tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22623886382161990702024-03-26T15:56:27.128-07:00DSGCW: The Backstage PassDSGCW: The Backstage Pass! Perspectives from behind the scenes!Michael Bahrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18295413362893969011noreply@blogger.comBlogger216125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-67312083953131944482023-03-26T20:00:00.001-07:002023-03-26T20:00:15.670-07:00LGS Net Income<p>The time has come at last.</p><p>I am migrating the weblog and diving into deeper analysis on Substack: <a href="http://lgsnetincome.substack.com">LGS Net Income</a></p><p>The introductory article and About page have more details. Over time I'm going to migrate most of the content from Blogger over to the new Substack blog, and most of that will remain free to read. The big addition is where I can provide extremely crunchy and relevant education and analysis as a paid blogger on that platform. I already pay for content from some sources (such as Caffrey's great Patreon offering) and it is well worth it. Hopefully I can deliver the goods similarly on LGS Net Income.</p><p>Thank you all for being a part of this wonderful experience, and I'll see you <a href="http://lgsnetincome.substack.com">on the other side</a>!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiL0iQfVK1fgQA3iAF-0XGiLoUN6uo-G9anzFr-i1dxD9GyMSQTYWlJJlqJuFa78nbKFslZYXDTXA60JCtygDwuqYqAWQadzo1CYtMF8jvXua6nZDtXjp4Zjy-YHbXZ1nDF8FiO3Wfdgh__En0is-az40xoME0ooNT-wOuANoLzgc0RVwkQ0oBeMRM/s1380/LGSNI%20COVER%201380x1256.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1256" data-original-width="1380" height="291" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiL0iQfVK1fgQA3iAF-0XGiLoUN6uo-G9anzFr-i1dxD9GyMSQTYWlJJlqJuFa78nbKFslZYXDTXA60JCtygDwuqYqAWQadzo1CYtMF8jvXua6nZDtXjp4Zjy-YHbXZ1nDF8FiO3Wfdgh__En0is-az40xoME0ooNT-wOuANoLzgc0RVwkQ0oBeMRM/s320/LGSNI%20COVER%201380x1256.PNG" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-56108349050544156922023-03-03T14:43:00.001-08:002023-03-03T14:43:54.421-08:00A Cell Divides<p>I'm opening another location in about a week, west of my current store.</p><p>Burying the rest of that lede, I was surprised at how much <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2022/12/world-coming-down.html">my last article</a> circulated. It did the highest numbers I've seen in a while. It looks like it got the attention of a fair number of people in the industry, and I got to meet some new friends along the way, which is always something you hope for.</p><p>I did see some consistent questions and feedback about my assertions in the last article, and some of them were reasonable queries that I figured I should answer.</p><p>The first and easiest response to dispose of is along the lines of, "Hey Bahr, haven't you been among the people clamoring for Wizards of the Coast to reprint everything? And yet in your article you say that the singles market is collapsing because of excessive reprints. What gives?"</p><p>I did and still do clamor for Wizards to reprint everything so that players can get the pieces to play the game. The difference is one of degree. I was a bit clumsy/inelegant in stating that Modern Horizons 2 was harmful to card values, because that statement lacks important nuance -- more on that in the next question. By far the larger overwhelm was the flood of Commander deck reprints coming out with virtually every booster product. Each deck, from among two to five per release, contained what added up to hundreds of cards in reprints at a cadence faster than bi-monthly at the very least. Booster set reprints aren't nearly as overwhelming, and if we look at things like the cards that showed up in the Double Masters sets, the Modern Horizons sets, and the Remastered sets, both the volume and frequency of reprints are much more sustainable. So. On balance I'd rather Wizards reprint more cards rather than less, but that dial got turned all the way up to eleven and it is proving too much.</p><p>But by far the most frequent article response I saw was players arguing about this:</p><p><span face=""Trebuchet MS", Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(102, 102, 102); color: #666666; font-size: 13.2px;"></span></p><blockquote><i>"Singles like Vendilion Clique and Containment Priest are great examples of once $20-$40 all-stars that are now literal bulk dollar rares."</i></blockquote><p></p><p>They don't see the "middle" as being a real thing or as substantial as what I described, on the basis that they believe Clique and Priest were already outmoded and the erosion of their values could be attributed purely to deck inclusion, and since I did not name-drop an exact list of other cards, there must not be any others. I agree that deck tech played a part for Clique at the minimum, and I contend that the reprint volume of Clique also played a meaningful part -- and the reprint volume of the cards that superseded it. And for those who want me to name-drop more cards, I am happy to. Look here.</p><p>More cards that used to be evergreen "chonk money," and have been reprinted to a fraction of value:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Pithing Needle</li><li>Thalia, Guardian of Thraben</li><li>Meddling Mage</li><li>Shardless Agent</li><li>Celestial Colonnade/Creeping Tar Pit</li><li>Goblin Rabblemaster</li><li>Knight of the Reliquary</li><li>Mishra's Bauble (which I'd agree it was silly for this one to become expensive in the first place)</li><li>Scavenging Ooze</li><li>Solemn Simulacrum</li><li>Theros Temples</li></ul><p></p><p>By and large these cards are still played, at a minimum in Commander and where optimal also in the sixty-card formats. That is also still not a comprehensive list, and I don't think it's necessary for me to deep-dive repeatedly for more examples; if you don't think the "middle" eroded, good for you, go on with your day. For those of us who buy lots of cards all the time and accrue large inventories, broad-based value decay is a real problem. Long-time expert MTG vendor Michael Caffrey from <a href="https://www.toamagic.com">Tales of Adventure</a> put it best when he said "I am not in the business of buying risk -- I'm in the business of managing risk." That sentiment encapsulates perfectly today's analytic outlook on our industry.</p><p>You may notice I omitted cards that were only expensive because there were like six copies in existence and once they got reprinted it became reasonable to get them at a power-level-driven value, such as:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Grim Tutor</li><li>Warrior's Oath</li><li>Imperial Recruiter</li><li>Jade Statue (Remember the outcry when this showed up in 9th Edition? It hasn't shown up since and nobody cares and it's borderline unplayable and it's bulk bin chaff.)</li></ul><p></p><p>You may notice I also omitted some cards that have been reprinted to a fraction of value, but did so in an anticipatable manner, and should be expected to be reprinted regularly, such as:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Fetchlands</li><li>Shocklands</li><li>Wasteland and derivatives</li><li>Commander-relevant mana rocks</li><li>Core 1CMC cards such as Brainstorm, Lightning Bolt, Dark Ritual, Swords to Plowshares, etc, at a lower value tier than the other examples.</li></ul><p></p><p>I mentioned Modern Horizons 2 above and it reprinted the enemy fetchlands, which are all now the cheapest they have ever been since OG Zendikar was in Standard. This is not a bad thing! They are essential cards that will get played in any format they are legal, for as long as people are playing Magic. It is good that MH2 made Scalding Tarn not be a $80 minimum ticket. And for those who want to spice their collections up a bit, there are still original pack foils, BFZ Expeditions, and other super-premium printings now and again. Knowing this, as MH2 propagated, most stores (including mine) made sure we had throughput on cards like the fetchlands. But with a singles stock in seven figures of units, there was and is no analog way we can keep track of everything. We had to turn to algorithmic tools such as <a href="https://massprice.tcgplayer.com">TCGplayer MassPrice</a>, which provide a clear benefit to vendors while also unfortunately providing exploit vectors to collectors. The meta-struggle became keeping up with the exploits while letting the algorithm solve all the ordinary and mundane pricing concerns, which it largely does.</p><p>Note that I am not complaining or whining about the exploit factor; it simply is the way things are. In business nobody will make special allowances for dealers. It is up to us to adapt and make our adjustments. In the case of DSG, the big adjustment was to sell most of our massive singles inventory quietly in the manner I described in the last article. In the aftermath, as I hoped might happen, we've been able to rebuy up some beneficial tranches of cards, primarily higher-tier format staples, and we have been free largely to ignore everything else.</p><p>On a complete aside about that, I do believe that effectively fielding a comprehensive singles inventory (aiming for full coverage) probably requires robotic automation now, such as the Roca Sorter or similar devices. Labor and space are simply too expensive today to have meatbag human beings picking endless white cardboard bricks, searching for cards above the listing threshold. Caffrey, quoted above, was an early proponent of this automation and did some meaningful initial development of the process particulars for it; if you aren't already <a href="https://patreon.com/toamichael?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=creatorshare_fan&utm_content=join_link">subscribed to his Patreon</a>, I encourage you to consider joining me and many other satisfied members by doing so.</p><p>On a second complete aside. I am going to change platforms for this blog in the months ahead, time and opportunity permitting. I am still assessing which platform makes the most sense, as I hope to monetize the blog in order to make it more feasible to produce crunchier, extremely useful guidepost articles and deep analyses that game store owners and managers can better utilize to make money. For logistical reasons I don't think Patreon fits my content plans quite right, though I may discover otherwise as I learn more. The front-runner at the moment is Medium, but its monetization seems a little bit too byzantine for my autistic do-it-transparently brain to wrap around, so we'll have to see.</p><p>Enough with the asides, you might say, and that's fair. I kept you waiting. I will conclude today's Magic: the Gathering market thoughts by saying I am ordering roughly the same quantities for March of the Machines as I did for Phyrexia and Brothers' War, as the sell-through of Standard sets has been generally good since the policy change that opened up prerelease-week sales of all SKUs for WPN member stores. You love to see it. And now...</p><p>I have mentioned here on this blog now and again that it would eventually make sense for me to <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/10/your-system-may-reboot-multiple-times.html">split my business</a> between cards and video games. Hence, "A Cell Divides," the prog-metal musical basis of which I will explain in today's coda.</p><p>A funny thing happened on the way to setting up the split, however. </p><p>I had from the start expected that the split would be along categorical lines: Cards in one store, Video Games in the other. This seems sensible enough, after all. Do card players not seek out card-focused stores? Do video game collectors not do the same? Every impulse told us that this was the simple and correct answer, from branding and marketing prerogatives to the simple division of relevant stock, rack, fixture, and administration.</p><p>Something nagged at the back of our minds that this wasn't quite right. And, ever the analysts, we nourished that doubt to see if it would grow into something more.</p><p>A single blog article is too limited in scope to accurately trace the years-spanning evolution of that analysis. It might be something I embark upon as a long-scale project on the monetized future blog, I don't know. Suffice it to say I am skipping some steps here and not showing my work. But out of multiple key ingredients that led us to our ultimate answer, the breakthrough that made it all work was recognizing that our major categories have <b>internal</b> audience cohort divisions, and that those divisions <b>line up</b> across categories. And moreover, that they continue to exist even as we extend to other collectibles categories, and that <b>they continue to line up</b>. I realize I am being a bit abstract here. This epiphany aggressively resists comprehensive explanation, with an almost violent obstinacy. I'm punching it right in the sternum and it just keeps giving me the Ken Masters taunt.</p><p>"Fine, Bahr, whatever, just give me the answer." The answer is that our business is dividing along the lines of our customer psychographics' engagement objectives, which flipped around from DSGs point of view become our store's engagement vectors. Yeah, I swear I'm not just making words up at this point. This is a real thing. At least, I am gambling a lot of labor and overhead expense that it is.</p><p>Our existing store, Suite 12, will continue as Desert Sky Games. What is Desert Sky Games today? The primary engagement vectors are in-print booster boxes and packs of Magic and Pokemon at highly competitive prices, abetted by a second-to-none rewards points program called DSG Stars that is probably the single best promotion we ever <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7pEXGCtnnk">initiated</a>. The secondary engagement vectors are a wide selection of out-of-print booster boxes and higher-end staple singles, plus a selection of higher-end video games encompassing both rare/hard-to-find and common-but-highly-demanded. Did you know at less than $60, a copy of Mario Kart 64 lasts less than an hour on the shelves? The game is almost thirty years old and has more than half a dozen sequels surpassing it and running on more current hardware, and also they sold millions of them. And yet to this day it's one of the highest-demanded titles not just for Nintendo 64 but across all platforms, and it sells quickly despite being at a premium. Mind-blowing. Anyway, in identifying those engagement vectors, we came to realize how the split needed to work by recognizing what was left remaining.