hit the CQ yet, so I am holding off.

Apparel and collectible toys have fallen beneath the CQ for us to be considered a serious player in those categories by anyone who walks in.  Fortunately, those two categories don't punish dabblers much.  We can have just one rack of shirts and one rack of POPs, as we currently do, and the penalty is that we don't sell many shirts or POPs... which was already the case.  Otherwise I wouldn't have let them attrit down to that level.

You may recall shortly after the store move that I stood on the verge of eliminating miniature wargames.  That danger has largely passed at this point, but only because we placed the category into something of a "maintenance mode" that amounts to just enough coverage that our devoted regulars can get the models and supplies they need.  I'm still not convinced that going huge on Warhammer or miniatures generally is still a thing that it makes sense to do.  I'm convinced that if we can keep the toxic side of the community away and encourage them to play at other stores, the player roster that remains will be good people.

So should I keep wargames now that I already have them?  The CQ for this category is a bit abnormal in that you can ignore most product lines as long as you carry Warhammer and the Citadel paint and tool assortment.  Games Workshop has polished this to a shine over the course of decades, and now provides (with pricing incentives) multiple buy-in levels complete with branded rack and fixture that constitute essentially ideal CQ for a store entering the category.  Over time, a store that sees success with Warhammer will start to learn which other SKUs are essential despite not being in the pre-set stock groupings.  But in terms of starting up, it's a solved equation.  And, crucially, in re-starting up it's a solved equation, which means that stores can drop and rebuild if they have to.  I don't think I am going to do that, but it's reassuring to know that I can without screwing up minis.

Comics continue to underperform.  Not long ago they spent some time in cash-flow-negative territory, which is just utterly unacceptable.  With the move and the combination of stores, we knew we'd lose some boxholder traffic.  But we couldn't just start shorting orders because we couldn't know which boxholders would go deadbeat on us.  We had two things happen that have brought us back out of the red in the category, though it isn't fully healthy yet.  First, the mini-golf place moved in next door and has brought in an increase in casual visitors, which has in turn grown comic sales, especially of all-ages books.  And second, there was an orderly transition from my previous comic manager, who relocated for his other employment, to my new comic manager, formerly a store assistant manager.  They have been keeping orders lock-tight.  I don't see a lot of waste.  In four months with no back-issue library to speak of, we've managed not yet to overrun the new-and-recent racks.  It's impressive.

So should I keep comics now that I already have them?  The CQ for the comics category is enormous.  I often tell people to be ready to spend five figures and change over the course of the first few months to get established.  If you can't spread a fairly comprehensive array of new releases each and every week, nobody will subscribe a box with you and casual visitors won't take you seriously in the slightest.  However, you won't have sales yet so you'll waste a lot of wood in the early going.  I almost think the CQ is even bigger than that, though.  I look at the most successful comic businesses today and I notice one common element: They're not just comics-first, they're practically comics-only.  To wit, many of them pay only passing attention to the "games" side of the industry.  And they might be right to operate that way.  (This is part of why I'm not concerned about GameStop's entry into the comics category.)  This leaves me in something of a conundrum.  Having comics be an appendage at the games-focused DSG is probably inefficient unless they somehow grow all the way back to scale organically.  It probably makes more sense for me to split off Desert Sky Comics as its own thing, though I'd rather not spare the personnel expertise and my focus right now is on the hub store.  I guess the outcome for now is that pulling the plug entirely on comics is still on the table, and that might even be the correct decision, but man, it seems like a punt when I've already hit the CQ.

We have a few small game systems with low CQs and they're sticking around because we can be real players on those product lines without risking too much illiquidity.  In each case we're already players in their overarching category, so a component CQ for adding a game can be cheap, and that's likely why game stores tend to expand within what they already do, more often than adding new things entirely.

Star Wars Destiny can be carried "for reals" for less than a grand sunk, and the same fixtures you use for any TCG, and the same organized play labor you already use for Magic.  Singles are optional; we've been waiting to get ours back in action for when Crystal Commerce and TCGPlayer integrate the category.  So we'll be supporting Destiny until it's well and truly dying, which doesn't seem likely any time soon.  Its CQ is minuscule.

