Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Cinco de Money

The governor permitted small retail stores like DSG to re-open Monday on a limited basis, with appointment service and obviously still no in-store gameplay.  The public responded to the tune of triple the sales of a normal Monday.  While we have no illusions that this pace is sustainable, it does speak to pent-up demand and is a relief to see after the awful level of politicization of the COVID shutdowns that has emerged in the public sphere.  We could have opened the doors to a cloud of inbound hate, but nothing of the sort materialized, thankfully.

We have plexiglass, masks, wipes, and hand sanitizer.  The floor has markings every six feet from the register.  Online orders continue to come in at a turgid pace, which is still a strain to keep up with on a staff that hasn't fully returned from furlough yet.  But we're managing it.
One of the things I'm happiest about is finally getting to return to tasks that generate money for the front-of-house primarily.  I put all of that on the back burner when we closed, because we could not possibly benefit from it until we re-opened.  Stuff like processing video game buys, that sort of thing. As a result, gigantic piles of systems, games, controllers, and accessories built up in my office, unattended to.  I am now digging my way through those piles and getting stuff out onto the racks and into the cases just in time for people to come purchase it.  In one case earlier today, I wasn't even finished, a gentleman arrived asking for a particular Rock Band guitar instrument that was still in processing backstage.  I had my staff wipe it down, I added it to the system, didn't bother with a barcode and label, and we just took care of the guy.  There's a lot of such ad-hoc work right now, as we expected.  Our data mining will be imperfect, but I don't like turning down money.

My back-office staff will be at full-strength-minus-one starting next Monday, and that's a good thing, because the process of adding singles to stock was one of the things we just grudgingly accepted as being done less during this whole ordeal.  As a result, our singles stock has thinned.  It's good as far as getting some money for cards we've long since needed to see move.  It's bad as far as projecting abundance and the confidence of being a store with all the major staples in stock.  Once we've normalized front-end ops to meet the new reality, complete with our appointment logging, we should have a better idea of how much labor can be pivoted over to bridge the gap of big piles of bought collections that have fallen behind pace in being added to stock.  Griffin tried to keep the shiniest and most useful things we encountered in sorting available for purchase, but he could only do so much while we simultaneously worked on all the other maintenance, cleaning, repair, upgrading, and oh yeah, shipping out the daily torrent of orders that never really did slow down.

Today is the Cinco de Mayo that isn't.  There will be no fiesta, no margaritas, no tacos... well, actually, yes, those last two we will have.  But no fiesta.  And there's something fundamentally wrong with that.  But however much we're able to take part in, we are going to do so, in celebration of being able to get back to business.  The month with locked doors was a slog, and while I honestly think we seized some opportunities -- just wait until our photo spread with the extensive facelift we've given the store facilty -- it was also mentally straining, stressful, and stretched us thin.  Every morning right now, as soon as that first customer walks in the door, it's one little victory.

Now let's see what happens next week with Ikoria.

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