</p><p>Our new store, Suite 11, right next door, will exist for some amount of time as the DSG Outlet Store. This resembles in many respects our long-time eBay store "DSG Closeout," and in fact it commingles that inventory so anyone who wants to buy our eBay stuff in person can finally do it seamlessly at our Suite 11 location. However, Suite 11/DSGOS is not just discontinued or clearance merch. It is the culmination of an idea I got from happy memories of years ago when I used to be into video game <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/consolemodding/">tinkering</a> and <a href="https://www.retrorgb.com">modding</a> -- the internal name for the DSGOS project for years was "Tinker With Games" -- and it was reinforced when I learned about places like <a href="http://www.repc.com">Seattle's RE-PC</a> and Dallas's legendary <a href="https://dfarq.homeip.net/computer-reset-dallas/">Computer Reset</a>, which stood for almost 40 years before closing after the passing of its owner, the venerable Richard Byron. While focused on computer hobbyists, both stores served console gamers as well. There was something here, it finally came into focus. </p><p>We realized that not only was there never a RE-PC or Computer Reset in Arizona that served the audience of console game tinkerers and modders, but that audience deeply overlapped the audience of "bargain hunters for video games and gear in general" -- and as discussed in last week's article, there was finally no more muddying of the waters within the bargain-hunting audience of the video game category because ultra-casual players who would have no interest whatsoever in tinkering or the collecting chase have largely moved on to subscriptions like Game Pass, PS Premium, and Switch Online, and no longer need video game retail of any sort. And, synchronizing the meridians, the product mix that this engagement vector demanded happened to be deeply overlapped to the inventory we were having the most difficulty presenting in a cogent manner in the context of pre-split DSG. Put a rare special edition Xbox One next to a PS4 copy of Stardew Valley next to a re-shell for a DS Lite next to a Sega Saturn that powers up but has a dead CD-ROM drive and needs an ODE installed... and what you get is a mishmash of product addressing high demand from four different audiences that have almost no overlapping interest in each other's target items. But it's all the video games category! Now, with a separation that's physical instead of just conceptual, we hope to serve each of those four audiences better.</p><p>Suite 11's DSGO, because it was already being used as our shipping office, will also serve as closeout space for discontinued TCG merchandise, so there will be bargains to be hunted for there. We're going to be emphasizing having as much merch as possible, presented at low prices with constant updates reducing pricing as needed. In fact one of the first big projects once we're already open is going to be taking the software inventory one system at a time and seeing how many games need to be tagged way down. A good example that came up during the build was Sea of Thieves for Xbox One/Series. For a long time the game held at the $35-$40 level. It has more recently slid down into $15-$20 range on Pricecharting. But the real value of this game as a functional thing is almost zero because it is free to play on Game Pass and it is targeted at an audience of mainly Game Pass or Xbox Gold users. So in terms of who wants this physical disc copy of the game? It's a small niche of collectors and archivers. In terms of who wants to play Sea of Thieves? Most such gamers can do so "for free." Splitting the difference, we're going to be taking each copy of the game and pricing it at $8-$10, significantly below the Pricecharting value. Collectors will buy them right up eagerly, and players weren't going to come in looking for it anyway. This is just one narrow example of how the customer psychographic objective distinctions work on a real-world piece of inventory in hand.</p><p>There's a lot going on in the DSGO that won't make a lot of sense to people at first glance, so we'll need to be on our "A" game in teaching and guiding. I'll have all the normal cables, adapters, and such for less common systems in the DSGO full-time to save room in Suite 12 for higher-demand inventory; it makes no sense to have a rack of Sega Dreamcast cables taking up space that could display another four colors of Dragon Shield. I'll have kiosk, RGB, and refit hardware on hand, as well as an abundance of cheap replacement parts and parts consoles, and mostly you either care about that stuff or you've never heard of it. I'll have movies from our old Suite 7 stock, dirt cheap, for those inclined to go physical rather than stream. I'll have game discs that are too scratched for us to sell, but for which we no longer have a disc resurfacer, also priced dirt cheap for those who can glean some value out of them. I'll have e.g. base consoles for XBox 360 Trinity chipsets for modders, and CECH-A01 PS3 mains that just need the revival process to become glorious backcompat daily drivers. I'll have merchandising material like posters and banners for sale, for those so inclined. We're going to sell off our custom cartridge cases now that Suite 12 no longer deploys stock in that configuration. If all of this sounds a little bit vague, you aren't imagining it. There is not a store offering quite like this in Arizona before now, and there has never been one in most parts of the country. It's a novel experiment to some extent.</p><p>I say the DSGO "will exist for some amount of time" because honestly we don't know if this is going to work, or if so, in what manner it's going to work; and we have internal prerogatives that make it possible to try without being locked into a multi-year burden to do so. (We didn't even have to buy a single piece of rack or fixture, since our Suite 7 assets were just sitting in storage.) And if DSGO is a complete flop, we've left open the lines of play where we just recombine the stores and do something different. That's the silver lining of opening the location one door's distance away from our current shingle, and that's the flexibility we get from cheap-as-free rent and low overhead and a stable financial position made possible by our big product wins from recent years, as discussed in recent articles here. We can kind of do what the f*ck we want. This is something we feel like trying.</p><p>The DSG Outlet Store should open by the weekend of March 11th, since that starts spring break for most students in our area. DSGO will be open Tuesdays through Saturdays from noon to 5pm. In a pinch we can fetch up stock from there after hours if you're visiting in Suite 12 and you know what you want. Labor remaining a constraint, I'll be running the DSGO by myself some amount of the time. There are no game tables and no public restroom and no buys in Suite 11, so a solo flyer can pretty much cover things.</p><p>Stay tuned for future articles where I migrate the blog to a new platform, and I wish all of you a very prosperous spring and a pile of money to be made on upcoming releases like Pokemon Scarlet & Violet and MTG March of the Machines!</p><p>Today's article title, theme, and concept, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNT_9mmQaS8"><i>A Cell Divides</i></a>, have been brought to you by <a href="https://hakenmusic.com">Haken</a>. (Rhymes with "Taken.") This mostly British progressive metal band is at the absolute forefront of the genre right now and is putting out some of the absolute best prog that has ever been. Haken's big breakthrough came with 2013's "The Mountain," and the band avoided any notion of sophomore jinx with the masterpiece "Affinity" in 2016. Both are highly recommended. The song <i>A Cell Divides</i> is from their 2018 album "Vector," which is doubly appropriate with how much I talked about vectors in this article. There also exist remastered releases of Haken's formative work from before The Mountain, and two newer albums have also released since, both awesome: early 2020's prophetic "Virus" and 2023's "Fauna." More top song picks include <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ8KqJJJJhk">Earthrise</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LytvSLrsdZs">Carousel</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAqX1sAcM2c">1985</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQJ-e75ZSj8">The Alphabet of Me</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Dw77bGkQM">Crystallised</a></i>, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sD0RoQ1EZ4">The Architect</a></i>, and <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_e4YX73Ww4">Cockroach King</a></i>. </p><p>Be assured that there is plenty for Haken to teach every entrepreneur reading this, as exemplified in <i>Earthrise</i>: "Evolve and we'll ensure our survival." With that, until next time, resolve to carry on, everybody!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizEUbh9et0j2AbIFCL4hi4t9q1hzDhejgCkvkWdhN0eZIvK1OQ4wgoPc0ITEiqOhB-MNEo2erIBKnt62UTt_IODFhchfIPlZcCCQEotjIFTCHohRhDX7wr3VZ5qsdHJrIQ_wGNC2pfeokwyI_zlu0sHfOojKLCNGqdy-xJKbFzITYNJUEoCmxQPPnP/s1280/maxresdefault.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="720" data-original-width="1280" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizEUbh9et0j2AbIFCL4hi4t9q1hzDhejgCkvkWdhN0eZIvK1OQ4wgoPc0ITEiqOhB-MNEo2erIBKnt62UTt_IODFhchfIPlZcCCQEotjIFTCHohRhDX7wr3VZ5qsdHJrIQ_wGNC2pfeokwyI_zlu0sHfOojKLCNGqdy-xJKbFzITYNJUEoCmxQPPnP/w640-h360/maxresdefault.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-56666416495943813422022-12-29T19:34:00.003-08:002022-12-31T10:13:54.014-08:00World Coming Down<p>Sorry about the six-month break, there. I was kind of preoccupied with a wedding. But yeah in addition to that, business at DSG and in the greater hobby game industry overall has commanded my firsthand attention, and now that we're on the other side of a holiday shopping season that behaved almost exactly to forecasts, it's time to look back at 2022 and recognize how absolutely absurd this past year in the biz actually was.</p><p>The Pokemon TCG had nowhere to go but down, regressing to the mean but still well above the doldrums of 2017-2018. The Pokemon experience of late 2020 and early 2021 was like a force of nature. We literally got to the point briefly in December 2020 where we had no booster boxes on the shelf. And it wasn't for lack of ordering enough, or for underpricing! Demand and sales volume were simply that high. Anything we could get was snapped right up. Our biggest Pokemon days have been the releases of Battle Styles and Evolving Skies, both of which happened in 2021, but we had great revenue on the likes of Brilliant Stars, Astral Radiance, Lost Origin, and Silver Tempest in 2022. Looking forward, we see Pokemon as a mainstay of our business in a way that it never was pre-pandemic, but because of that extreme volatility, we don't ever want to have to pay the bills with nothing but the 'Mons. Our chips will never QUITE be all-in on the table with Pokemon the way we did for <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2022/07/double-agent.html">Double Masters 2022</a> or for products like Time Spiral Remastered before that. Of course, I say that with two behemoth releases inbound in the next three months alone: Crown Zenith and the Scarlet & Violet Base Set. Bring it on, Nintendo.</p><p>Video games had an interesting descent to normalcy after stores like mine all got cleaned out during the pandemic. We're still not readily able to stock Playstation 5 or Xbox Series X systems on demand, which is just as well given that new systems are breathtakingly margin-free and exist primarily to drive trade-in volume. Nonetheless, we sold a lot of Nintendo Switches, including the new OLED versions, and at no point in 2022 were we out of stock entirely on them, to my recollection. </p><p>Previous generations of systems slowly returned to stock, at levels I'm not completely happy with, but which are adequate. We stopped taking in most optical disc systems since the drives are starting to hit very high failure rates, much the same as automotive CD stereos from the 2000s are all breaking down now. I'll be intrigued if future years pose a big challenge for nostalgic Xbox 360 or Wii players hoping to enjoy license-locked and de-listed titles marooned on those platforms and unavailable via more current means. Meanwhile, on any given day, we can typically fill a nostalgic millennial's order for a Nintendo 64 or Game Boy Advance with some carts and controllers/accessories, and those are great tickets so we're always going to bend over backward to make that visitor happy.</p><p>The operative progression in 2022 in the video game category was toward subscriptions <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/02/fewer-and-fewer-console-games-are-seeing-a-physical-release/">and away from everything else</a>, which has implications for brick-and-mortar retail as you might suppose. The most successful subscription service is Xbox Game Pass, and verily, Xbox One/Series physical disc media is among the lowest-selling software in the store, ranking below even old Sega stuff. Our sweet-spot software inventory across Nintendo systems, older Playstation, and the vintage platforms, grew steadily all year, which might be a function of good buying volume on our part or might be a function of demand plummeting... and is probably some amount of both.</p><p>I have <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2022/01/thoughts-part-16.html">stated before</a> that the video game category would sunset some day and the business would change. It's not that we wouldn't be able to sell any video games, but that the focus would shift from players to collectors. Bread-and-butter gamers who seek bargain value at stores like mine and then trade games back in when they finish them will find their needs served by Game Pass and the other subscription services -- and as of November 2022, a staggering <i>thirty million</i> gamers are doing exactly that. In the course of the Microsoft-Activision-Sony hearings, we learned that <a href="https://www.purexbox.com/news/2022/11/sony-reveals-xbox-game-pass-has-29-million-subscribers-admits-new-ps-plus-tiers-substantially-behind">over 28 million subscribers</a> are on Game Pass, with another 1.5 million apiece on Playstation Plus and Nintendo Switch Online. I think players will still be with us for a while yet, because so many thousands of absolutely awesome titles are still, to date, marooned on older systems and media. However, if there is a profit to be had, those titles will find their way to present-day markets, which we have seen broadly on platforms like the Vita and the Wii U, where virtually every consequential game has arrived on Switch or is eventually expected to. Thus, in the future beyond when players need local independent video game stores, only collectors will be seeking our channel, and that is the absolute worst audience to serve. There are some angels amongst the collector public, but the vast majority of that audience in the video game hobby are extremely anti-store in general, have already acquired all the common titles they want, and will seek only the rarest fringe of inventory, and whine like a mule about price while knowing full well it is fair market value; they just hope the store is stupid or desperate. Yeah, I'm not looking forward to dealing with that.</p><p>Oh, lest I forget. The Magic: the Gathering singles market collapsed. Or, more accurately, it is <i>still collapsing</i>. Around three months ago we started to see discussions on the MTG finance social media groups and subreddit that indicated that this collapse was finally being noticed by others. Griffin and I noticed it late last year and acted accordingly, and our reward was a six-figure cash payoff, literally. The canary in the coal mine for us was not the pace of reprints in products such as Modern Horizons 2 or the Secret Lairs, though neither of those helped. Rather, it was seeing literally hundreds of Commander reprints every six weeks as new Standard and Commander Legends sets included multiple Commander decks and a refreshed List to top it off. With Arena killing paper Standard and Commander predominating in the meatspace game world, that reprint cadence produced a glut of singles in needlessly duplicative catalogue nomenclature. (Weirdly, the List was the more sustainable part of this, as a card that repeats exactly on the List is identical to its previous Mystery/List printing and does not create a new duplicate SKU.) TLDR version: Singles became virtually impossible for players OR STORES to keep up with. The bough broke.