Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Always Be Crystallizing

During my week off from The Backstage Pass, I took my daughters, ages eight and ten, to their first rock concert at the pavilion west of town, to see their two favorite musical acts, Lindsey Stirling and Evanescence.  The girls enjoyed themselves mightily, and it was a peak dad experience.
During the show, Stirling had a video prologue to her 2012 hit, the gorgeous Dm-F-C-G anthem "Crystallize," in which a voiceover explains the concept behind the song:
"In the 1990s, Dr. Masaru Emoto undertook his classic study of water and its response to stimuli such as words, music, and expressed emotions.  Positive and negative words and expressions written on, or spoken to, individual water vials.  The droplets of water were then frozen, and the ice crystals were examined under a microscope.  The crystallized results were revealing and dramatic.  The water that had been exposed to positive statements made beautiful, symmetrical crystals, while those that were surrounded by negative expressions created meaningless jagged shapes.  If thoughts and words can have such an effect on crystallized water, imagine the influence they can have upon us!  Chemically, we are all made up of 70 to 90 percent water, so, by our own positive thoughts, and by our own kind words, we physically change our molecular structure to create symmetrical patterns of strength and power within ourselves and within those around us.  We each have the power to create literal inner beauty, and to become the change we want in ourselves."
Now, with all due respect, I find the scientific validity of Dr. Emoto's research... questionable.  There's just so much wrong with the conclusion that words and expressions can change a chemical reaction due to an interpretive context.  Does this only work in the King's English or perhaps Nihongō?  Are deaf people accommodated somehow or are they just out of luck?  What if someone is inebriated and their utterances aren't fully voluntary?  And how were the "positive thoughts" fixed in media... those new brain-based flash drives we've all been installing in our skulls?

I've never been a fan of the positive-thinking-will-shape-reality stuff like "The Secret" and so on.  It's just not rooted in sound science, and it's not even rooted in sound philosophy.  It's as compatible as it needs to be with religion, I suppose.  But seriously, "hope" is not a strategy.  I'm more a believer that you get results by doing, not by wishing for it.

Setting that aside, there is a lesson at the core of the Crystallize theme that does apply to business, and to the hobby game business in particular because of our various peculiarities: Third Place organized play space and the social equation it demands of us, small scale making publishers challenged to accommodate us, rampant unprofessionalism scaring away many who try, and the reality of secondhand dealing in which the roles reverse between buyer and seller at a moment's notice.

And that lesson is this:

We have interactions in a multitude of contexts every day in which we can get drawn into a spiral of frustration, negativity, and futility -- and with perfectly valid bases to do so -- or we can choose to act toward the positive outcome we want.  And though there are times when it's difficult beyond all reason to stifle a pithy response of one kind or another, in virtually all cases the net result in the long term is best under the acting-toward-the-positive-outcome plan.

It's not difficult to find a bunch of recent events to analyze, so let's apply this directly to three of them.

(1) Mythic Edition Guilds of Ravnica booster boxes

Magic: the Gathering retailers were given the bad news over the weekend from PAX 2018 that these special boxes with Masterpiece planeswalkers in them would be exclusive to the Hasbro online store.  As in, not available through hobby retail at all.  Now I've said before that not every promotion is targeted at our sector specifically, and we have to accept that.  We did get the store-exclusive buy-a-box promos, for which I am not ungrateful.  But Masterpieces are a particularly loaded item with massive customer attachment and Hasbro and Wizards surely know this.  I'm disappointed and I know we're going to have a lot of demand for this that we cannot fulfill, and that some amount of money that would have bought two or three booster boxes from me, will instead buy one $250 Mythic Edition box from Hasbro.

So, how do I crystallize a situation that's almost entirely negative for me?  I'm always at liberty to, you know, just not carry Magic.  I could deeply short Guilds of Ravnica and sit there with empty shelves and a spiteful story to share with whoever does show up wanting to buy cards.  While some of that would surely deprive Wizards and Hasbro of some passthrough revenue, none of it really accrues to my benefit.  It's like protesting Trump by committing suicide.  "Hey, Jerk!  I'm not gonna contribute to GDP anymore!"  Well, you sure showed him.

What I do know are a few things.  People will want to sell me the masterpieces for cash.  Players will still want singles for the newly rotated Standard.  Box purchases will likely be down.  Wizards will continue its emphasis on butts in seats, which is not necessarily the best thing for retailers to focus on.  My players do have an expectation of a positive, comfortable experience.  I have a lot of space to leverage, a component of my advantage over competitors.  And the Ravnica Guild Kits releasing shortly after the main set will have additional demanded material in them, for which I want to make sure I don't undershoot the mark.

