Mercy is For the Week

Inspired by Gary Ray's recent A Week in the Life article, I figured I'd share the ridiculously fractured workflow that makes up my daily grind here at DSG.

I should preface the week by explaining my side-gig as a bus driver and babysitter.

I am up at 7am because my kids have to be dropped off at school by 8am.  I'll also be picking them up at 3pm, which means leaving the store by 2:30 and getting back about an hour later thanks to a long, slow pickup line that never improves because slowpokes are too stupid and a ridiculous number of soccer moms clog the pickup line with their land yachts and drive their children home even though they live one or two streets over within the neighborhood.  They could literally walk to the school, find their kids, and walk home in less time than they take driving and waiting in line and slowing things down for the rest of us.  Their yoga pants appear strictly ornamental; no fitness is achieved in them.

I will then watch the kids at the store, with them distracting me and preventing me from doing any real work, until Steph comes to grab them at around 4:30.  I do this every weekday except Wednesday.  The total impact to my work month from this is around 70 hours of lost productivity.  If I wanted the kids to have after-school care, it would cost a staggering $870 per month through the district.  So against costs, and not accounting for taxes, I am "earning" about $13 per hour doing this.  That's not great, but not awful either.  And most people who have punch-clock jobs don't have the permission or flexibility to do this, and the contact time and involvement with the kids is a definite positive.

I try to double- and triple-up my value by sequencing in errands and meals and phone calls to that driving and waiting time, and doing non-brain work while the kids are at the store distracting me.  In all honesty I bet I defray almost that entire child care cost with no greater effect on my work output than the ordinary daily inefficiency of your average call center employee.  And sometimes the kids have homework and they shut up and do it so I can be productive.

Monday
I wake up.  I go downtown to look for a job.  Then I hang out in front of the drugstore.  Actually, after waking groggy kids from weekend stay-up-late-playing-video-games excesses and dropping them at the elementary center, I drink enough caffeine to kill a buffalo and roll on up to Ray Road.  I log into QBO and the banks and so forth and find out where my money is, and then I put money where it needs to be for the week.  During the dark times, this was basically a daily dance with danger, but these days I'm planning expenses pretty far ahead and the weekly work amounts to a series of "press the button" outputs on funds whose movements have long been anticipated.

My online store manager and fulfillment staff are usually already at the store when I arrive, processing that day's TCGPlayer reimbursement invoice and shipping out a weekend worth of eBay sales and web orders and such.  Right now I let Amazon fulfill all our orders in their channel, so that's a nice labor savings.  All week long the fulfillment staff work early shifts, with at least one of them on deck until the evening shift arrives because a manager covers the front solo and cannot leave the front to pick kiosk orders.  So the fulfillment staff does that.

Ordering used to be a big Monday thing but these days I want my managers to be more involved in deciding what comes in.  Jake works Monday and Brian works Tuesday, both of them on four-day open-to-close workweeks that run concurrently on Fridays.  Thus, I give them both until early Tuesday afternoon to make any requests they have.  Square's low stock system tells me the rest of what I need, and I'll let any staff member load up a potential item on the Alliance website since it has that functionality.  So throughout Monday I'm gathering that info.

The exceptions there are Games Workshop, who are inexplicably a three-day ship from Memphis to Phoenix, and Video Game Advantage, who ship from New Jersey.  I place their orders right away and I usually have a good idea what's needed from the system reports.

Griffin is back to coding for more money than he makes here hosting Magic tournaments (shocking, I know) so I take care of marketing the day's events and promotions on social media every day around midday.  All of the above puts us into lunch range and then it's time for me to go get the kids, so I'll tuck in odds and ends and then head out to do so.  On return, the balance of the day is taken up in general productivity, such as triaging video game buys or working on administrative deliverables.

Title IV-D child support payments tap at 5pm on Mondays for those who are under a court order to pay them, so a lot of people usually come in on Sunday and Monday to sell cards or video games for cash.  Thus, I sandbag cash going into the weekend for buys, and then I rarely deposit weekend cash sales, as we'll end up dipping right back into them to make even more buys.