Guild Ball is a micro wargame that's basically death soccer with tremendous British "flavour."  If you're already carrying enough minis to have a paint and tool line in place, the CQ for Guild Ball is about the same as for Destiny, less than $1k.  I wouldn't pick it up as your first and only miniatures line (unless perhaps it's your first wargame and you're already carrying Wizkids Nolzur's, Wardlings, and Deep Cuts for all your D&D players) but if you're in minis at all, it's safe for now.

Dragon Ball Super is a hot TCG that's been getting hotter.  Distribution is pretty narrow, with GTS getting the lion's share of product, but it's obtainable.  The CQ for DBS is also in that sub-$1k range as long as you're not going to do singles, and we're waiting on integration for the same reason as with Destiny.  The booster packs and boxes are known form factors.  There are only three main sets so far and a handful of ancillary packs.  Most stores already have card tables and an event schedule.  Giddy-up.

Finally, Lightseekers is a new property, a TCG that's blended to a smartphone game.  It has some marketing push behind it from I know not where, and the hook is that it's an easy play and quite a bit of fun.  It's tough for any new TCG to get traction, but Lightseekers seems on the verge of doing it.  And the CQ is made easier by a publisher-direct starter option that I won't detail too closely here because I understand they're making some adjustments to it.

The CQ for the Pokemon TCG, if you're going to carry singles, is pretty high.  Realistically you need to dump five grand or more to start, to be doing it right.  And then you have to spend every day to buy walk-in collections, and 90% of them will be worthless 1999-2001 cards in awful condition.  Moreover, the current market for Pokemon singles has been worsening, as I mentioned recently.  Nothing is worth anything the day after tomorrow, the crucial cards needed for high-level tournament play (such that it exists for Pokemon) become spike expensive overnight, nobody trades them in, and they become chaff like everything else once the metagame shifts.  Kids who don't know much about the game or don't play competitively just want EX and GX cards, and there's no good EV to open them from packs and no good ratio to buy them that gets many takers.  In 2018 I've seen better Pokemon singles sales from our sticker vending machine, and they don't even know what card they're going to get!  And unlike Magic players, the Pokemon players don't want to use the electronic kiosk system.  They want all the benefits of it, such as instant knowledge of stock of any given card, but they want to pick through bins and search through binders physically, and neither of those things work well if you're cataloguing the cards.

So, despite the fact that I've long since paid the CQ for Pokemon singles, with an inventory years in the making, I may drop them.  Sales are down, chaff trades are overwhelming to the point where we just stopped buying, and moving away from them could free up resources to do something better.  I'm going to try a few things that might get output back to where it needs to be.  If it all comes to nothing, I'll likely sell the singles inventory to another retailer and not worry about it, or convert it to pick bins and have the shiny kid bait in a glass showcase, offering visual you-see-it-we-have-it shopping like we were a bunch of barbarians or something.

That old article I linked at the start?  It's easy to see why we have or haven't moved on some of those product categories it mentioned.  Look here:

Sports cards?  Prohibitively high CQ for now, only overlap is card supplies.

Disc golf?  CQ isn't awful but it overlaps with nothing so we'd incur the full weight of it.

Vintage toys?  High CQ, though it's not all money; a big need here is space to store and triage acquisitions.  We do have the space, we're willing to leverage it, and therefore we might move this way before too much longer.

Classic games?  Moderate CQ and we've already started moving in.

Coffee and/or food service?  Sky-high CQ.  In fact, entire-business-level CQ.

LEGO?  Moderate CQ, and process mastery is the main obstacle here.  I have about 25% of the seed inventory already, in storage.

Vintage arcade?  We're doing it, full blast.

Electronics?  Moderate CQ and it's a direction I've been looking to go.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I expect to use the months and years ahead to iterate the store's merch portfolio to reach an equilibrium point where I'm not outgrowing our space again, and instead pushing for efficiency and depth, and therefore sustainable net.  New additions will enter when I am sure I can meet or exceed that category's commitment quotient.  This will serve as a natural gate to expansion components, and I accept that categories with smaller CQs will seem artificially better prospects to get added sooner.

You know what had a bargain-basement CQ, especially in proportion to the sales we saw for them?  Fidget spinners.  That's why in short order you started seeing them everywhere.  A low CQ for us sometimes means a low CQ for any business.  I'll still take it.