Based on what I know, the approach I have in mind at this point is to buy the same few hundred booster boxes at release that I was already going to buy, but open roughly ten cases more for singles than I would have otherwise, keeping ten cases fewer in stock for box purchases.  My TCGPlayer business can hardly keep up with the demand for Standard key cards, despite a surcharge versus the lower price that local players pay in-store or on my website for the same stuff.  I will allocate what money might have been used to deepen my stock on the set toward ready cash instead for the likely influx of people who spun the wheel on a Hasbro Store purchase and want to cash out whichever planeswalker is going to be the top hit (probably Elspeth).  I will continue hosting the gamut of formats and let player demand dictate where we put our attention.  I will focus on maximizing my clientele's access to the merch I've got.  That ultimately serves the bottom line better.

(2) Upheaval at GAMA

The Game Manufacturer's Association, of which I am a retail member, recently declined to renew the contract of the association's Executive Director, John Ward.  Any time there is an effectively involuntary turnover of leadership for a large organization, there is going to be an outcry from members who oppose the move, joined by an entrenchment by those who support the move.

For those of you who are not part of the industry professionally, it's a reasonably big deal.  It's not quite up there with Apple firing Steve Jobs back in 1985, as the scale is quite a bit smaller, but John Ward took GAMA from the brink of insolvency to a much healthier position in the space of a decade. He got the organization out of an unfavorable convention contract with Bally's in Las Vegas and into a substantially better accommodation with the Peppermill in Reno.  There was more to his tenure than that and I don't want to overwhelm this article with it, so take my word for it that the importance of Ward's contributions cannot be overstated.  To learn that the current GAMA Board of Directors voted, narrowly no less, to bring Ward's tenure to an end means that they needed to have a pretty solid rationale and purpose for such a decision to be defensible on its merits.

So, here's a situation that affects my business tangentially but materially.  Where our industry sits in the grand scheme of things is important, because it affects in broad swaths the shape and form of our costs, our products, our reach, and ultimately our ability to operate the way we do.  And yet from a Friendly Local Game Store position, my ability to affect the GAMA Directorship situation is narrow. I am not on the Board.  I am not even on the GAMA Retail Division (GRD) Board, a sub-committee whose Chair, currently Dawn Studebaker of The Game Annex in Indiana, is a member of the greater Board.  I'm friends with all seven members of the GRD Board, while the greater Board of Directors includes both familiar faces and strangers to me.  Obviously I'm a voting member of the association, which will next matter in a chilly Nevada town sometime in March 2019.  But right now I've got only my proxies, who are meeting again late this month to further evaluate the Ward contract situation.

So, like I said, the entire GRD board has my confidence and I believe they will act prudently on my behalf in ongoing affairs, whether or not I agree with every specific decision they make.  I come from the Tom Clancy school of thought where the integrity of the person matters more than whether they believe the same thing I believe.  I can get along with someone who disagrees with me but is an honest and forthright human being.

That leaves the greater GAMA Board of Directors.  In addition to Dawn, the Board includes Andrew Chesney, Mike Webb (Alliance), Marie Poole (Fire Opal), Jeff Tidball (Atlas), Bob Maher (ACD), Aaron Witten, Brian Dalrymple, VP Anne-Marie De Witt (Fireside), and President Stephan Brissaud (IELLO).  I am well acquainted with Webb, Poole, Tidball, De Witt, and Brissaud from business, and I remember Maher well from the early 2000s on the MTG Pro Tour when I was a DCI Level 3 judge.  The others I don't know.

Crystallizing this situation means recognizing the outcome that I want (the continued health and growth of GAMA and its ability to advocate on behalf of stakeholders in my industry), and recognizing who I have acting on my behalf until such time as I can cast votes myself for that representation next March.  Jeff Tidball published his vote, but none of the rest have.  I have to ask myself, do the people I know on the greater Board have my confidence the way the GRD Board members do?  I'm not quite as close with them as they are not my direct peers; they are from the publishing and distribution sectors, so I either carry their goods or outright buy from them.  But I've gotten to know them well enough that they get the benefit of my doubt.  I don't have the full information they have, but based on what I do have, I know what my vote would be.  I hope that whichever way they go on this is based on even better information, regardless of whether that aligns with my hypothetical vote or not.