Tuesday
If I'm ever going to sleep in on a weekday, it'll be Tuesday.  I can drop the kids off at school and just head back home and rack out for a couple of hours.  Inevitably I have work to do and the sun shines brightly in the window so I'm Up And Atom again.  I take care of morning admin from my desk at home, eat, and then head in.  If I pushed breakfast late enough, it's good, because I can pick up the kids after school and just take them home and have a late lunch "for free" while I wait for Steph to get home, and the kids will play video games and leave me free to take care of more real admin work at my desk until I head back.

I am post-bariatric so unfortunately meal planning takes on outsized importance in my daily work.  If I don't eat the right stuff at more or less the right time, I deteriorate pretty quickly.  Can't focus mentally, can't do serious work physically.  Vitamins also play a part.  It's frustrating to have age and health effects hurting my productivity this way, especially when I think of all the time I squandered in my youth when my body was at 100% and I could have abused it for hours on end to earn money.  That last sentence reads far more suggestively than I imagined it would.

Anyway, Tuesday early on, once Brian has added his input to Jake's and I have pretty decent order request lists, I reconcile all stock needed and check my pending items from this week's distribution arrivals, and fire off orders in the early afternoon.  GTS has a warehouse in Phoenix, so if anything I need is fulfillable there, I will grab it either Tuesday or Wednesday.

Tuesday used to be a busy night at the store due to comics, which aren't a factor now.  However the area Legacy crowd and Modern crowd both turn up in strong numbers, and Commander is always a thing.  Dungeons & Dragons runs six nights a week.  So while I am not strictly needed on coverage almost ever, it's not the worst night for me to be lurking and doing project work at my desk.

Wednesday
It's the day I don't have to pick up the kids!  Their particular schedule has them shuttled around by Steph and by Grandma (Steph's mom) and I am not needed in that equation.  I load every deep-digging project onto Wednesdays, especially where I expect to be neck-deep in the back room doing archaeology, or performing substantial furniture movement or anything IT-related.  If there's a drill or a soldering iron involved, this is the day that task is going to happen.  I tend to cover the most ground on deliverables on Wednesdays and even if I have to pay a little more than usual for lunch, it's a throwaway cost against the amount of money I usually generate for the store, both directly and indirectly (or "for later" through setting up revenue structures or updating them, etc).  Since GTS's warehouse is right around the corner from the legendary Little Miss BBQ, I sometimes get my brisket on with a consolidated errand trip.

I let myself burn hot fuel all day and then quit no later than 7pm, because 10 to 11 hours uninterrupted makes for some pretty great throughput and I am usually wiped out and also needing a substantial dinner by then for bariatric purposes.

Thursday
Most orders arrive Thursday, and the staff does well nowadays at ingesting them to store stock and merchandising them.  Part of getting them involved in the ordering process has been a result I like, which is that they take ownership of the product once it comes in, and they want to see that stuff specifically sell well so that I will give them even further latitude to have us bring in more stuff.  Which is, in fact, the case.  I absolutely will do that.

Events tend to be busy on Thursday nights and sales tend to be strong.  I could make an argument that I ought to be there every time, but by dint of circumstance, Steph's evening work obligations tend to occur on Thursdays, so I usually roll out before it gets too late and let the crew finish out the day.

Friday
Usually I'll be picking up a clicklist order from Sam's Club of a van-load of beverages and snacks for the weekend, and I'll hit the bank and pull out a bunch of extra cash for weekend buys, and any errands still pending need to get done, so I spend a lot of Friday on the road.  I'll bring the kids back to the store after school and take them to Circle-K for "Froster Friday" if they behaved well that week.  Frosters (a rebranded version of an Icee or Slurpee) are the lock high with kids.  For less than a buck each today, they get a better treat than anything I used to get on a regular basis when I was their age.

Both managers are on deck Friday, the entire fulfillment staff, and usually one or two part-timers on top of that, and Griffin is usually around to hobnob and play Vintage or Legacy, so Friday is when DSG is bumpin' and is absolutely the place to be.  The staff do a "fancy Fridays" thing where they all wear suits and ties and Jake puts on his weird jazz channel on Pandora Business and the store gets this amazing tabletop-nightclub aesthetic going.  It's more impressive than the written description makes it sound, and I get to defer credit for all of it to my team, which I am delighted to do.