How Will the Rise of Tabletop Look Decades From Now?

When you're right there in a cultural moment, it's not always easy to tell how dated it's going to seem when it's a distant memory.  Don't believe me?  Look at these fine rodent-promoting gentlemen laying it down, circa 1985:

A good friend of mine recently noted that, with the breadth of media we have these days and the horizon-to-horizon options in general entertainment and cultural engagement, newer generations won't experience any of the kind of shared zeitgeist that we Gen-Xers and our precedessors did.  He's probably right, and that saddens the heart of yours truly, who has immersed to fandom in sci-fi (movies), romantic realism (art), prog and goth metal (music), and a somewhat broader palate in literature, all during a period of time spanning roughly 1982 to 2004, after which I stopped wanting to encounter anything new.

Even for Millennials, the shared zeitgeist is more distilled, in each exhibit there is usually a dominant figure, and it defines the entire type of thing.  They have this ultra-narrow but white-hot generational affinity for things spanning roughly 1992 to a few years ago, the endpoint isn't really fixed yet, it might end up being 2014 in analogue to when my tolerance for society ran out.  For Millennials, there's a real hotspot from 1999 to 2001 or so in which almost everything they liked or cared about was a pretty big deal in general for mainstream culture, and thus their nostalgia pivot points sit there.  Post-grunge and nu-metal, boy bands (sooo many boy bands), Pokemon TCG, the Nintendo 64, the Star Wars prequels, the Harry Potter books.  I could roll my eyes and say I can't relate, but then why do I go into a nuclear-grade nostalgia trance every time I hear Take the Time or Anybody Listening, fire up a game of Faxanadu or Super Metroid, or start my Nth re-read of The Belgariad?  It's the same thing.

By the time you get to the Post-Millennials, whatever the hell we're calling them, the shared cultural convention has given way to a million different isolated cells of hyperfocused fandom, goes the theory.  But if it's all isolated to the degree that anything can cultivate a following, does anything really become "huge" the way it once did?  Maybe not?

Certainly in broad swaths we see a shared zeitgeist still.  If you don't believe me, understand that Gangnam Style has been viewed on YouTube 3.1 billion times, as of this writing, and counting.  And if I were to show you any of a dozen common memes, you'd not only know the most common versions of them, but probably the shorthand for the meme itself.  But also we see that most "event" books, movies, and music are based on properties that rose to prominence during earlier generations.

The tabletop boom as we know it today started around 2010, as the economy dragged itself out of the trough of the 2008-2009 recession.  So it's on the tail end of Millennial tolerance as a "generational" thing, Boomers and Gen-X-ers are already past the affinity stage so we just take it as another thing to do (and maybe that makes it more stable for us!), and what about the Post-Millennials?  The tabletop boom is burning hot right now in 2018, and right now should be their nostalgia pivot years.  This is it.  A substantial part of the generation to which my kids belong is having their formative shared cultural experience peaking over the next few years.

But if their fandom is infinitely widely dispersed, is the entirety of tabletop enough to be a common nostalgia point?  Is all of tabletop, from TCGs to board games to miniatures to collectibles to deckbuilders to party games to classic games and all the rest, enough to be a cultural impression as strong as Gangnam Style?  What if the answer is No?

I can tell you right now, Allie, my oldest, will go from age 10 to 14 during these crucial years.  She is a late Post-Millennial; Pew Research bounds "Generation Z" as 1997 to 2014 births.  And Allie doesn't give a wild flying care about tabletop, for the most part.  Her iPad is her Precious and you can attempt to wrench it away from her at your own peril.  Video games are oxygen to her.  Ask her about Minecraft.  Maybe that's one of the few things that rises to the Gangnam level.  There damned sure isn't much else that she sticks with for any length of time.  She has the infinite channels of the eternally connected life.  She can consume any content at any time.  (Well, notwithstanding the papier-mache gate of Parental Controls.)  My friend's cultural observation appears confirmed by Allie's reality.

I guess I wrote my way from one question into multiple questions.  How will the rise of tabletop look decades from now... to whom?