And then I turn around and try to run my business as professionally as I can, so that whatever advantage or benefit GAMA is able to wrangle next on my behalf, I am both in position to receive it and doing so in a manner that does the organization credit in its public-facing facets.  I've explained before in this space that the underbelly of my industry is an awful place right now.  If we ever expect to get to sit at the adult table, we need to do better, and doing better gives GAMA more leverage to employ.

(3) Warranty abuse for used video game sales

I recently shared an incident in which my return policy on used video games was abused by a customer who took home some Playstation 3 discs, played them, and changed his mind about keeping them.  Since you can't readily scratch blu-rays due to their excellent laminate coating, this customer took some kind of sharp implement and actually cut big divots in the disc surfaces.  He then returned claiming that the scratches had always been there and the discs wouldn't play.

So, obviously we knew from the first moment that it was a filthy lie.  We look at every disc when we get it and we reject anything with damage to the data substrate, and we accept at a lower rate anything that can be resurfaced to ~99% likely playability with our commercial-grade disc surfacing machine, an RTI Eco Auto Smart.  Before any scratched software is entered into inventory, we will have resurfaced it, cleaned it, and fully prepped it.  There was zero chance that the discs were scratched up when taken by the customer, especially in a haphazard way not suggestive of normal handling or mechanical device failure.  Moreover, due to the extensive error correction built into the blu-ray media format encoding, these discs did in fact still play just fine.  Even chopping them up for warranty fraud wasn't enough to prevent that.  Yeah.

It was all I could do not to call them on it.  They knew.  Their furtive manner said it all.  I kept it simple.  "Here's your refund.  We won't sell you any more games from now on."  The response was "OK" and one of the two guys actually went and bought some comics at that point.  There's some audacity.  I guess if he charges back the purchase I'll have to take further steps but other than that, it amounted to a finish of the situation.

The way I crystallize that encounter is by knowingly changing nothing at all in my return policy, and counting on most people to be decent folk and not lying dirtbags, and allowing the instances of fraudulent returns to wash out in the law of large numbers of overall sales.  Indeed, virtually every day we have new customers buying video game gear and asking what the return policy is.  It's a question that sets my teeth on edge for various reasons, but with a clear warranty offered (30 days against defect, three Rs process, and a one-time satisfaction swap within 3 days on software) they end up sufficiently confident to buy.  And if there were a lot of abuse happening, more stuff would come back to us.  In practice, almost nothing comes back.  This also encourages us to be on our game when it comes to testing and prepping the goods.

Doing the right thing by thinking the best of our clients and playing it straight up has significant positive side-effects as well.  Recently we had a genuine situation where a console had a defect we missed in our prep.  I apologized and offered the customer a full refund, but he wanted to keep the item and asked only for us to cover the difference between that and a cheaper system that would have been comparably functional to the one he has after accounting for the defect.  More than reasonable.  He was well within his rights to bring back and expect full compensation.  I was more than happy to provide an outcome that didn't cost as much, and resulted in a satisfied keep.

The positive outcome I want is for people to buy lots of video games and gear from me and be happy doing it.  Acting toward that positive outcome, I crafted a warranty structure that should safety-net the buyer from authentic problems pretty well.  It errs on the side of safety-netting some inauthentic problems, and in the end that's OK.  I'd rather be wrong in that direction than wrong where a buyer is stuck with something that doesn't work because of our negligence.  And even when a corner case arises out of real abuse, I know in the long run the system is producing the right results in the overwhelming majority of cases.

Thus and so

If you are an industry peer reading this article, your homework assignment from now until forever is to think of this when you have an incident or event at your business that created some difficulty.  Think about how you responded to it.  Think about what outcome you most wanted, that was realistic in terms of how this industry is known to work.  (To borrow a phrase from Gary Ray, don't want it one way, when it's the other.)  Then determine what range of responses to that problem or issue or crisis might have given you the best likelihood of an outcome in line with what you wanted.

Drill yourself on this.  Figure out positive things to say that move the interaction toward your preferred resolution.  Invent and practice your lines for the next such situation.  I work from a (mental) script very often, virtually every day.  Not out of any desire to interact in a non-genuine way, but because as an autistic person I am a social disaster and I believe my customer clients deserve a more polished interaction than I would provide if I were just doing it off the cuff all the time.  So once I develop a good script component, I use it over and over.  My staff hears me use the same turns of phrase regularly.  Some of them adopt those same lines.  Others, the more socially adept extroverts, prefer to work on the fly, but they're riffing on my melodies and the practice and repetition helps them as well.

Go and do likewise.  A, Always.  B, Be.  C, Crystallizing.  And while you're at it, listen to the song, because it's really, really good.

No comments:

Post a Comment