</p><p>Using tools such as the TCGplayer inventory reporting, CSV exports, Massprice, and Griffin's coding acumen, we observed that there was a vast "middle" of cards that was crumbling into dust. I only wish we had noticed this a year sooner still. Singles like Vendilion Clique and Containment Priest are great examples of once $20-$40 all-stars that are now literal bulk dollar rares. DSG's inventory of over a million cards was seeing an internal erosion that was frightening in its magnitude and threatened to undermine the asset component we had spent years building. We utilized our software tools to carefully adjust tranches of cards to an amount near Direct Low, typically above Market, and well below our typical pricing near Listed Median. (This was after segregating our $100+ Reserved List stock.) Then, we began a gradual process of ratcheting down the price one percent at a time every few days. This resulted in a grinding effect where we basically sold enormous amounts of cards, at quite literally the highest price we could get at the threshold of immediacy, given no announcement, no fanfare, no outward sign that we were doing anything.</p><p>Over the course of months, the money rolled in and the cards rolled out. And a corollary effect occurred: Our labor cost to manage singles, previously masked by the ordinary course of fulfilling Reimbursement Invoices, became clearer on the ledger. We were able to see the tremendous waste caused by time sunk pulling Pauper Commander lists. We were able to count just how worthless it was to open singles at set release with the glut of reprints forcing values down. It went further than that, but you get the picture. Waste in the form of inventory decay, waste in the form of inefficient labor loads in the task processes, waste in the form of accounting for it all. A fortune passing us by and right down the drain, previously offset at scale by the main singles revenue level, but no longer sustainable with card values collapsing.</p><p>Once we figured we'd sold down enough, leaving 10% for the next guy as we were taught to do, we sold off the rest of our sub-$100 cards to other vendors. Don't cry for them; they got a smashing deal for an enormous hoard of cards, even at the New Reality value levels those cards had fallen to by that point in time. With our new-found labor savings, we were able to reduce again the price of sealed Magic product to levels that others in town really can't keep pace with, without resorting to subscription gimmicks and the like. With our space freed up, we have yet even more future projects incubating. I look forward to, eventually, discussing them. We still deal with high-end singles and that has been awesome, with the exception that we're upside-down on some of our best-condition dual lands because of how competitively we've been buying on them. We don't mind waiting for the market cycle to rebound, as it typically does in late spring as tax refunds propagate.</p><p>The singles sell-down contributed to our cash position that let us barge in heavy on Double Masters 2022 as we had planned. That set is indicative of the overall trend for Magic in 2022. It was great out of the gate; so great, in fact, that I <a href="https://www.acura.com/integra/gallery">literally bought a sports car</a> with the profit distribution from the release cycle. But it slowed down and now I have probably a three-year supply remaining, including cases upon cases of both draft and collector boxes. The market price of the boxes has dipped back toward pre-order levels, and I don't feel like selling them that low, so as with our cleaner duals and RL staples, we're just going to sit on them until the sun comes back out.</p><p>The big benefit of the MTG singles collapse is that it will eventually bottom out. Some of my peers say they think it has already happened. From my analyst perspective, I haven't seen enough longitudinal data to say whether they are correct or not, but I would like them to be. Throughout the trough cycle, buying opportunities will abound for any store in a strong cash position, and right now, that's us. We know there's at least some amount of haves-and-have-nots in the scene, with one day earlier this month bringing us news of FOUR game store closures, two of them local. (I know I haven't worked on the game store closure list lately. I'm kind of hoping GAMA will take it over.) With singles values in the dumpster, buying great collections for a song should be possible, even at competitive levels versus the marketplace. I think values will behave a little differently in the recovery now that people know the pace of card prints and reprints will continue to accelerate, but that players will still want to play. I have a notion of what <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold_Equations">the cold equations</a> will look like in that market. But for now, we're all just engaging in educated guesswork. I expect to be in the Magic: the Gathering business for as long as DSG exists, so it's a puzzle I had better be solving as we go.</p><p>TCG Accessories were dumb in 2022. We made money on them well enough, but it seems like every accessory brand went ultra-wide and it became kind of pointless to attempt comprehensive coverage. The best practice in this industry is to be an arms dealer and play no favorites, offering any accessory a card player might want, and accepting that the <a href="https://www.freightwaves.com/news/viewpoint-supply-chain-tells-the-truth-about-chinas-covid-problem">vagaries of shipping out of China</a> would cause periodic outages and blurps in selection from the customer end. I decided to take a different approach that might end up being wrong, but it's an approach that satisfies my autistic brain: coverage of a narrower range of brands, basically just Dragon Shield and Ultra Pro, but trying to keep every color sleeve in stock as close to 100% of the time as possible. I have been carrying Ultimate Guard also but I'm contemplating dropping them. Players still like Boulders and Sidewinders, kind of, and used to love the Arkhive series of cases since Boulders and Sidewinders are designed to fit inside them in a modular way. But now there are umpteen different kinds of Hives... Arkhives, Minihives, Superhives, Treasurehives, Omnihives, and on and on. And that has diluted demand to where most of the Hives move too slowly. I have racks upon racks full of them. Meanwhile popular colors of Dragon Shield can sell a master case worth in a week or two. I'd rather devote limited shelf and storage space to deeper stock of those.</p><p>Meanwhile of course inflation has socked us all in the junk like a load of bricks. And if you're going to argue that inflation isn't real or that Putin is to blame, get outta here with that nonsense. A staggering <a href="https://techstartups.com/2021/12/18/80-us-dollars-existence-printed-january-2020-october-2021/">80% of all dollars in existence</a> were printed in 2020 and 2021. That is a sure-fire recipe for an inflationary bloom. Collectibles that experienced an easy-money spike in 2021 at the front of that cycle <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adHGrSP43QE">fell back to earth</a> in 2022, but costs of living didn't. Interesting how that works. Thus and so, players saw their discretionary money reduced, and they cut back spending accordingly this year. DSG survived well enough thanks to hedges upon hunkers upon consolidants; one might accurately say that the focus of my personal Year 2022 was to reinforce the value of the business's asset base in its various liquid and illiquid components, much of which work was not public-facing, and a little bit of which I discussed above. This was a terrible plan if we thought the year would boom, and a perfect plan if we thought the economy would suffer a heroin hangover from 2021's inflationary high. And, well, <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2022/07/double-agent.html">we were right again</a>. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIoPlLEXM2Y">Damn it feels good to be an analyst</a>. (link absolutely NSFW)</p><p>"Why is DSG not a WPN Premium Store Yet?" is a question one might reasonably ask, and the reality is that I might abandon trying for lack of time to allocate to what has proven a very subjective and indefinite process. DSG's main store isn't quite set the way I want it yet, but even just short of the goal line, it is already one of, if not THE, most beautiful game stores in the entire southwest. I have some finishing touches in the works and in progress that should hammer that reality home pretty solidly. In fact, just in the course of iterating toward our configuration prerogatives in the wake of the <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2021/07/take-hold-of-flame.html">unexpected fire and store move</a> from 2021, the store turned into the cozy ultraboutique that Wizards usually prefers for Premium. The store really should just be made Premium as it stands. It's there. However, our original WPN representative kept finding additional things for us to do, and then he left the company and our new rep hasn't worked with us yet (and we haven't had time to work with him anyway). Ultimately, this entire situation might just be a casualty of priority. While I'd appreciate having the credential and getting the associated perquisites, DSG's Premium application taskwork simply hasn't risen into the top ten on my ongoing List Of Things That Are The Best Thing I Can Do Next since at least late 2019. And as Canadian retailer Ted Yee correctly observes, the only thing about a store that really needs to be premium in the end is that store's bank account balance.</p><p>Anyway, I hope you emerged from the riptide of 2022 healthy and intact, and I wish you all the best of health and prosperity in 2023 and onward! We have a lot on our agenda and as per usual, we're going to do it without explaining ourselves, perplexing the haters and intriguing our competitors, and ultimately (if we succeed) achieving advantageous position in the market.</p><p>Today's blog article theme song, "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTxgN693xjo" target="_blank">World Coming Down</a>" by Type O Negative, pertains to the foregoing only in the grammatically literal sense of its title. The actual song is a masterpiece of gothic metal introspection on the nature of masculine vulnerability and brutally honest self-reflection. It might be the best thing Peter Steele ever wrote, and the world remains emptier for his unfortunate absence these past dozen years.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5ppso5gLJVlcSNeDkP8sTV4Xj2UFjDMNrNBBK7pIVJPjJg83H2VDs3Ig9utYf_cbQnswM39-Q5GFiHIXPHon2DXTfdcfzKK8_K0l2wauorFFsTQy84dxS6TexKNVKJe6V58IwcCx8SA2IxssamTT1aanqSSPdtIp9wdFlN4v5qPMpCdcZp1jEzZCC/s1600/type-o-negative-joseph_cultice_circa_1993-webcrop.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5ppso5gLJVlcSNeDkP8sTV4Xj2UFjDMNrNBBK7pIVJPjJg83H2VDs3Ig9utYf_cbQnswM39-Q5GFiHIXPHon2DXTfdcfzKK8_K0l2wauorFFsTQy84dxS6TexKNVKJe6V58IwcCx8SA2IxssamTT1aanqSSPdtIp9wdFlN4v5qPMpCdcZp1jEzZCC/w400-h225/type-o-negative-joseph_cultice_circa_1993-webcrop.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Photo (C) Joseph Coultice</span></div><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-24555533884838584072022-07-18T15:43:00.000-07:002022-07-18T15:43:11.752-07:00Double Agent<p>Desert Sky Games is approaching the ten-year mark in business, and most processes are approaching the point of being solved by now. However, the market still moves and shifts as it likes, and it's up to us to adapt to that, or not. We think we've adapted in a rather brutal fashion, and in the meanwhile moving forward behind the scenes, skating to where the puck is going to be.</p><p>Shortly after the success of Magic's Kamigawa Neon Dynasty release to start the year, we decided to plan our shots with what looked like a saturated release schedule. This was before knowing Unfinity would appear in October, or that Warhammer 40K Commander Decks would delay from August into October also.</p><p>We loved the deco-noir motif of Streets of New Capenna and we expected (and got) shard triomes, so we expected ordinary business with that set. Normal ordering volume. In practice, what happened was that the set landed a little on the soft side, but it was within what we could afford and we saw only middling distress from the weaker competitors out there.</p><p>Commander Legends: Baldur's Gate (CLB) was something of a wild card at that point. Collector booster boxes of the original Commander Legends set (CL1) skyrocketed in price and remain to date the only source of extended-art foil Jeweled Lotus, Vampiric Tutor, and various other cards. At the same time, the main set would be in print for at least a year and we knew we could come back to it. It made sense to go heavy on CLB if we didn't have anything else to be ready for, or risk missing another CL1 scenario. Stores that were hurting from New Capenna were doubly vulnerable.</p><p>Of course, you all know what happened after that. The very next release on deck, July's Double Masters 2022 (product code 2X2), projected as a runaway hit even that far back. For August, the Warhammer decks were fixed (not a booster product) so would be a minor spend in all likelihood, and we have a 10th Anniversary celebration to be ready for as well. We set our sights on Double Masters as our big "play" of the year, long before CLB ever came up for distribution number lock.</p><p>So, every store ordered 2X2 obviously, but we suspected most stores did not take our deliberate approach to it. Knowing we wanted to be in and out of CLB quickly, we halved our expected quantities for what ended up being the flop of the decade thus far. Stores around town are, even now, absolutely choking on Baldur's Gate, which landed sparse on power and missed at least one obvious reprint in Dockside Extortionist, which appeared instead in 2X2 where it wasn't needed to sell the set. Meanwhile, we had no particular issue clearing CLB ahead on money, even though our hedge was still not enough, and we do still have quite a bit of excess stock. It will be fine in the long run as the set becomes the Ancient Dragon Lottery for customers, but let me be very clear when I say CLB is the worst-received product in modern Magic history, since at least Global Series Mu Vs Jiang, and the worst-received booster set since Born of the Gods or maybe even Saviors of Kamigawa.</p><p>Looking ahead to 2X2 then, in addition to ordering low on CLB, we tapered down our general restock volume and started hoarding cash in advance of what we expected to be a large spend on Double Masters. We wanted to be able to buy absolutely every last box we could. Even after how well things went, I wish I had requested twice as much.</p><p>The final secret sauce was not taking pre-orders. Most stores float from release to release on net terms, whereas since last summer's sudden store move settled out, we had managed to normalize cash flow to the point where we could be paying cash up front every time if we had to. Your usual store will take pre-orders to make sure they can cover terms, and if business has been soft enough, they'll pay existing expenses from pre-orders and count on later transactions to cover open terms invoices. Lord knows during the doldrums of 2018, I ended up having to do that a few times. People love Rivals of Ixalan now, but nobody loved it when it first arrived, let me inform you.