The Silent Generation is mostly absent from tabletop, simply because it was never part of their lives beyond the simple bounds of Monopoly, cribbage, and playing cards.  For the Boomers and Generation X, the rise of tabletop (and its inevitable fall) are probably going to look a lot like the passage of hair metal or grunge, the Disney Revived era, the 1990s comic book bubble, or what have you.  We were there for it, and already adults, set in our ways, and rather than taking personally how "dated" it appears, it's a period piece to us.

Millennials are a little closer to the moment but theirs has been a skeptical generation even as it engaged in the hobby.  They knew from day one that electronic pursuits would predominate, even though tabletop would probably always have a niche following.  Their interest level in tabletop will drop the farthest and bottom out the lowest, and will track the decline of tabletop overall.  At the trough, they'll see playing "analog" games as an embarrassingly silly thing, like late 1990s low-budget CGI effects.

Post-Millennials?  I expect them to look at the rise and fall of tabletop the way I look at the rise and fall of disco.  I was alive when it happened, but by circumstance of timing, I never had any reason to care.  By virtue of their inevitable need to distinguish themselves socially from their predecessors, expect Post-Millennials to be the flagbearers for tabletop right around the time Millennials won't be caught dead placing a worker Meeple and passing the turn.

Generation Nextest, with births from 2015 until whenever, will see the tabletop era the way Xers like me see the Korean War.  It was over before we begun.  The primitive 4K video recordings of people playing tabletop games will look antiquated compared to the immersive omnidirectional content of their brain-stem network interface.  They'll discover lost arts and spend their days fighting a virtual war against the computer systems of megacorporations.

TL;DR -- Probably a good thing I didn't sign a ten-year lease.

The Game Stops Here

In the tabletop retailer Facebook groups, there is extensive discussion of mass market outlets like Amazon and Target, but owing perhaps to the lack of a prominent category-killer chain, that's about as far as the discussion goes.  Toys R Us is dead now, or dying, or whatever.  Barnes & Noble whipsaws between going deep and blowout clearance; it seems obvious they're on the brink.  When Hastings was still in business, it wasn't a big topic of discussion despite the close product mix and the company having among its owners the publisher WizKids, once known for HeroClix and now known for D&D miniatures so white-hot popular that supply doesn't begin to meet demand.

In fact, the only small-store tabletop chain stores that ever get brought up are the Games Workshop company stores, the newer of which are simply branded as Warhammer stores.  Often a tabletop retailer will be concerned if a GW store arrives in their orbit, expecting their Warhammer sales to tank.  In reality, I'm deeply hoping they drop a store right there two miles off my starboard stern at the Chandler Fashion Mall.  GW stores are great for independents.  They sell the product in a superbly merchandised scheme, they sell it at MSRP, and they actively demo the game.  I couldn't ask for more from a publisher-owned outlet with products I carry.  I hear a lot about how the GW stores get the "cream" of customer spending, the initial burst of interest and money, and pass off those customers for "maintenance" to independents when the low-hanging fruit spending is over.  I think that's a short-sighted perspective.  A person who truly engages in the Warhammer hobby won't stop at 2000 points worth of Space Marines.  And what do you care how much money the other store makes.  You worry about how much money your store makes.

Having said all that, take the worst tabletop retailer discussion of the GW stores or whatever mass market outlet you like, and it's a candle before the raging bonfire of the video game retailer Facebook groups and how they discuss GameStop.  It's an absolute obsession.  Some of the video game business owners seem like they spend as much time worrying about what GameStop is doing as they do on their own stores.

Desert Sky Games is across the street from a GameStop and two miles away from another GameStop in the aforementioned Chandler Fashion Mall.  And yet, astonishingly, we are still capable of making money in the video game business, and we do it without paying all that much attention to what GameStop is doing on any given day.  How can this be?

I won't straw-man this, so I should give airtime to the legitimate worries of independent video game stores where GameStop is concerned.  Look here.

}- GameStop is so well known they get a high volume of buys from the public, especially of the newest and hottest titles and gear, despite the fact that virtually any independent store will pay more for those games and systems.  A lot of independents get the "leftovers" that the local GameStop wouldn't buy.  And a lot of it is crap.  People post memes about how their entire video game collection is only worth $7.50 when they trade it in to GameStop... and then they do it anyway, instead of selling it to us!