I tend to spend Friday evenings helping out with general maintenance or tasks and staying out of the way.  It's the best day of the week for me realizing the value of what I've built as a functioning, delegated business that doesn't require me on coverage at all.  And yet it's also a good evening for me to stay late and be there.  Regulars get some visibility from me, which I avoid the entire rest of the week so I can work and not be tempted to chat with friends.  And Fridays sometimes incubate some monster sales, and when a serious player is making a big purchase and the dollar amounts get toward four digits and there are usually DSG Stars redemptions or case pricing involved, even Jake and Brian like to get my green light before going ahead.  (As long as it was reasonable, they could have done it without asking, but I am glad they are being careful.)

Saturday
I don't have the most congested social calendar out there, but if it has anything on it, there's a fair chance it's on Saturday, and that includes store events of consequence.  I am almost always on-site "tending to my wager" and during quiet times I am coordinating with Brian on what projects can get knocked out.  As the afternoon deepens and heads toward evening, sales pick up and usually we get our weekend's top revenue load flowing in and product out the door.  Projects get set aside and it's all customers until the final bell.  There's no banking, so I often take the opportunity to grind some eBay listings, finish that month's sales tax prep, or other administration.  Lately it has been taxes.  Saturday is typically secondary to Wednesday as a day I can dig into some deeper projects if there isn't a front-end event demanding any attention from me.  (And the staff can handle most things.)

Sunday
Sunday is our short day, and it's always Jake along with one experienced staff member or another for the duration.  Sales tend to underwhelm, it's all about those buys (as described above).  There is usually a pretty full room with players, and snacks and drinks won't keep the bills paid but I'll still take that money as it's better than nothing.

I almost always come in Sunday even though it's an ideal day for me to take the day off, because the attraction of "getting ahead" of the week in projects and such is tough to ignore.  If I have to do any serious inventory or fixture work in the storefront, doing it after the 6pm closure also makes sense, as I don't always have time before opening during the week.  And I also want to be ready for the guy who walks in the door to sell us some staggeringly large collection of whatever for cash.  Jake knows what he is doing and can "make the deal" from open to close just fine, and has many times.  But only Griffin and I have the ATM cards and the checkbook signer access.  A sufficiently big buy can often require my presence in order to disburse money.

And that is essentially my week!  As you can see, there are a few issues of scale that actually lock me in to physical presence at the store, but in terms of the daily mechanics of business, the team has that well in hand and has become adept at teaching the processes and getting new hires up to speed also.  Which is a good thing because thanks to the food and child-care necessities in my schedule, I have all the hour-to-hour attention continuity most days of a mongoose on ecstasy.

Monday
I finally got a job.  Keeping people from hanging out in front of the drugstore.

Living in a Movie

I added a category to the store about two weeks ago, as I mentioned here on the blog that I would, and it's already paying off nicely.  That category is Movies.  Today's article title is a prog-metal reference.

"But... Movies?  How can that possibly be viable?  Isn't physical movie media even closer to obsolescence than comic books?"  Yes, it is, and yet it is still viable for a number of reasons.

There is a wax and wane in the world for people collecting versus people decluttering.  Even independent of value considerations or what's popular, there are always people who just like to shop for fun things, and other people who want to clear out things they don't want.  In this way, carrying movies is riding the tide, not fighting it.  We're already doing this with video games, board games, D&D books, and Magic: the Gathering cards.  Some stores do it with comics and toys and other game cards and media.  We already service collectors and media consumers alike.  Provided we could do a few infrastructural things, which I'll reach below, carrying movies was easy and barely amounted to a pivot.