</p><p>Not taking pre-orders also let us avoid the inevitable race-to-cheaper optics war that happens out of the gate before spoilers, where the people willing to give a game store an interest-free loan the soonest, get to lock in low pre-order pricing relative to the set's release demand/market. There isn't much risk to the consumer because if the spoilers suck, they can just cancel the pre-order. The risk to stores is that the set won't be popular or will get overprinted, or on the other side, that the store will give up a bunch of revenue in order to have fast cash up front. Based on the previous Double Masters set's success, we did not expect a bad product, and we didn't need the cash advance.</p><p>So there we were, all expenses paid and money ready going into July, and sure enough, the market price of 2X2 climbed to where we could offer best-in-town pricing and STILL make $100+ more per box than we would have at the beginning of pre-orders. There it was, the gold ring we were grabbing for: setting up to make this release as beneficial as possible, using the power of patience. Friday, July 8th set a new store record for daily sales before we even hit the 90-minute mark. We ended up more than doubling the previous record. Then Saturday, July 9th hit the top 5 of all time. Then the following weekend we had two ranked days, an accomplishment that gets harder every time because the threshold to be on the rankings goes up. We have fun plans for that revenue.</p><p>Even now as most local competitors have sold out of 2X2 product and are scrambling for fundraising schemes, and even as we enjoy fantastic release-week sales, we sit atop a massive hoard of 2X2 and it's all long since paid for. We will be selling this stuff for months. Longer, if we have our druthers. We will ride the market price all the way up to the moon as we go. Every box and pack we sell will be better than the last. And when the cupboard is dry in the metro, only the behemoths will still have stock: DSG and probably Amazing Discoveries and Play or Draw.</p><p>The MTG price hike that goes into effect with Dominaria United in September isn't going to make us blink, and based on the logistical success of our 2X2 play and the colossal labor savings from doing it this way, we are going to come out of the gate for DMU with best-in-town pricing and no pre-order requirement. Plenty of product will be available, just come in and buy what you need. We hope to cause further distress to competitors as local players cancel pre-orders with them (or force discounts) knowing they can get their boxes from DSG for less on prerelease day.</p><p>Lest this blog article sound too gloaty, I should really explain the context. For a number of reasons, not the least of which is my autistic personality that is the exact opposite of the gregarious extroversion more ideal for store owners in this industry, DSG has long been the local easy target, the store that gets no benefit of any doubt, no leeway for any mistake, and maximum pressure from any competitive move. It got pretty onerous as time went on, and surely embittered ownership toward certain specific antagonists. One of the lessons you learn in law school is that if you're going to punch someone back, do it hard enough that they will have a difficult time getting back up. We took that lesson to heart throughout these years of scuffles and skirmishes. Rather than simply fighting tit-for-tat, DSG turned inward and changed our position so that we could win outright, sustainably, on the exact aspects of business where our adversaries thought they could most easily crucify us, and were themselves the most vulnerable to reprisal. This is not an unprovoked or unilateral attack by us in the great ongoing war of Business. Rather, this is reprisal, a delivery of comeuppance. It is a sort of justice. They threw the first punch, but we intend to throw the last.</p><p>Probably the best part of all this, is that most of our current business initiatives are not externally visible, and are the greater part of what's really going on. Our entire 2X2/DMU operational shift was just one of many things, and yet it has been so visible and so successful and so effective that I can even state right here in print that it is not that important in the grand scheme of things, and it doesn't matter! Competitors cannot ignore it in the analytical calculus regardless! That is OUTSTANDING strategic positioning. It's a play-action pass on first-and-goal from the 1-yard line. The defense cannot play both the run and the pass effectively, and is overwhelmingly likely to be scored upon.</p><p>Thus derives this articles title, Double Agent: our hat tip to the wonderful and profitable Double Masters, but also to how we've managed to set this up to achieve both goals of succeeding on its face, and disguising from competitors most of what we are really doing. We wholeheartedly recommend <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeKmx-YWv5E" target="_blank">the Rush song by the same name</a> for your listening enjoyment.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjEye_kptNbMsSc5_GoA3MeCuLlEtA_jR65_OSmmB0_scW-QRdVkXodq83DrSNHFVc_sxajnEXV7TeQZFi-Dx0k5s3pT-lkp2eCu9FtUvvjmhuIPDYJun4p5bvXJToVaJuiodpEYlpuD-DRKIRt7MC5KFENwpO_csVADIURcoH4AVtqZOrvA_2m_t4N" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="949" data-original-width="950" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjEye_kptNbMsSc5_GoA3MeCuLlEtA_jR65_OSmmB0_scW-QRdVkXodq83DrSNHFVc_sxajnEXV7TeQZFi-Dx0k5s3pT-lkp2eCu9FtUvvjmhuIPDYJun4p5bvXJToVaJuiodpEYlpuD-DRKIRt7MC5KFENwpO_csVADIURcoH4AVtqZOrvA_2m_t4N" width="240" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-26658505085254117832022-05-15T02:46:00.000-07:002022-05-15T02:46:51.825-07:00Enjoy the Silence<p>I do owe my readership an apology. I have been extremely sparse about new blog articles. Some of my deadbeatery is excusable -- I do have a wedding coming up this fall, after all -- but part of the reason I haven't been writing is a deliberate decision that is tied to business prerogatives. And not to be too meta, but that itself seemed like a pretty decent idea for an article!</p><p>In an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgJqH84SS94" target="_blank">absolutely great interview session</a> with finance YouTuber Graham Stephan, automotive YouTuber Doug DeMuro explained that he keeps a grueling schedule of content production despite already earning plenty of money, because he doesn't know when it's all going to end, so he feels motivated to max out the earning capacity of this window of opportunity while it stands open. That is to say, the boomlet of social media whereby a YouTube channel is, for this moment in time, a lucrative option. Indeed, an extremely lucrative one if you managed to get situated right. But it can't last.</p><p>Doug is absolutely on point with this. Windows of earning opportunity are often a combination of preparedness, awareness, discipline, ruthlessness, and luck. They can close without warning or remorse. YouTube seems like an earnable conduit right now, but what happens when it's not. It can absolutely happen. For example, already Facebook provides far worse advert metrics than Instagram for the same content DSG puts out, for the reason of I have no damned idea. It just does. (Paid advertising campaigns on either platform feed through to readers on both.) What happens when YooToob becomes "lame" and the earnings center-of-gravity for videos is on Twitch or (sigh) TikTok (in which case I'll be missing it because f**k that noise).</p><p>The situation for Desert Sky Games is a little bit broader and more general. With the exception of a couple of blips now and then on the schedule (Innistrad Crimson Vow and Pokemon Fusion Strike, more or less), we have been on an absolute earnings tear since spring 2021. I have barely taken any days off through this entire duration, not to mention during which we had a fire, a store move, and almost complete turnover of staff. The bottom line is that most business is booming and on any given day or week I don't want to miss the chance to capture peak earnings, so I spend an inordinate amount of time doing "store stuff." Pokemon is off its 2021 peak, but is still much hotter than the doldrums of 2017-2018. Magic is a torrent of product that we can almost, kind of, keep up with. Video games have been on absolute tilt ever since March 2020 and who even knows when that will slow down. I've been pricing systems at above the pricecharting rate and they still sell as fast as I can prep them and get them staged. Meanwhile on the buy side I've been turned down offering 75% of pricecharting in cash for Nintendo hardware, usually a severe overpay, and right now it's not enough.</p><p>Meanwhile, owing to the pandemic and the nursing shortage, Hannah, who is a registered nurse working overnights at a local hospital, has had the opportunity to bank massive bonuses taking extra shifts, and for that matter is in a profession that keeps getting market increases for her regular wage, so even though the work is pretty strenuous, she doesn't want to miss a peak earnings window either. There are stretches of days where we complain that we miss each other. It's a hell of a grind. But wow, we feel pretty good about the bankroll we've been building.</p><p>There is roughly a two-week cadence to our work right now where Hannah and I spend mutual work days working, then we have one weekend with the kids where our non-work time is spent with them, then there is a day or two of relative downtime that we spend with each other (and also do household stuff, which is mostly the lowest priority) and then during the second weekend when we don't have the kids, we both work again straight through. Essentially, any night when she's at the hospital, I put in extra hours after closing in the dark store, because my tiredness is offset by the ease of productivity in the peace and quiet. I'm not inclined to just go home and stare at the cat, as cute as Store Kat may be.</p><p>This is also part of why DSG isn't a WPN Premium store yet. Every time I send a new video, they send back a punchlist of what should be minor projects, but I just can't justify spending time on any of them when working on the store's existing deliverables earns me way more money and incurs less transitional friction. Writing, which in the abstract I always want to be doing, is similarly outranked by monetizables.</p><p>The foregoing makes me sound like quite the money-grubbing greed merchant, but what I'm doing is really a far more conventional diligence. The reality is that small business retail in the comic and hobby game industry isn't a career with a clearly shaped future. We know sunsets are ahead for each of the three main things DSG does (video games, Magic, and Pokemon) but when those sunsets are going to hit, industry-wide, is a moving target we can only speculate. And I think general tabletop is far worse off. If you forced me to pick a year, right now, without any caveats, when the business model that DSG is running will become untenable? For a variety of reasons, I'd pick 2028. (Six years ahead, as of this writing.) And I'm concerned I've placed that date too far ahead. But let's just say 2028 for the sake of thought exercise.</p><p>Now think about your own career. If a little bird told you, credibly, that you'd be fired six years from this very day, and nothing you could do would prevent it, and moreover your industry wouldn't be a viable income source anymore and you'd end up having to move on to some sort of adjacent work, and you can't yet know exactly what work that would be, and you were being offered unlimited overtime at double, maybe triple wage here and now today, what would you do? I imagine you'd make hay while the sun shined, right? You'd pick up every shift you could. You'd cancel vacations, you'd put hobbies on ice, you'd quit the neighborhood bowling team, you'd stop going to church, maybe. After all, God helps those who help themselves. And you'd do ten years worth of work in five, and probably spend that last year winding down and organizing your transition out. And you'd be financially well situated when the clock struck midnight, and that's exactly what I want for me and Hannah and ultimately for the kids. </p><p>I decided decades ago that if I ever had the chance to compress a career like this, I'd do it. "If you could work your ever-living ass off for ten years but then retire, would you?" Absolutely the f**k yes. In fact after a break during the early months of retirement, I'd surely find my way back to productive endeavors, not the least of which would probably be writing. But just because I was willing to run that grind didn't guarantee that I'd get an opportunity to actually try. I had preparedness, awareness, discipline, and ruthlessness, and now the video game and Pokemon booms and Magic's high-voltage itinerary are the luck that the recipe called for. My championship window is open. It's right there. I have to take it. And that means, unfortunately, instead of reading interesting industry repartée here on The Backstage Pass, I'm afraid most weeks for at least the rest of 2022, you'll just have to enjoy the silence. :)</p><p>Since my blog articles intentionally use song titles now, I would be remiss if I did not link a great rendition of same. I've never been a Depeche Mode listener. I can appreciate them on a technical level but their performances just do nothing for me, for whatever reason. But compositionally they did a solid with Enjoy the Silence, and I can't pick between two splendid covers of the song, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gZzkGvyqzc" target="_blank">first by piano prodigy Tori Amos</a> and the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49uUSm36Sqs">second by goth-metal groundbreakers Lacuna Coil</a>. Words can be so very unnecessary, but I give them more credit than only to harm.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqggxFezkdsbD2QH2xXg0_1UjLw9t7P_DpnWk8NM9CnAGSi2rJrY-5S75YgaVo4HVh5tou475lIn53Bd-_YRioBkSGpjR1UM00XTY5doMzXVfLWPSN7bhb5GXwW9Ib3t-3qiRZQfFwvKLET3qTV-EPcEvxoEJCiG8yW1HFpRUGLjWuMh5S6a74-cSa/s1023/MV5BNTc1MzM3MGMtZGE0Yi00OWY5LThkMTgtMzMwNGEzZjM5MThhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDUwNzkwMTQ@._V1_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="604" data-original-width="1023" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqggxFezkdsbD2QH2xXg0_1UjLw9t7P_DpnWk8NM9CnAGSi2rJrY-5S75YgaVo4HVh5tou475lIn53Bd-_YRioBkSGpjR1UM00XTY5doMzXVfLWPSN7bhb5GXwW9Ib3t-3qiRZQfFwvKLET3qTV-EPcEvxoEJCiG8yW1HFpRUGLjWuMh5S6a74-cSa/w400-h236/MV5BNTc1MzM3MGMtZGE0Yi00OWY5LThkMTgtMzMwNGEzZjM5MThhXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNDUwNzkwMTQ@._V1_.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-89231879777398375202022-02-26T21:04:00.003-08:002022-02-26T21:25:50.771-08:00Get On This Deck!<p>I never thought global war would be a real possibility again in my lifetime, but here we are. Last week, Russia invaded Ukraine, my family's ancestral homeland. </p><p>That's right, I am of Ukrainian descent. I was originally a Rossman, before that an Ursuliak, and follow an immigration trail from my present-day home in Arizona to the Great White North of Alberta, Canada, to whence traveled the family from Ukraine in 1903, three generations before me. (I am in the 4th generation of American Ursuliaks.) Fun fact, Ursuliak and Bahr both mean "bear" in their respective root languages.</p><p>But enough about my grizzly bloodline. Anyone who knows me knows that one of my life causes is fighting against bullying. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is about the most gargantuan bully move that has occurred in many years. Even if I had zero ties to Ukraine, taking Ukraine's side in this war is a very easy and obvious moral decision.