Over a very short window of time, a few days really, we went from being told to cancel large gatherings, to empty shelves where the bottled water and bog roll* used to be, to being told to cancel medium-sized gatherings, to schools being closed for the rest of the month, to various cities going into much more serious levels of "lockdown," to being told to cancel essentially any gathering, even as small as a few people, and here we are. Monday afternoon, I closed the DSG game room and vintage arcade entirely, and we're postponing pretty much everything. The store is still open for buying, selling, and trading, unless and until we're told we can't do that either.
I've been preferring to take guidance from my old employer, the Arizona Department of Health Services. I know the people working backstage there, and they know what they are doing. The data don't suggest that we need this degree of isolation and shutdown, but hard numbers aren't what motivates people to buy out all the bog roll. AZDHS has to provide guidance that's a little safer than sorrier, and then as other governmental entities keep upping the ante, we essentially had to go along with the tide of public opinion or risk being drowned in the undercurrent.
So now it's St. Patrick's Day, March 17th, and it's anyone's guess what today is going to be like. It seems wrong on an almost religious level not to have everyone partying the night away to their Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys playlists. In hobby game land, Dungeons & Dragons has two pretty sweet looking new releases, the Explorers Guide to Wildemount and the Laeral Silverhands dice set. Those showed up late last week so we've been sitting on them and readying for deployment. A sellout would be awesome, but it won't break my heart if we fall somewhat short of that. Animal Crossing comes out on Switch later this week and we have a good day-zero stock of it on a truck somewhere heading this way.
Looking forward, the real danger isn't in the short term at all to our bottom line. We do a lot of online business, and my staff is going to be nicely occupied in catching up on the processing work that feeds into that. The revenue streams from TCGPlayer, Amazon, and eBay aren't so great that we can wave off in-store sales, but they're enough protein to keep us alive for a while. The real danger is if this mess goes on and on for months. Then we start to have true, unrecoupable, immitigable losses, as overhead costs begin to mount whether we're selling things or not.
See, among the hardest business impacted are restaurants, bars, concert halls, and movie theaters, because a night of service revenue, once missed, is gone. There's no getting that back. If DSG doesn't sell a thing, we still have that merch. Imagine if our merch disappeared into the aether if it wasn't sold the day it arrived. (Obviously there's an aspect of this in spoilage, like for new comics, but of a far different degree.) Anyway, this is called evanescent revenue, earnings that are available to be captured for a certain time, and then disappear whether successfully converted to money or not. Airline seat-miles are the archetypical evanescent module. Empty seats on a moving airplane are a full and unrecoupable loss for the airline. Their situation isn't so great right now either, in fact.
People whose earnings are the most variable, and front-line, and are the most evanescent, are food servers and bartenders. There are a non-trivial number of those among the clientele of your typical hobby game store. And if they go bust for money, then we have a problem upstream of them at the vendor level. Henry Ford had a point when he said it's bad if nobody can afford to buy his products. He just meant in ordinary time. Now that we're under Pandemic 2020, we get to see this effect that ordinarily would not be that pronounced.
So right now we basically watch and wait, and take the time we do have to finish infrastructure projects, clean and clean again, sort cards, and try to make DSG's return to full cruising altitude as glorious as it can possibly be. I'd say "see you on the other side," but we're still open, so I'd be delighted to see you whenever you happen to visit. Stay safe!
*I learned just yesterday that "bog roll" is British slang for toilet paper, and now I can't stop using it. The term, I mean, not the bog roll.
No comments:
Post a Comment