It was immediately apparent on research that most places that buy movies pay absolutely nothing for them, and there was plenty of margin left even if I pay more than they do for buys, and sell at prices as cheap or cheaper than they do for selling.  I weighted our buy offers more toward blu-rays and away from DVDs and older media, but we'll still accept anything.  I weighted them even further toward 4K movies, but nobody is going to trade those in much yet, even though I am paying (as far as I can tell) almost triple what local competitors are.  And I weighted even further in favor of categories that fit DSG's brand: Science fiction, fantasy, Disney, comic book heroes, and horror.  (I am calling movies in those five genres "in-genre" at the store and in this article, whereas everything else is "out of genre" or "bulk.")  Horror is at the fringe as a tabletop category but has its devoted audience, and it happens to be a good seller in the used movie category because plenty of schlocky horror flicks aren't listed on any streaming services.

Ah, streaming.  Well, that's obviously what is killing physical movie media, and yet it still has not finished the job.  Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO Go, YouTube Red/Premium, CBS All Access, and so on and so forth.  It is all catastrophically splintered, and content licenses transfer and expire on the regular.  This means if you want to watch some thing, you absolutely can at any time of the day or night, but if you want to watch a particular thing, there is a non-trivial possibility that the title you want is not available to stream.  It either has never been listed, or has been de-listed from wherever it last played, or is only listed on a service you aren't subscribed.  Keeping subscriptions active to a bunch of streaming services at once is expensive to the point that it defeats the whole "cutting the cable" savings plan, so almost nobody does that.  The result?  There is still no always-superior option to owning the movie on a shiny plastic pancake (or as a digital download).

There are other reasons physical media still works, such as for older or much younger viewers or rural viewers who want to watch without an internet-connected device, older versions of movies no longer available today *ahem*ORIGINALSTARWARSTRILOGY*cough*, and on and on.  I have said in this space that comic books as we know them have a sunset of perhaps a decade and a half, and I think movie discs are going to beat them into the dustbin by maybe a year or two, if and only if we see a massive licensing solution that couples with ubiquitous access to render every other option inferior in virtually all cases.  Even if I pick up the extension option in our current lease, movies will still be a thing until after that lease term ends, which is as much "tomorrow" as I need to care about for now.

So movies make some amount of sense as a physical media thing, and it so happens DSG is a store well-appointed to commerce in physical media things.

Infrastructurally, I needed a few things to happen to make this work.

Rack and fixture were done.  Our video game racks are colloquially called "DVD racks."  Guess what they were designed to display.  I had to make some room on the retail floor, but this was achievable using footage vacated by comics and reclaimed from the holiday configuration.  I already had wholesale supplies of thousands of Amaray cases, jewel cases, disc envelopes, liners, wafers, and other sundries involved in the presentation of disc media thanks to carrying video games.

Software had to be ready.  I did not want to database up all of the movies in existence, so I got some UPC-compliant barcodes dialed up in an archiving layout, a holdover from some of my first-year-of-law-school learning, and built simple price tiers by media that Square could produce an abundance of labels for.  For example, in-genre blu-rays are around five bucks in most cases.  Bulk DVDs are 99 cents.  Every tier emphasizes low price, with a variable ultra-premium tier available in case I pick up any ultra-rare collectible stuff.  With our label over the real barcode, speed and simplicity are achieved.

Equipment had to be in place to reclaim value out of damage.  I already own a commercial-grade disc resurfacer, RTI ELM's outstanding Eco Auto Smart.  This is no small investment and I recommend it for video game stores even if you never do movies because it's a piece of capital equipment that allows a store to do what the clubhouses/pretenders can't, and that's actual substantial product repair or reclamation.  Damage to a video game is a 50% buy price deduction.  It's a sound profit engine to be able to literally burn and scour off the damaged layer and reseal it with solvent so that the disc is practically brand new again.  And this beast is no wind-crank disc buffer that causes as much damage as it purports to fix; people who have had their discs redone in the Auto Smart have rightly regarded it as something of a hobby miracle.  I also have good A/V equipment for testing, including a surprisingly cheap high-end SVHS VCR with a time base corrector for fussy tapes, and I lack only a dual-standard optical drive that supports the obsolete HD-DVD format, for which a collecting niche exists and I've already accumulated some media to validate.  I can use an Xbox 360 HD-DVD accessory, but there's a non-trivial software obstacle now due to deprecation of the format.  It's not expensive to get Toshiba or LG dual-standard players second-hand if you know the models to buy.