</p><p>That's where The Backstage Pass comes in, because it turns out two of Magic: the Gathering's all-time good guys in the Pacific Southwest, Dave Magenheim and Adam Romney, are ponying up in support of Ukraine and have set up the means for Magic players everywhere (and, indeed, anyone else who cares to join in) to do the same. I am on board and I hope my platform here, humble as it is, may provide some amplification.</p><p>I'll let their words serve as the best explanation for this campaign:</p><p><i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">We're asking MTG players everywhere for something small: buy one less pack and send the </span><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-weight: 900;">five bucks</span><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;"> to Ukraine. Then tell your friends to do the same.</span><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">On the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, thirteen brave soldiers found themselves surrounded and defenseless by the Russian Navy on a small island in the Black Sea. After firing on the island, Russian warships demanded their surrender. These true heroes of Ukraine recognized Snake Island as their personal Alamo and refused; responding "Иди на хуй!'" The precise translation is not suitable for a family fundraiser, but serves as our inspiration and our calling to the community:</span><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">"Get on This Deck!"</span><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">Buy Ukraine a Pack. Honor those Legends.</span><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">Our starting goal is for this community to cover the cost of a case of cards - equivalent to two months salary for the average Ukrainian. Your small sacrifice will go a long way. 100% of donations go directly to United Help Ukraine - which distributes food and medical supplies to Ukrainians affected by the Russian invasion.</span><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><br style="box-sizing: inherit; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-family: CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" /><span face="CircularXXWeb, Lato, Trebuchet, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333;">We are not in any way affiliated with Wizards of the Coast ... but we'd like to be! We've given you money for years Hasbro; it's time to send some back.</span></span></i></p><p>GoFundMe Link <a href="https://www.gofundme.com/f/buy-ukraine-a-pack-an-mtg-community-fundraiser?member=17663339&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer" target="_blank">HERE</a>.</p><p>I vouch for Adam and Dave without hesitation.</p><p>Morale on the ground in Ukraine is very high right now. Unlike Russians with their unfortunate fatalist mentality, Ukrainians are a scrappy, self-determined lot, and are used to having to make their own way and solve their own problems. Ukrainians are thrilled to know that anyone, anywhere, especially Americans, are taking their side, whether in material form or otherwise. Obviously the material form of taking their side is the form that's going to help the most directly. And since most of us aren't in the munitions shipping business, we then turn to financial support as an effective means.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj5cnqIh-xrGe4d-STRYaRm_IcZKTnmTmegdNcTFuEwFmODSCyCR9g2zcsWKcFlEY7sNEWQzZwI2OHVEIUrsrXJ-eUGq3IvV6z6EpX75NnIy4gVZKO7FSUWnKLc4G1CWhnVlFwzV4V2K8olKNvE-OYQDoOIdWxRQNt6k6Z_n7PpnaOFT3QVTfjA_VPO=s820" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="820" height="175" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEj5cnqIh-xrGe4d-STRYaRm_IcZKTnmTmegdNcTFuEwFmODSCyCR9g2zcsWKcFlEY7sNEWQzZwI2OHVEIUrsrXJ-eUGq3IvV6z6EpX75NnIy4gVZKO7FSUWnKLc4G1CWhnVlFwzV4V2K8olKNvE-OYQDoOIdWxRQNt6k6Z_n7PpnaOFT3QVTfjA_VPO=w400-h175" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-36550821163098555402021-07-16T22:07:00.000-07:002021-07-16T22:07:36.911-07:00Take Hold of the Flame<p>On the afternoon of June 19th, we were having record sales for the fifth day in the last ten, with a house full of players for the Modern Horizons 2 release weekend, in a 6k+ square-foot store that was approaching end-of-lease. If you had told me at that moment that the store would be closed for the rest of the month, I would have laughed at you.</p><p>Less than 30 days later, we re-opened in just under 2k square feet, in a gorgeous fully-renovated suite on the other side of the same building, where our lease is renewed through 2025 at an occupancy cost so much lower that it's practically operating for free (and for the short term, "practically" is more like "actually").</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8cy2rNoWlP2X7sydEochFmJHbv1y3GjtJ8F2IqaSA674V7sKtZp2GHsLl3sIm4UBrpC0VTzgxTRA8J-ytKC7MvX2GFTbE28rncrg0_T-cFxKprZYu7wKSP1XEhVf_puBexMmsadKJcZA/s2048/636E31C8-E8E7-4998-B65D-23D04E3E2D3F_1_201_a.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1106" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8cy2rNoWlP2X7sydEochFmJHbv1y3GjtJ8F2IqaSA674V7sKtZp2GHsLl3sIm4UBrpC0VTzgxTRA8J-ytKC7MvX2GFTbE28rncrg0_T-cFxKprZYu7wKSP1XEhVf_puBexMmsadKJcZA/s320/636E31C8-E8E7-4998-B65D-23D04E3E2D3F_1_201_a.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div></div><p>But wait a minute. Hadn't I <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/04/assumptions.html">posted right here</a> on this blog that I was 95% confident the store would remain where it was through 2022? (Amusing that in that same article, I forecast a "pandemic" as one of the "apocalyptic" scenarios that might throw all assumptions out the window.)</p><p>So what happened?</p><p>Fire. Fire happened, and a supportive landlord who was willing to work with us to turn a loss into a win.</p><p>For a week in mid-June, a heat wave blasted the Phoenix area that was so onerous even we locals were hatin' life. DSG had HVAC interruptions, brief outages, and other unpleasantness. We even shut down the vintage arcade for a few days to try to reduce the power load. Sometime around 7pm on June 19th, the heat blistered our external power junction assembly, and a bad connection arced many amps of power into ignition.</p><p>We cleared the store of guests and nobody was harmed. It is testament to the great construction of our building and the safety measures therein that the other power phases continued uninterrupted despite a literal electrical fire burning inches away from their connection points.</p><p>Alas, the fire destroyed the entire junction, and replacement took weeks of parts procurement and installation, followed by weeks of city and utility certification before the suite could be used again. (As of the publication time of this article, it was still not done.) DSG faced a potential business outage right in the middle of our hottest streak in company history. In fact, despite being closed from June 19th to the end of the month, June still came within a few percent of being our biggest month ever, and instead sits in second place behind March 2021. The stakes could hardly have been higher.</p><p>To our immense fortune, we had already been working on our exit plan from Suite 7, which was approaching end-of-lease, as I mentioned earlier. The other partners and I had spent months sketching out the branches of our potential site scenarios. Through this preparatory work, we had already reached a provisional agreement with the landlord to move to Suites 11 and 12 for our lease renewal, but it was supposed to happen months into the future, closer to the Suite 7 lease terminus. The landlord already had an inbound tenant signed on for Suite 7 who was ready to start construction whenever we happened to be out of the way. We all figured late 2021 or early 2022 would be Go Time.</p><p>When the fire occurred and we learned how seriously it was going to disrupt business, we were able to amend the agreement with the landlord to just proceed with the move immediately, and give the inbound tenant a chance to get started and pass through Permit Hell sooner. The inbound tenant was thrilled. I can't disclose their business since that's not my information to share, but the entire DSG crew is looking forward to it being there, and we will be eager customers.</p><p>Moving immediately meant doing things on a tight calendar and some extra expense from not being able to slow-walk some of the renovations, but thanks to this spring's stimulus boom, we were positioned sufficiently well to proceed using cash on hand, and insurance is going to defray some of that cost later. And we sharply minimized lost time. I cannot stress how different this move has been from the last one, which ran way over calendar and way over budget and required us to borrow an inordinate amount of money at lousy interest rates. This new move required us to borrow zero dollars and zero cents, and on top of that, again, insurance reimburses some of the expense.</p><p>So there it was. We had a plan already in place, and what the electrical fire let us do (or forced us to do, depending how you look at it) is start before we were ready, and finish before we had preferred to, but ultimately move forward right away and reap the long-term benefits of that.</p><p>The MTG Forgotten Realms prerelease stood as a pretty hard calendar milepost that we didn't want to miss. Under the original plan, we'd have hosted that and one or both of the Innistrad events from this fall in Suite 7, and then we'd shift all activities to the new suites seamlessly between major dates. Instead, after coordinating with Wizards of the Coast and getting the appropriate permissions, Forgotten Realms became the first event in Suite 12.</p><p>We know the new location is smaller. I've been <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/10/your-system-may-reboot-multiple-times.html">telegraphing pretty heavily here and elsewhere</a> that something like this was going to happen, so it's worthwhile for me to give some insight here on the business aspects of reducing our store footage in this manner and the business reconfiguration that goes along with it.</p><p>Having the largest store in the Valley <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/10/here-we-go-again.html">was fun</a>, but in many ways it was overkill, and it absolutely was not cost-efficient. We had a huge and happy player base, and Suite 7 was certainly big enough to accommodate them, but during the long slide of tournament indifference that preceded the COVID pandemic, we discovered that it wasn't necessary to have that kind of capacity, since that river almost never ran bank-full.</p><p>Indeed, even at our fullest, we never even reached 50% of our imputed maximum occupancy. Over the years, I had to get really creative to monetize surplus footage, and that's part of why Warhammer and D&D lasted as long as they did despite the organized play deployments for both categories failing to perform sustainably. I had more space than I could fill, so things that were using that space inefficiently got a partial pass. That partial pass finally expired when growing business components started making more beneficial use of that space, such as our TCG singles processing office. It started to make sense to <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/11/horus-hiatus.html">take those categories out of the equation</a> if we were not situated to be top-tier in them.</p><p>That said, we are still positioned to serve the lion's share of our everyday player volume from before. Obviously it will be a bit of a pinch at prerelease time, since we routinely seated double or triple our typical FNM player counts for that. We've got about a 48-player max in Suite 12, and we can stretch that from time to time to about 64 players using additional space in our section of the plaza, including parts of Suite 11, once we've had time to set that up. (We only need seating for 32 players to host WPN Qualifier events, if those ever resume.)</p><p>More importantly, we are poised to do a far better job serving our players than we did before. Suite 12 has been fully renovated, from newer LED ceiling lights to awesome stone floors, and it's beautiful and comfortable. Our WPN Premium application is already on my itinerary. We hit a jam with the new tables we had planned, our understanding was that they were about three inches wider than needed (good) but it turns out they are three inches narrower than needed (not good). But we still have the eight-footers in place with sweet covers and comfortable space around. And obviously our HVAC system will have fewer cubic feet of space to cool during the hot summers. Meanwhile, singles processing in its entirety takes place in Suite 11 and requires no additional steps from the player.</p><p>We have been telling the regulars who ask, that there is a long term plan in progress and it will make sense as the final pieces fall into place. We're definitely at the 80%-85% completion level now, with only a handful of major moves (each containing its own array of sub-moves) remaining to get DSG to where we believe it should be. It should all be starting to make sense now to those of you who have been observing all along, though you'll gain even clearer insight as we push those last few building blocks into place. The recent "Great Narrowing" of DSG's focus from full-spectrum hobby gaming to just video games, Magic, and Pokemon, <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/08/insert-coins-someday-soon.html">explained at length</a> in <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/01/turning-lessons-into-action-in-2019.html">various</a> articles here, was a prerequisite condition to a broader structure of efficient facility deployments, starting with the one we've built now in Suites 11 and 12. We've been working on, as I put it <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/10/gingerbread.html">in a previous article</a>, "steering the store's cone of influence to a narrower range of things, so we can craft an offering that is increasingly 'no excuses.'"</p><p><a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2016/08/four-years-facilitating-fun.html">Before the move</a> from Gilbert to Chandler, we had maxed out a 2400 square foot suite and had our Tempe location also on lease wind-down at just over 3k square feet. The 2017 lease for Suite 7 was cheaper than both Gilbert and Tempe combined, and also larger than both of them combined. It <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2018/08/six-years-of-survival.html">seemed like it was a complete win</a> on all fronts. Instead, we found ourselves out of position. We had been <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2015/08/three-years-down-one-very-big-year-ahead.html">running a Mario model</a> that suits rural and mid-major areas well, spreading a wealth of categories and play space to cast as wide a net as we could. While we were busy with steep efficiency challenges in an attempt to be better than a jack of all trades and master of none, in our major metro region, laser-focused smaller stores took leaps forward and proved to be running the better structure.</p><p>In fact, the Bahr Haters out there now get to experience the one thing they wanted the least: a DSG with near-zero overhead that can exert tremendous competitive pressure on them through pricing, supply, <i>and</i> our ironclad reputation for doing everything above-board. Feel free to throw in the towel and close up any time you're ready. (This is especially sweet after how some of them stoked the rumor mill during our closure suggesting that we were done for. Yeah, you wish.)