}- GameStop is able to deal in new video game systems and games due to their massive scale, where most independent stores pass on that because of ultra-tight margins, worse than anything in tabletop, and the high speed at which prices plummet when a new title's shine wears off, often making the store lose money outright if they can't shift that stuff within 30 days of release.  That means a lot of calls and walk-ins where people ask for that day's hot new games, and the independent store generally has to apologize and say no, to which the customer replies, "Oh.  I'll just get it at GameStop."

}- Due to their working capital and merchandising systematization, GameStop can drop a store just about anywhere they think they ought to, and have it look pretty decent, in a way that independents cannot really match, pound for pound.  And they have a prepared lease that gives them the plaza or mall exclusive on much of what they sell.

}- Publishers provide GameStop exclusive products.  Independents get those same goods later on the backswing for resale used, obviously, but that's later and the money is missed now.

}- GameStop's software integration and deployment allows them to have a relatively powerful rewards offering, seamlessly functional between their in-store and online sales, and everything else that comes with a huge data infrastructure, such as return-abuse flagging, data mining, load balancing, preemptive price movement, and so on.

}- Oh, and GameStop has been pushing their way into the tabletop and collectibles markets, and now apparently comic books, because they can.

There are surely more factors, but let's go with those.

And here is why they don't crush us.

{- Regardless of what buys we do and don't get on any given day, the longer an independent store stays established, the more people gradually learn that they are better off selling to us.  Our trade prices are regularly higher and our cash offers are virtually always higher.  GameStop overpays on a few things from time to time due to some nuance of their data analytics.  For example, they overpay on aging sports titles, until a threshold passes and then they won't even take them.  The same goes for MMO games like Destiny that are hot tickets one day, and the next day have a trade value of zero at the 'Stop.  Our practice has been to utilize our own buying policies and not worry that much about why GameStop changes an offer price.  For most titles we're going to be offering at least as much or more; for titles we really want, we make a point of being extra generous.

{- Because GameStop focuses so hard on new frontlist and practically disregards retro, there is a symbiotic relationship where we provide customer service by recommending GameStop when someone wants, say, a brand-new Nintendo Switch, and the GameStop gets us back by sending people across the street to our store when they have a pile of cartridges or are looking for titles for previous-generation systems.  And their staff proved friendly and accommodating when we approached them in the same fashion.

{- The GameStop floor plan calls for microboutiques with a Pareto-portioned merchandise mix.  They can never go as deep as we can overall.  Even on newer systems where they make their hay, you'll mainly see the AAA titles, though thanks to scale their online store can go further.  But GameStop's online store is no different to us functionally than any other online competitor, whether Amazon, Cool Stuff, Star City, and so on.  Once you're talking about someone mail-ordering, even when it's as easy as phone taps, you've already changed the venue away from a local store.  So in terms of GameStop's ability to place their cookie-cutter deployment wherever they want, yes, they can do that.  It's a step up from a flea-market stall, but it is of the same species, an ever-migrating shop counter, and a functional one at that.  Your typical independent wants to cultivate a following by picking a location very carefully and staying there for the length of the owner's career, and that difference in objective changes the entire decision tree and makes the comparison apples and oranges.

{- Touching on the previous two points, with our own Elite Pro GameStop membership, we can take advantage of their periodic Buy-2-Get-1 offers on retro titles or accessories, bringing in tough gets like Link to the Past or Smash Bros or PS4 controllers at a margin that's acceptable given the extremely high turn rate.  We can just pay for it and it's worth it, or if we have the time to spare, we can root out overstock we have that they are overpaying on that hasn't gone to zero yet, like Madden [This Year minus 1], and get their store credit bonus to add to our bankroll for their next B2G1 sale.  And they don't care; their approach to this is systemic and disregards outliers like us cherry-picking stock we want against the high volume of inventory they have coming in every day.  I stress that stores like ours don't want to spend a lot of time dickering around with this, since we're better off just focusing on the customer(s) right in front of us.  But the tool is in the workshop for the odd times we might decide to apply it.