Finally, I needed some merchandise.  I have been working liquidation channels, some of which are surprisingly bad "bargains," and I bought up about 1500 units of merch, a bit lighter than I wanted but my intention was to do this inexpensively out of spare operating budget.  Out of everything I got, only about 600 units were in-genre and only half of those were blu-ray, but it was enough to hit the shelves and not look anemic, meaning it hit the commitment quotient.  The vast majority of bulk DVDs are not part of the cost load I forecast at the outset, so their 99-cent everyday price is basically a freeroll, and they will play well with Buy-One-Get-One-Free sales.

Splitting the stock between in-genre and out-of-genre (treated as bulk) was an important step, I believe.  It helps avoid the "junk shop effect" that is already a worry when you carry video games, and seems like it could get worse with movies.  Everyone has seen the racks at Goodwill, and nobody wants the hobby game store they run to look like that.  And for the odd visitor who actually does want a rom-com or thriller or comedy, they're looking at a price tag that's probably 99 cents and that's extremely attractive.  That's less than just about any rental option.  They could buy the movie, watch it, and throw it away afterward (or donate it) and not feel any cost impact.

Ultimately I hope to grow the in-genre stock so overwhelmingly to where bulk doesn't even reach the retail floor.  I can take it to festivals and vendor events and sell movies out of a bin 2-for-$1 and still be freerolling.  There are decent used book and movie stores these days that have gotten their presentation to look better and those are the ones I've been studying to iterate toward.  The chain in Arizona called Bookman's is a good example.  The cheapest-looking merch there is the books; every other piece of media they offer amounts to a premium.

Stores like Bookman's that sell used books and movies are also doing well in music (vinyl records, cassettes, CDs) and it's not a very far leap from movies to that, especially considering that same disc resurfacer comes in handy again, and much of the software and equipment and rack and fixture continues to be compatible.  The big curveball is merchandising display for vinyl records.  Like comic books, there really isn't much available to sell records out of, that isn't a purpose-built fixture for records and only records.  At this stage in the game, that's more bother than I need.  Vinyl is available brand new in distribution, however, and is in a boom cycle.  I wouldn't mind bringing it in purely on the basis that it has phenomenal street cred right now, if it weren't for the roadblocks.

I do want to be careful that I'm still in the game business when the day is done.  The amount of resources I have poured into the movies category thus far, in total, is less than I have spent on a busy day buying Magic cards.  I know where my bread is buttered, and focus is valuable.  Most stores are not going to be well-advised to make this move.  Stores already positioned strongly in the vintage/nostalgia mainstream market, like Minnesota's Heroic Goods and Games and Florida's Flash Games, Comics, and Toys, were well-situated to carry movies and have seen good results.  It's going to depend on what else a given store is doing, what kind of audience it has, and what business structure exists already that can be repurposed or multipurposed into the category.

I have another new category to add in 2019.  Like movies, it overlaps into some stuff I am already doing at DSG.  Unlike movies, I don't think many, possibly any, other stores in my region are doing it.  I've become aware of a few in other parts of the country that have moved or are moving into that space and I have been following them avidly, excited at the possibilities.  This is going to have to end as a vagueblog because I don't want to cede first-mover advantage to anyone else, but I hope I can make it happen before we get into the autumn sales cycle and run out of time in the day to experiment and develop the business.  My two biggest action items right now are putting more resources into Magic singles and putting more resources into current-gen video game buys, so these other things are great spec work, but I'm paying the bills catering to audiences I know.

Until then, have a great week, and maybe come find a movie you've been meaning to watch, and own it for a few bucks!

So This Is Where We Left Off

Against all logical explanation, I have something of a readership now, and I figure anyone who has joined us midstream might wonder what precisely the hell is going on here.  It seems like a good time to recap the early episodes and set the stage for (presumably) many thrilling installments yet to come.

That's me.  Michael Bahr.  I'm 44 years old and I feel 94 most days.  I've been married to Stephanie (Jarczyk) Bahr for 12 years, and I have three video-game-addicted children in grade school: Allie (11), Evey (9), and Greg (7).