</p><p>Since the impetus for our big move forward amounted to us essentially seizing an opportunity provided by a fire, I couldn't resist the reference to Queensrÿche's masterpiece "Take Hold of the Flame." Indeed, fire or no fire, it was time for DSG to make a definitive move, to hard-shift from the store we thought would be pretty good for many in general, to a store we knew we could make excellent for those who wanted what we were focused on doing. We took hold of the flame; we had nothing to lose, and everything to gain. And so that you can enjoy it in all its glory, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk84dVq644k" target="_blank">here is the best metal vocal performance ever filmed</a>.</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-58674725697582116892021-05-23T14:34:00.003-07:002021-05-23T17:41:38.613-07:00DSG Events Resuming Questions & Answers<p>Welcome back, everyone. We've missed so many of you.</p><p>There is more to say than a quick social media post will cover, so we're going to have a quick info dump first and then I will address some questions that we know will (or already have) come up.</p><p><i>(For those of you who have never read The Backstage Pass before, it's our business blog related to the comic and hobby game industry. Most of the articles here are meant to be business-facing, but everyone is welcome to read on if you're curious about the inner workings of DSG and stores like it!)</i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1rhMMZitQcwjrqhG-v-PY-Iz2jtsVuiJ2eRmS5UI2gEImhIaNGgVZ82TH0aBvOaLVAi0ugbugNW68DM3du9hMwk5KUB9tsM47CS0tZAhJU9kpCzfaOEYGb4TNOF0El_fSu2_pMW0K8v4/s2027/Screen+Shot+2021-05-22+at+3.12.43+PM.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="803" data-original-width="2027" height="159" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1rhMMZitQcwjrqhG-v-PY-Iz2jtsVuiJ2eRmS5UI2gEImhIaNGgVZ82TH0aBvOaLVAi0ugbugNW68DM3du9hMwk5KUB9tsM47CS0tZAhJU9kpCzfaOEYGb4TNOF0El_fSu2_pMW0K8v4/w400-h159/Screen+Shot+2021-05-22+at+3.12.43+PM.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><b>EVENTS AND OPEN TABLE USE RESUME FRIDAY MAY 28TH</b></p><p><b>NEW STORE HOURS: OPEN MON-WED 12pm-7pm; OPEN THU-SAT 12pm-10pm</b></p><p><b><u>EVENT SCHEDULE:</u></b></p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Thursdays 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Legacy;</li><li>Fridays 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Modern;</li><li>Saturdays 1pm & 6:30pm Draft, 7pm Standard and Pioneer;</li><li>Pokemon League Saturdays 3pm-6pm;</li><li>Special events will typically pre-empt the Saturday 1pm Draft;</li><li>Booster drafts and constructed sit-and-go events will be available on demand as capacity and clock permit;</li><li>Commander play is available any time the store is open but may have space limits during paid events.</li></ul><p></p><p><b><u>OTHER CHANGES:</u></b></p><p><b>Facemasks are no longer required as of May 28th.</b> The science says once you're in a room for half an hour with someone, you have aerosol saturation and masks no longer help (in either direction). This means if the tables are open, facemasks become a matter of personal preference rather than business policy. However facemasks are still permitted and we will not tolerate any harassment of visitors or staff for opting to wear a mask. Some folks have immunovulnerable family members or other circumstances where they may wish to have every last grain of potential benefit. We at DSG respect this and we will insist upon this courtesy at all times on our premises.</p><p><b>All sanctioned events require Wizards EventLink registration</b> (for capacity management) and we will waitlist players in-store when events are full on EventLink. Any EventLink registered players not present at the start time of the event may be dropped in favor of enrolling a player on the waitlist. Note that this means you must have a smart device or phone to play in sanctioned events. Wizards's rules, not ours. You receive pairings and enter your results through your device. We are new to this too, so bear with us as we all learn together how this stuff works. Wizards Event Reporter is defunct now and there are no more DCI Numbers.</p><p><b>There is now a venue fee</b>. Event entry covers the venue fee as it is a component of the entry price. Admission to tables without entering an event (i.e. Commander open play or Pokemon League) costs $9.99 per day (after tax) <b>OR</b> ONE DSG STAR per day. (The cost to acquire a DSG Star is essentially $2, as you are awarded one for every $20 in purchases, and ten DSG Stars may be redeemed at any time for 10% off any purchase.) DSG Stars are our electronic reward system that is automatically maintained by Square, our credit card processor and point-of-sale system.</p><p><b>The venue fee won't go into effect until June 1st</b>. Holiday weekend fun! But also a chance for everyone to return and get used to the new event layout and let us shake out any glitches.</p><p><b>Events will get priority seating</b>. With our seating reduced to 36 (regular) or 48 (high capacity), paid events will be allocated reserved tables, and open play will have capacity limits going into event times.</p><p><b>Event entry fees are changing</b>. Booster Draft entry is now $19.99 after tax, including venue fee. Constructed daily event entry is now $9.99 after tax, including venue fee. Special events will be priced on a case-by-case basis.</p><p><b>Tables are exclusively reserved for Magic, Pokemon, Final Fantasy, and video game play</b>. We are no longer supporting in-store play of any other games. Nothing against those games, it's just not part of the DSG business plan moving forward.</p><p><b><u>REALLY GOOD NEWS STILL TO COME:</u></b></p><p>We have some awesome special events coming up. In addition to the official stuff like the Modern Horizons 2 prerelease week, the Chilling Reign take-home prerelease, and the Forgotten Realms prerelease week, we are setting up even more fun events: DSG stowed a lot of surplus product during the pandemic so that we could all play formats that never had a chance for in-store play. Time Spiral Remastered drafts, Zendikar/Kaldheim/Strixhaven Prerelease sealed deck events, and more! Stay tuned for scheduling on these great experiences!</p><p><b><u>QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:</u></b></p><p>That's all the news for now, so if you learned what you needed to know, you can skip the rest of the article. Below, I will set out some additional details and some of our rationale for these decisions for those who are interested to know.</p><p>Q: Why only three evenings of events every week?</p><p><i>A: We think there needs to be time to ramp back into full operation. Also, before COVID, events early in the week often did not fire, while events later in the week generally did. We don't know if that trend will continue, and we will be monitoring event results over the months ahead to get a sense of the player community's mindset. If we do have to make a change later, it's far easier to add events than to take events away. And for things like prerelease weeks, we can still run pods earlier in the day on Mondays through Wednesdays, for those players who aren't at work or school.</i></p><p>Q: What's with the venue fee? I want to hang out and play Commander all day for free!</p><p><i>A: We expect a certain amount of unhappiness on this because a thing that was free is now not free. However, this is the new reality. We learned during COVID that the "sea of tables" game store business model is just flat-out worse than the shopping-only model. The old way is labor-inefficient and space-inefficient and makes it more difficult for us to provide a good customer experience in a multitude of ways. But we are players too and we always intended to bring back in-store play. It just can no longer be a promotional expense now. </i></p><p><i>This change is also extremely overdue in the tabletop world. Venue fees are commonplace in e-sports and nobody even thinks about it anymore.</i></p><p><i>We deliberately crafted a venue fee structure that is effectively free for players who do business regularly with us -- many of our long-time customers have hundreds of DSG Stars on their accounts, and are often event players anyway who will not incur a separate table charge. By contrast, the venue fee might be cost-prohibitive for players who do not typically transact with us, whether buying or selling, and who do not enter paid events.</i></p><p>Q: Can I use store credit to pay the venue fee rather than earning and spending a DSG Star?</p><p><i>A: Yes, of course!</i></p><p>Q: Can I use store credit to pay event entry and have it still include the venue fee?</p><p><i>A: Yes, of course!</i></p><p>Q: Have you considered a membership plan rather than pay-by-day?</p><p><i>A: We did evaluate this extensively. We found that, on balance, memberships look like a bad value for most of our players. The biggest problem is what happens when life gets busy and you don't get to come in very often. You feel like you had to pay (often on an automatic credit card charge) and didn't get your money's worth out of it. Feelbads, plain and simple.</i></p><p><i>And let's face it, there are too many subscriptions dripping each of our credit cards every month. We don't want to encumber you with yet another recurring bill.</i></p><p><i>Membership timing also sets up bad incentives, like if you have final exams this week and summer break starting next week, you don't want to start a membership right now because you don't get to really use it until afterward... but what if the night you REALLY need a break is TONIGHT? Or if you are about to change jobs and you don't have a firm schedule yet, it's a major feel-bad to pay for table time you might end up unable to use.</i></p><p><i>With the DSG Stars option for venue fees, it's a breeze. Your DSG Stars don't expire for a year, so you can wait to use them, and the system automatically keeps track. And you can always just redeem them on purchases if you go a while without needing any for table admission (or you are mainly playing in paid events anyway). Talk to our players who have been using the ten-DSG-Stars-discount regularly, especially for booster box purchases and pre-orders and such. It's an ongoing discount that keeps renewing. It's a reward to everyone who keeps coming back to DSG. It's probably the single best thing we've ever done in terms of successfully setting up win-win incentives for doing business with us.</i></p><p><i>From a logistics perspective, using DSG Stars for venue fees works great because we have a star redemption in the system showing who paid for open play table access that day. So we will be able to verify pretty quickly if someone tried to sneak into the play area. (Don't do it. The rope and stanchion is there as a polite way of deterring this.) We don't have to keep lists or anything. For busy nights we ordered up a bunch of wristbands we can use, like at a concert.</i></p><p>Q: What if I pay my admission into the 6:30pm draft at 12:01pm? Do I get table access all day for no additional cost?</p><p><i>A: Yes. We will watch to see if this presents any issues, but we don't expect it to.</i></p><p>Q: What if the draft then doesn't fire?</p><p><i>A: Your draft admission will roll over to a future draft. Event admissions are non-refundable (and always have been at most game stores, so this is nothing new). Seriously, though, we're not jerks. We want you to get your money's worth. In the unlikely event drafts continue to come and go without ever launching, we will figure out a make-good transaction for you.</i></p><p>Q: OK then, what if I pay my DSG Star for table access and then decide to enter the draft that night and it does fire. Do I get my star back?</p><p><i>A: Yes. Again, you really don't need to worry about these kinds of things, but we've already been asked by people who we discussed the changes with and these sorts of concerns were in their feedback. We get it, the first worry is whether something basic like this is going to become a problem. </i></p><p><i>Like I said, we're not jerks. We have no need to double-dip, and the venue fee plan is intended as a cost that will only apply once per day per person. Whatever we might have to do to reconcile that if some weird circumstance comes up, we will take care of it. We got you, fam.</i></p><p>Q: Did you upgrade the tables?</p><p><i>A: Yes! We ended up doing it a little differently than planned, though, because we are less than two years from end-of-lease now and we wanted to make sure the tables we bought would work at the prospective locations we are already evaluating. (Most are very close to where we are located now.) The long and short of it is that we went with heavier-duty tables that are eight feet long, so that standard capacity at three players per side was comfortable, and max cap at four players per side was no worse than max cap before. Multiple spots we've surveyed lay out very nicely with eight-footers but would be too crowded with pairs of six-foot tables per section, and not have enough seating with single six-foot tables per section.</i></p><p><i>The boutique tables we originally planned to bring in didn't look like they were standing up to wear and tear very well in the stores that had them already (in other parts of the country, not local competitors). Based on feedback from those store owners and their experiences, we decided to double down on ruggedness and let tablecloths and table mats provide the aesthetics.</i></p><p>Q: What's up with the game exclusivity? No more Dungeons & Dragons?</p><p><i>A: I'm afraid so. In fact, D&D is already being phased out from DSG, including this week's enormous dice sale on most specialty dice and dice packs, and soon the last of the sourcebooks will be sold off and not restocked. So 2021 is the end of the line for RPGs at DSG; we've enjoyed having them (and I have been playing since 1st edition and the basic red box) but the pandemic accelerated the market's move toward virtualization, remote play, specialized play venues, and other market segments DSG just isn't in. Even discounting the books hasn't mattered. And as a matter of course, we're not supporting gameplay for TCGs we don't carry. We see the appeal of new hotness like Flesh & Blood and Digimon, but right now we're focused on continuing to improve our Magic and Pokemon offerings, and we keep Final Fantasy TCG around because we have a special relationship with that player community and with the publisher, Square Enix.</i></p><p><i>Board games are basically gone except for a small remnant that are video-game licensed or related; we moved away from general tabletop in 2020 when it became clear that our Amazon sales of board games etc were far higher than our in-store sales of them would ever be, and labor constraints and publisher channel restrictions made it unfeasible to continue in the category even as a local/online hybrid. We discontinued miniature wargames in 2019. We discontinued comics in 2018.</i></p><p><i>This years-long process is something we internally have been referring to as DSG's "Great Narrowing" and it's something of a controversial move in the industry where diversity of product is promoted as axiomatic. I believe that approach works in different markets, especially smaller metros and rural areas where high labor efficiency can couple with a broad product spread to create a strong unified hobby offering. In Phoenix, a tech-heavy major metro with high competitive saturation, I think an independent store is best positioned if it dominates a single category. In 2022, DSG will be splitting into two companies, one for trading card games and one for video games. (I have been foreshadowing here on the blog that this split was coming; it's just a matter of timing now, and is likely to be the major shift at end-of-lease as I discussed above in the answer to the table upgrade question.)