{- Any mass-market approach with master-planned processes is going to struggle to hit efficiencies with product lines that are especially fiddly.  That's why they don't ever offer card singles, and that's what makes their push into comics look like two sunset industries leaning on each other and taking a gamble.  While I think they've surely got a return-merch deal in place with Diamond and the publishers that hedges most of the risk, I don't expect them to lose money on the comics thing.  At the same time, they are not going to become a Friendly Local Comic Store.  They simply can't do it.  Not with their physical footprint and not with their process structure.

{- It's easy to forget while our gaze caresses the bumps and folds of our own navels that GameStop has other competitors: the rest of the mass market!  And that makes the exclusives something of a double-edged sword.  What makes someone buy God of War at GameStop when they can get it for the same price or less from Target?  Sometimes those two stores are in the same plaza!  Mass-market outlets use exclusives as lures to get people to come in, almost all of them do it, and what do you know, we do it too with store-exclusive comic covers, WPN-exclusive Magic products, organized play promos from Fantasy Flight and WizKids, and so on.  So while the strike time of a hot GameStop exclusive like the Secret of Mana remaster creates some feelbads for independents, the reality is it's nothing but the status quo, and it washes out in the larger numbers.

{- Finally, yes, GameStop has a software infrastructure advantage that independents can't match.  Independents also don't have to match it, because independents aren't operating a continent worth of stores.  Yes, it would be great for our more humble point-of-sale packages to provide the kind of robust analytics and functionality that GameStop's does.  And you know what?  We almost can.  Megapackages like Magento are within reach of larger independents.  Microsoft RMH, if they can ever fully migrate the world off RMS, is a powerful tool.  And in the world of small-shop cloud-based solutions, we have some narrowly tailored stuff that puts us in the ballpark and for which local expertise simply has to bridge the gap.

At the end of the day, it comes back to fundamentals.  Focus on one's own business.  Refine and iterate.  Find ways to delight customers.  Exhibit integrity.  Master processes.  Build up your employees.  Take care of business and you'll be fine.  Coveting thy neighbour's ox and ass is about as useful as spending your days reading Game Informer.

What the Hell is Wrong With This Industry?

If we ever want publishers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers to take us seriously and do real business with us that's sustainable in the long term, we need more professionalism in the retailer tier of this industry and we need it badly.  I don't have the answer, but I absolutely admire the problem.

I'm not talking about the everyday things, store behaviors we hear about on the regular and have become depressingly accustomed to, such as the payroll fraud, the filthy facilities, buying from minors, mistreatment of women and others, and so on.  At this point it's so characteristic of the comic and hobby game industry that when you tell someone a store is doing it, they look at you like you just told them that used-car dealers tend to engage in pressure sales.  Sky blue, water wet.  And this reality is not gaining us many allies.

Unfortunately, there are times when some comic or game store takes the next step, and does something truly deplorable.  These, unfortunately, are the incidents that create deeper impressions in the minds of those involved or affected, and contribute an outsized portion to the general public's overall disdain for stores such as mine.

The following are things actual comic or hobby game stores have done in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Eighteen.  These actually happened.  I won't call out the stores by name, purely on the off chance that I've mischaracterized something, and not because I think any of these deserve charitable anonymity.

Here is the, by definition incomplete, list.

-> A comic store closed forever on zero days' notice and took all accrued customer store credit with it.  This is not a unique scenario, but it was one that has occurred less often with the rise of Magic-heavy clubhouse closures, since they tend to continue liquidating online afterward and many attempt to make good with store credit holders.  Not this time, and apparently with an unusually large escrow figure involved.

-> A game store took official Magic: the Gathering product art and added giant porn-style "chest augmentation" to the main female character image for their event advertising on Facebook.  Because if there's one message Wizards of the Coast wants to be sending, it's that they are the same as the companies that make all the anime lolicon TCGs.

-> A game store closed but didn't tell Wizards of the Coast, so as to preserve the temporary ability to get Magic booster boxes at wholesale to sell out of the trunk of their car, which they did, at a nickel over cost.  After a few weeks of seeing dwindling player engagement -- possibly, and I know I'm reaching here, because they no longer had a real store -- they finally threw in the towel, posted a ferocious Take That message on Facebook blaming their former customers for their store's failure, and sold off their remaining inventory at a nearby Grand Prix to one of the visiting dealers.