I have a law degree, a genuine bona-fide certified authentic Juris Doctor, from Arizona State University in Tempe.  Sun Devils 4 lyfe, yo.  I never entered legal practice, but instead spent a little over seven years in government administration, then parted ways with the bureaucratic profession to work full-time as the administrator for my company, Desert Sky Games LLC, of which I am the majority owner.

I have two main business partners aside from my wife.  Michael Griffin, programmer and DCI level 2 judge, is known in the community.  The other partner, also Mike, is silent and prefers semi-anonymity.  He is an electrical engineer by day and enjoys maintaining DSG's eclectic vintage arcade in his spare time.  Other limited partners pass in and out of the business from time to time.

When DSG began in 2012, there were 11 total partners (counting spouses), and we had a single location in nearby Gilbert, at the southeast corner of Gilbert Road where Williams Field becomes Chandler Boulevard.  That was always a mouthful.  I like giving directions from our present location better.  DSG Gilbert opened its storefront August 10, 2012, but was operating online at the beginning of July.  While expensive to lease for its 2400-square-foot size, the DSG Gilbert location was spectacular in terms of access to a strong customer base.

In early 2017, we acquired Tempe Comics, a competitor near ASU's main campus on east Apache Boulevard.  It operated for a year as DSG Tempe, and we allowed both the Gilbert and Tempe leases to expire in late 2017.  September 29, 2017 was the opening date for our combined single Chandler location at the southeast corner of Ray Rd and McClintock Drive, a behemoth facility sporting over six thousand square feet of awesomeness.  It remains, at the time of this writing, the Phoenix metro area's largest game store.

Chandler is home to 250,000 residents, and the Phoenix metro overall to almost five million.  This is a high-population market compared to most comic and hobby game stores, and is also a supersaturated market, with roughly 50(!) game stores if you don't count mass market, pure bookstores, pawns, or thrifts.  Every few months we lose one or two and gain two or three.  Some of those competitors are pretty aggressive, while others are friendly.  Ultimately, we are all also competing for the entertainment dollar against the mass market, online, and other forms of recreation besides games.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I traveled to Pro Tours, Nationals, and Grand Prix tournaments as a DCI Level 3 judge.  The judge program was not very advanced at the time and a lot of the durable skill was more of what we consider today to be tournament management, not ruling precision as such.  Today's level 2 judges are better at the game rules than level 3 judges of my era.  I retired from judging to go to law school in 2004 and "go pro" in that respect.  Because of this, I come from the competitive side of Magic: the Gathering.  As a player I am an insufferable scold in any constructed format where I am allowed to prevent my opponent from playing Magic.  I like limited better anyway.  I don't tend to play much these days and would need extensive practice to shake the rust off if I ever hoped to be competitive again.  The business end of Magic and trading card games, however, shifted sharply away from competitive play to casual play around ten years ago.  This meant I had to learn a different approach to conducting business related to the game, an approach in which an understanding of competitive play prerogatives was no longer especially valuable knowledge.

Thus, you will frequently read in this space a business perspective borne of doing what the market wants, as indicated by the market's actions and behaviors more than its verbal signals alone, and that may or may not reflect what my personal preference is in terms of game content, gameplay style, business processes, or even what I'd rather see from the industry itself.  I'm not here to change the world, I'm here to make the world more fun for the people already stuck in it.  Fighting the tide just gets you fatigue.  Riding the tide brings you to shore.  Riding it poorly will dash you on the rocks.

I'd like to provide more content this week but there isn't a whole lot to discuss just now.  I am in the middle of Yet Another Point-of-Sale Migration that I will write more about when it's finished.  The current Magic and Warhammer releases have been good, even very good, but not mind-blowing by any measure.  We did break records with prerelease attendance, but things calmed back down to normal after that.  The GAMA Trade Show in Reno is just over a month away.  My wife and kids are all in the middle of that looooong third quarter of the school year, in her case at the front of the classroom and in their case being taught in it.  January took forever.  And it's so cold.  I know nothing we had here was comparable to that polar vortex in the upper Midwest, but I'm ready to go back to hundred-degree temps again here in the desert.

Whatever this week has you doing, seeing, reading, or playing, enjoy it!  See you next week!