</i></p><p>Q: Why are you still closed on Sundays?</p><p><i>A: That decision is subject to change later but it has been an enormous quality-of-life improvement for our staff and ownership. We do like money, so it's possible that as business ramps back up to full power, we will find that being open on Sundays is unavoidable. And as with the event days in the first question, it's a lot easier to add an open day later than it is to take one away.</i></p><p>Q: What will you do if the venue fee plan doesn't work?</p><p><i>A: That depends on what's "not working" about it. For business purposes, empty tables during non-event times are preferable to having non-monetized open play taking place. If we experience significant problems with logistics, enforcement, or other aspects of venue-fee-supported open play, we will probably close the tables except at event times. As players ourselves, we consider this an undesirable step and we don't want to move in this direction.</i></p><p>Q: Where are you getting your facemask science?</p><p><i>A: I saved this one for last because there's a lot to say here. But first, credentials. DSG's managing partner, yours truly, worked for almost a decade at the Arizona Department of Health Services as a senior analyst. I have extensive familiarity with public health, epidemiology, and health policy administration. Our decisions throughout COVID since the very earliest days of the pandemic have been close to flawless in terms of reading the data, assessing the news, reading the trends, and making the best decisions for the protection and safety of visitors and staff. Long story short, we know what we're doing and we stand on our record.</i></p><p><i>Moreover, the CDC has released guidance within the last week that vaccinated people can cease masking indoors. We're not going to police peoples' vaccination status, but if you're genuinely worried about catching COVID... well, you should probably get vaccinated. Just go to CVS, it's call-ahead or even walk-up in most cases now. I took a chance on a walk-up a few weeks ago and missed an open service window by minutes, and they just had me come back the next morning for the shot.</i></p><p><i>Small businesses spent the last year getting a great deal of public pushback against facemask requirements, regardless of whether those requirements were imposed by state or local laws or orders, or whether they were put into place by the business owner. We required facemasks at DSG from May 4, 2020 (the day we were allowed to reopen the doors) to May 27, 2021. Over a year. We took a lot of heat for it even though for over 11 months of that time, the policy wasn't even our choice, but was a governor's executive order, and then a City of Chandler municipal order. For the last few weeks we have continued the mask requirement as a business policy on our own decision, because we follow the science and there was still a non-granular health benefit to being masked with the tables closed and most visitors being in the building only a short time. The negative response in recent weeks has been significant and reprehensible, including a visitor bullying one of our staff members over the matter. (If that person returns when I am in the store, they are getting a lifetime ban from DSG.)</i></p><p><i>So now that the long year of facemasking at DSG is over, we hold everyone who harassed us about facemasks in absolute contempt. This is a private business on private property; respect our rules or don't come in. Is that libertarian enough for you? DSG has been, from the very start, a politics-free entertainment space. No harassment. No bullying. No discrimination. No proselytizing. I shouldn't have to say this but I just spent a year having the public prove to me that I guess I <b>do</b> have to say it. No matter which jersey you wear, park your politics at the door, and then come in and play some games. Let's get back on track.</i></p><p>For those of you who showed immense support during these last 14 months of uncertainty and upheaval: Thank you. Thank you so very much. We see you. We remember you. Moving forward, the decisions we make and our efforts to make DSG better, are done with your enjoyment in mind. Yours specifically. We specifically want this place to make you as happy as it reasonably can. We want it to be the place that was worth you going the extra mile to make sure you would get to enjoy again. Hopefully we will live up to that commitment. You are awesome.</p><p>See you all at DSG! Shuffle up and draw seven!</p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-35448334996414250542020-10-22T14:15:00.002-07:002020-10-22T14:15:30.852-07:00Who Turned Out the Lights... Again?<p>Can this election just be over? There is always a pronounced <a href="https://www.retaildive.com/news/how-the-presidential-election-is-distracting-holiday-shoppers/426406/">negative effect on retail sales</a> during the U.S. Presidental election years, because consumers value certainty. There will be a boost in sales no matter who wins. (Joe Biden is <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/where-the-presidential-race-stands-before-the-last-debate/">going to win</a>.) Despite my incorrect prediction of the election outcome four years ago, I am confident enough in the underlying principle that this article is practically a reprint of <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2016/10/who-turned-out-lights.html">the one I wrote at the time</a>.</p><p>In 2012, Desert Sky Games was still newly opened and did not expect much in the way of sales. In 2016, we were almost finished with our first lease and had a miserable month thanks to the combination of a contentious election between Clinton and Trump, the Crystal Commerce "Red October" <a href="http://status.crystalcommerce.com/incidents/911hq0d647bc">outages</a>, the new Magic set Kaladesh being poorly received on initial release, and a lurch in the ever-increasing shift of general merchandise shopping toward the mass market.</p><p>Now it's 2020, and in addition to a hellscape pandemic year with financial ruin upon many, we've somehow got an even <i>more</i> contentious election between Trump and Biden, a change-of-generation with new Playstation 5 and Xbox Series consoles already sold out on pre-order, the new Magic set Zendikar Rising underperforming at the gate thanks to a slate of Standard bans and supply chain chaos, and DSG isn't even in any other categories anymore besides TCGs and video games, which is just as well because I hear nothing but snafu stories coming from those as well.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKjpka_1-5h4o8UrW9uvxrv4L1gd8i4wOc-3RdhMz2ekqQV_AunIsKyxJE5nT0v5-BXMnVpYxDSVMcsbnZf-GxsgPMHIEkIJOnWkCaK_JiT2AHptTJ2lS4zIPBBPD6yAHsoBU5PWLKhkM/s1300/45837880-stock-market-concept-stock-market-crisis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="882" data-original-width="1300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKjpka_1-5h4o8UrW9uvxrv4L1gd8i4wOc-3RdhMz2ekqQV_AunIsKyxJE5nT0v5-BXMnVpYxDSVMcsbnZf-GxsgPMHIEkIJOnWkCaK_JiT2AHptTJ2lS4zIPBBPD6yAHsoBU5PWLKhkM/s320/45837880-stock-market-concept-stock-market-crisis.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>The election will ultimately resolve out. Like I said, regardless of who wins, people will turn the page and go back to buying things, when they can (go stimulus!). The Nintendo Switch is having a banner year so I have no real worries there; retro is doing fine, the PS5 and XS* will both drive tremendous sales and trade-ins, and Zendikar Rising and the forthcoming Commander Legends have enough great cards in them to keep players interested. The Expedition lands returned for their second installment since 2015's Battle for Zendikar, and this time the shocklands did not appear since they just rotated out from the Guilds year, but the fetchlands did appear, along with a great assortment of other most-wanteds, and players are loving it. Magic in 2020, strictly as a product slate, is far and away the best it's ever been. I wish it were possible for players to come to the store and play it.</p><p>Once the pandemic ends on November 4th (eyeroll) we can maybe even re-open the game tables before too much longer. I don't mean that COVID wasn't real or any such nonsense; it is obviously both real and serious. But once the election is over, the <i>politicization</i> of the pandemic can start tapering down and we can relegate it to the boring purview of medical professionals and state/local health agencies. There are COVID vaccine trials already underway and I know personally some people participating in them. The trials are being handled like the national security priority it is, and once a vaccine clears trials, it will be wise to go ahead and get it, rather than holding out or waiting for a better/revised option.</p><p>My divorce and the sale of my house are continuing to dominate my non-business time, so articles here on The Backstage Pass will likely continue to be sporadic. Hang tight and we'll be back on track before you know it. I have also been invited to do some article writing by one of our strategic partner companies here in the industry so I will be delighted to put a spotlight on that when it's time.</p><p>Have a great Halloween weekend, and whether the election goes your way or not, I hope you have a better end of 2020 than the middle was!</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-7808506912490122020-10-12T10:14:00.000-07:002020-10-12T10:14:07.150-07:00Your System May Reboot Multiple Times During This Update<p>I recently <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/09/split-infinitive.html">wrote here about my impending divorce</a> from Stephanie, and that process has been consuming an outsized portion of my at-home time, particularly getting in extra reps with the kids. I wanted to pay extra attention to them while they were still permanently living with me, since that era was about to end and even partial custody is never the same. There was something of an emotional payload. I don't discuss that sort of thing here on the weblog, but that kind of mental processing really does take all the punch right out of me in terms of mustering up enthusiasm for the business. </p><p>As such, Desert Sky Games has mostly plodded along these last few months, and especially the last few weeks. Thankfully, my teams can largely manage the movement of TCG merch quite competently without me standing over them, and TCGs and video games are now the only supercategories left. I have relegated the remainder of our RPG stock to a perpetually-discounted rack just to serve our nearby regulars, and board game stock is already reduced to titles with video-game-related IP, such as Fallout and Boss Monster. So that's a thing that got done. The "hyperfocus" plan is well underway. As I've alluded to <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/08/insert-coins-someday-soon.html">in past articles here</a>, it will become correct for business for me to split TCGs from video games and probably divide DSG into two separate stores. There is no need for me to attempt to do that under what remains of our current lease, so I'm not going to, but the future writing is on the wall.</p><p>As I write this article, the divorce wheels are in motion and finally Stephanie has leased her own place and moved out of our house, where I remain. The housing market is so insane right now that we can't help but sell; it's going to afford us a complete debt wipe plus living expenses for a long time to come, and that's the kind of thing that can really help combat the coping stress from a life change like this.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7vzdEUlZdTx0cjpejRHDtC2x8Vxi8UocEyTaw4vCzRwv1rP9lls87H8DQMO-4ZHepwrEX9ExTov3ML4Qt_klGZRCSZk5zHbTTRDNcb6KjpfUPCVHZt1uSb7DjE0unafj4JlUROtAluFU/s2048/7A70C550-29EF-46B5-A3D5-8EFBFDFCBEAF.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7vzdEUlZdTx0cjpejRHDtC2x8Vxi8UocEyTaw4vCzRwv1rP9lls87H8DQMO-4ZHepwrEX9ExTov3ML4Qt_klGZRCSZk5zHbTTRDNcb6KjpfUPCVHZt1uSb7DjE0unafj4JlUROtAluFU/s320/7A70C550-29EF-46B5-A3D5-8EFBFDFCBEAF.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p>I will be living in the house while we sell it, and I couldn't help but be struck by the emptiness of it after the move-out. Because of school logistics, we're primarily housing the children with Steph. I will get plenty of custody time, but "main home" is with Mom, for them. For the weekend of the move, my parents blessedly offered to take them up north to their cabin and let the kids spend the weekend playing in the forest and not watching all their stuff get hauled out of the only home they've ever known, and when they got back, their bedrooms and such were "ready" for them at Steph's apartment. We hope that softened the blow a little bit for the kiddos, and I do get them next weekend already so they're going to be back with me five days after the drop-off, which is good. Kids get used to routines and that's exactly what we plan to give them.</p><p>So over the weekend my girlfriend Hannah joined me and we went about the business of resetting the house for sale staging. The market is so hot we barely have to do anything more than an as-is sale, but on the advice of our Realtor, we're putting in some targeted cleaning and polishing to emphasize open space and light and make the place desirable. But it's so <i>empty</i> to me. Moreover, it's going to be empty again, and my ultimate destination new home will be empty, so I get to do this all over anywhere between now and the end of the year or so, once the house sells. Then, I figure to rent for a year or two and then re-buy into the house market. I am gambling that house prices will have settled back down and it will make sense to buy. If I'm wrong, oh well, that's the risk I take.</p><p>How do I take this experience and glean value from it for the business?</p><p>Well, as I mentioned above, the store lease is in the backswing now and we now get to start planning ahead to our next move. After the difficulties from our 2017 move and spending the better part of 2018 paying for it, I need another move like I need a hole in my head, but the business reality is that I am personally risk-averse and I have a fiduciary duty to the DSG investors and we are going to make the play that reduces our vulnerability to future pandemics and other macroeconomic disasters as much as possible. We realize that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-try-to-prepare-for-the-next-black-swan-you-cant-11587720630">black swan events are bad as a basis for policy</a>, but when you have tectonic plates shifting within the industry anyway (MTG Arena, crowdfunding's ascendancy in general tabletop, Amazon as a general rule, increasing minimum wages, comic distribution chaos, and so on), a black swan mitigation strategy can be something that dovetails into a general push toward ruggedness.</p><p>I've joked that I'm all-in on the 1000-square-foot shoebox now, but that really is too small, and a COVID vaccine will exist at some point and I'll still want to host meaningful numbers of players for nightly tournaments. We assuredly do not need 6400 square feet of glory and the biggest independent game store location in the entire metro. So the next facility will be somewhere in between. I really wish the original Gilbert location landlords had played ball with us on our lease renewal rate, rather than holding to the higher price, because that location was a bit on the small side for the post-COVID world, but a lot closer to where we want to be than the current size, and it sits half-empty to this day. Our current landlord is fairly accommodating about suite modifications, so for all we know we might be able to stay put and just reduce footage. Or else that becomes the point at which we separate the TCG store from the video game store and move forward under two different banners with two different (smaller) doorways. This whole scenario is not something to be solved now, but it's on the 2021-2022 itinerary.</p><p>If I can arrange that sweet-spot next lease, whichever of the above permutations occurs, I'll ink up and the team will get to reboot DSG once again into an empty building, and convert it by means of labor and materials from a vanilla shell into a Friendly Local Game Store that the community can enjoy and embrace as its own. The great thing about a <i>tabula rasa</i> facility is that it can become so much more.</p><p>Between multiple home moves and store moves, by the time we get to around 2023, I will hope to be situated for at least half a decade in whatever buildings I've managed to occupy. Let us hope that the hobby game industry is behaving favorably by then, so that I may.</p><p><br /></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-11049162297597626472020-09-15T06:30:00.000-07:002020-09-15T06:30:03.743-07:00Cash Cow ConundraEvery business has its meal ticket. That is, every business does that thing that results in must-have revenue at sustainable margins. There is typically some hedging or add-on business, but it's ancillary to the main event. We're talking about the core offering, the goods or services that draw most customers to the business.<br />