-> An antique store side-dealing in video games in the southeast decided, what the hell, we're going to sell the Chinese counterfeit NES Classic Mini, and posted to their Facebook wall a photo with a huge stack of them for sale at $40 apiece.

-> A game store cut to top 8 of its Store Championship when only five players were left in the event.  (Not a clue how they got the event software to perform this; it was reported by players who lost in the quarterfinals.)  The bracket of four players played a quarterfinal and a semifinal, while the 5th seed was given a bye all the way to the final.  Oh, and the fifth seed was an employee of the store.  And he won.

-> The new owner of a fully diversified and established game store exited the video game category not by holding a liquidation sale, but by trading in the entire store's inventory to GameStop.

-> A game store attempting to crowdfund its opening budget fell woefully short and launched a diatribe at its community promising them they would never "have a store that cares about them" if they were unwilling to pony up cash in advance for an unproven dreamer.

-> Craigslist spam appeared repeatedly offering "OG XBOX Softmoded w/30,000+ GAMES" (sic) -- normally the work of garage dealers and hobbyists who apparently don't fear a C&D, this time it was discovered to be the work of an area video game store that has built itself a shady reputation.

-> Multiple stores of each kind closed for the day at various times due to light rain, light snow, didn't want to miss the big game, or because the owner and sole employee wasn't feeling up to it, and/or a plethora of other excuses that aren't really malice on anyone's part, but amount to simple unprofessionalism and beg for the worst possible customer reaction when one approaches the door and sees only an engaged lock and a dark room beyond.

-> A game store asked for community help in starting the construction buildout of their new facility, heedless apparently of the scorching level of liability at risk and the strong likelihood that their insurance, if any, would not cover such a volunteer deployment.  (For that matter, the tax code is also relevant to this situation.)  When only one volunteer appeared, the store posted a video to Facebook sneering and shaming the community for not turning out in greater numbers.

-> A game store known as a loose fence for stolen collections offered to sell a prominent judge's stolen collection back to him, at "cost."  Fortunately, in a happy ending, the store was persuaded (once an attorney got involved) to return the collection to its rightful owner, rather than seeing the matter get referred to the state Attorney General.  This same store, during the publicity morass that followed, decided to double down by engaging in misogynistic social media activity.  They are still open and doing business and area grinders defend them passionately.

-> The CEO of a small game store chain took to social media to call out and harass an executive with a publisher that had cut off that chain's access to tier-exclusive upcoming products and promotions.  The CEO in question, possibly drunk or high or both at the time, tagged into the meandering trainwreck of a post virtually anyone he could think of that knew that publisher or who he himself had verbally sparred with in the past, including at least one tasteless tag of a deceased store owner who was well regarded and truly missed by his peers and community.  The CEO's diatribe degenerated from empty but obnoxious blandishments to outright threats, before mysteriously disappearing from Facebook.  Fortunately, there exist these things called "screenshots."

-> A comic store employed Ken Whitman.  On purpose.

The reality is this.  The comic and hobby game industry is niche of niche -- about $2 billion, half of it comics and media, as of figures published in 2017.  The video game industry is somewhat larger at $100 billion, give or take cab fare, but the independent stores' share of that scene is utterly minuscule, a fraction of a fragment.  There is frighteningly little money to be made in this space because everyone wants in (presumably to work with fun things all day, de-emphasis on "work") and that has given us a landscape in which landlords don't take us seriously, the media doesn't take us seriously, publishers don't take us seriously, distributors hedge from every angle with us, and ultimately the customers don't take us seriously.  My family has been mostly supportive, but many of my peers have found that their own family and friends think of their business and profession as a joke.  And every time a retailer in this industry does something like the incidents recounted in the list above, that reinforces the belief that all those parties are right.  They disregard us and for all they know, they should disregard us.

Some of us are trying to do this better.  We don't have the deepest pockets to do it with, and much of what we're doing amounts to "run our store, but exhibit integrity wherever possible," but it's something at least.  Will we ascend to the "established" cred that the nicer local or regional microchains in other industries have achieved, in time to avoid being crushed by one mass-market entity or another who decides to lean on us with a chip stack we could never match?  If we don't, will anyone but us care?

We're broadcasting now and the clock is running.  This show will be however good we can make it.