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">"Cows Cowing" - Photo (C)2020 Michael Bahr</span></div>
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For a small specialty business, the greatest success comes when the meal ticket is resilient. When it's ready to withstand competition, technological change, variance in customer interest, and economic difficulties. A product line or service offering that meets those criteria becomes a <b>cash cow</b> for that business. It is the driver of profitability, the reinforcer of brand, and the guarantor of payroll.<br />
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The pop culture, comic, collectible, and hobby game business offers a choice of product and service categories to stores like Desert Sky Games, and many of them have the potential to be cash cows if properly developed. There is a danger, however. A store owner who misevaluates how the cash cow factors apply to their business risks losing big. This can include changes of landscape, and a store could be in a poor position to adapt. Imagine if you will a devoted indie wargaming store, featuring Warhammer and the next four or five most popular minis games, three or more paint racks, multiple tool and supply options, appropriate organized play, and matching ancillaries. That seems pretty great until Games Workshop drops a Warhammer store right nearby. That devoted wargaming store still has ways to make money, and the Warhammer store is <i>supposed to</i> demo the product and introduce new gamers to the hobby to the indie's theoretical benefit, but in practice what often ends up happening is that serious Warhammer players gravitate to the company store, the brand vertical, because of exclusives, stock assurance, brand recognition, any number of factors. Warhammer is a higher-voltage minis wargame than every other minis wargame in print, combined, and the indie suddenly sees its product mix become far less viable. It would be like a firearms store suddenly not being able to carry Glocks.<br />
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The galaxy-brain-meme version of understanding what makes a meal ticket into a cash cow is to understand when it's possible to harness that and then commoditize another category for competitive advantage. The classic example of this, which I've cited before, is of course Microsoft's original deal with IBM to provide the Disk Operating System (DOS) for the original PC. IBM did not insist on an exclusive deal because what other computer manufacturer of the time could outsell them? But by seeing that software was the real platform, Microsoft got to make that their cash cow while commoditizing hardware to where any PC clone with a compatible BIOS could run Microsoft's DOS and thus <i>run IBM PC software without having to purchase an IBM PC</i>. The cheapest clone available at the needed horsepower level would be enough to fire up WordPerfect or AutoCAD or the day's latest computer games, and IBM was left out in the cold earning nothing on that sale.<br />
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Amazon commoditized books (and commoditizes other consumer goods even now) in order to sell web infrastructure services, advertising services, marketplace platform services, data mining, and more. Everyone thinks of Amazon as being in the business of selling things, but they don't give one whit about that. Selling things isn't their meal ticket; selling things is the lure, the attraction, the catch. Amazon makes their money by owning and operating the infrastructure that benefits from consumer goods <i>being</i> deliverable-on-demand commodities. All they had to do was fulfill their own prophecy and the money firehose swung permanently to the "on" position for them.<br />
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There are many, many game stores now who have taken things about one layer of abstraction into the commoditization vs cash cow meal ticket concept, and their solution is this: Sealed TCG product is the commodity, to be sold at a nickel over cost, and singles are the cash cow. This is only partly wrong and only partly stupid. <br />
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First, let's dispose of the singles question by observing that they are indeed a meal ticket cash cow if properly deployed at scale and transacted with expertise. That is probably the most accessible cash cow from a newcomer vantage point in terms of reaching bare profitability. It takes a while to ramp up from there, but it's doable. If you are in town up against a Grand Prix dealer, God help you, but even then it can be done. The wobbliest leg of the singles equation is competition; they stand up pretty well to technological change (so far), variance in customer interest, and economic difficulties.<br />
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Second, addressing the commoditization of sealed product. Sealed TCG product when it's not Magic or Pokemon, and sometimes Yugimans, is a bad hold in virtually all cases. There has been a resurgence lately in the price of some out-of-print product, such as the booster box prices for the old Decipher Star Wars CCG. But in most cases, if you try to hold sealed TCG product that isn't Magic or Pokemon, you end up with hard-to-move chaff with little-to-no value, that depends for its consumer value on a robust tournament community that often does not exist. Sealed product that is Magic and to a lesser extent Pokemon, is the opposite of this. It is not only evergreen but perpetually gains value in almost all cases. Every last booster pack of Magic on the shelf is going to sell. One day, one way, to some player, it's gone. Every last one. You don't have to do anything special but have it after the other proximate options no longer do, and at a price that the player immediately in front of the counter finds palatable. So there is <i>no need</i> to commoditize TCG sealed. A store can allow the meat on that bone to nourish.<br />
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In the Before Times, when tournaments were a thing, many stores bemoaned the competitive need to run events at a loss or breakeven in order to drive sales of TCG product, both sealed and singles. While using organized play in this manner can be frustrating for labor load reasons and others, it is actually a smart further step on the logical approach to the competitive formula described in this article. TCG singles <i>and</i> sealed can both become cash cows when you commoditize <i>events</i>!<br />
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Without any doubt there exists some AHA! epiphany about what can be commoditized next so that the store can monetize events directly at the expense of a thing, and maybe that thing is something to do with streaming. It's tough to say because streaming is, in essence, a commodity <i>ab initio</i>. Virtually nobody who is doing it is making any real money except for a tippy-top niche few who have caught lightning in a bottle and successfully executed the conversion on that. So I don't know if it's streaming, but I suspect it is not. It's also not coffee, because if you can embrace the reality of being a restauranteur and bring adequate deployment capital to bear, coffee monetizes <i>itself</i> Outstandingly Well Thanks For Asking and becomes an even further buttress supporting the notion of relegating events to the altar of commoditization. Food is an order of magnitude more involved than coffee alone, but is the same conceptual idea. Kiddie camps? Escape rooms? There's a lot being tried right now, and some of it is working in some cases. This is probably the leading edge of where the hobby game industry is right now, 2020, or well as of March 2020 anyway, on the question of where the money is earned in TCGs and tabletop.<br />
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This concept leads to further discussion and I think there are better people than me to expand upon it, so I am going to leave it with something of an open hook here and encourage anyone with insight on their commoditization vs cash cow meal ticket situation to weigh in on your social media platform of choice (the share button should be right below) or your blog or whatever. Let's hear it.<br />
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What does DSG do? Our cash cow is video games. Our meal tickets that come up a bit short of cash cow status are TCG singles and to some extent TCG sealed. We leave a lot of money on the table in the TCG category in order to compete in a crowded local market. We commoditize board games, selling them at deep discounts purely as a marketing tool and an arrival-encourager. We also commoditize used movies/music/media as well since it's a logistical appendage to our video game business. In the words of the Portal turrets, we do what we must because we can. Anyway, this combined approach is tailored to the combination of markets in which DSG does business and competes (Phoenix area, East Valley, our own website, TCGPlayer Marketplace, Amazon, and to a lesser extent eBay and Facebook), and may not necessarily be right or even profitable for all stores.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-89600331089194958042020-08-20T06:30:00.000-07:002020-08-20T06:30:01.451-07:00Insert Coins Someday SoonOur niche industry has been hard-hit by the COVID pandemic, particularly board game cafés and stores that heavily allocated focus and resources to organized play. The cafés have <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/07/hobby-comic-and-game-store-closures.html" target="_blank">already been massacred to some extent</a> and the ones that are still open right now and haven't failed yet are either those who were able to raise some tide-over capital or those with a rugged backbone of orthogonal revenue of one kind or another, such as retail. DSG has been fortunate to have a strong video game business and a strong Magic singles e-commerce business, because in-store sales of general tabletop have cratered deeply since March.<br />
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The sector that COVID has just utterly murdered, though, is the industry of coin-operated amusement machines and vending, or just "arcades" or "coin-op" for short. As <a href="https://www.10news.com/news/coronavirus/covid-19-restrictions-crushing-coin-operated-game-industry?fbclid=IwAR0C_iQWEDcld2GSlfQr-_l9QTS3wO_nKN-Sw_Up51s0l9bML-oA08VIei4" target="_blank">ABC 10 San Diego reports</a>, coin-op routing in particular has been choked to zero, with no revenue and unavoidable layoffs, and hulks of equipment sitting inert in the back corners of restaurants, bars, and in storage.<br />
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It has been much the same for DSG's Vintage Arcade. We recently added all kinds of amazing gear, including a bunch of modern Japanese candy fighter widescreen cabinets and a bunch more sit-down racers, and they've all been taking up square footage and earning nothing for six months.<br />
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If people can't (1) congregate and (2) touch things, well, it's difficult to see viability for the coin-op business. We are fortunate somewhat in that the powers-that-be have determined that COVID's spread by surface contamination is not a serious vector, whereas aerosol and droplet transmission remains significant. Moreover, we are fortunate in Arizona that the summer <a href="https://www.azdhs.gov/preparedness/epidemiology-disease-control/infectious-disease-epidemiology/covid-19/dashboards/index.php" target="_blank">finally did its number on COVID</a>, with an assist from more widespread mask usage, dropping our death rate to statistical insignificance and our spread rate to chalk.<br />
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That provides hope that perhaps the arcade can re-open soon. Across the continent, COVID stats vary, so this may not be true for coin-op businesses everywhere. But in Arizona, the numbers really do suggest that we've reached a point of relative safety for this.<br />
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Re-opening our entire game room is not going to happen until, at soonest, the expiration of Wizards of the Coast's sanctioned play suspension. This currently is set to end in late September after the At-Home Prerelease Event for Zendikar Rising. We can't 100% forecast what the COVID stats will look like overall by then, so it may transpire that Wizards extends the suspension, and we will be fine if that is the case. Arizona's stats might also worsen sharply, which would have us hold off until a later date. In any event, we are quietly preparing for a <i>possible</i> re-opening of the game room at the end of September or early October, at a deeply reduced capacity.<br />
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Taking what we know in the previous two paragraphs, we're about ready to turn the arcade back on, most probably to occur in time for Labor Day weekend. There are some final upgrades and maintenance we want to take care of first, and we're going to move some of the equipment to take advantage of excess floor that won't be needed anymore for tabletop events. We will be paying attention to control panel cleaning, there will be more space between and around machines than arcades typically provided in the Before Times, and we'll finally get to use the new ceiling lighting profile that keeps reflected panels out of the way of game screens. I do not expect throngs of people to show up to play in the arcade initially. But it will be nice to see it start up again and I'm sure there's some pent-up itch to throw down a few Street Fights, hit the shooters, get our retro on, and slam some silver-ball.<br />
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On that note, there is a subtopic that I don't want to overlook.<br />
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We've had six months to gather data and observe the landscape, and we've had to draw a conclusion. Dungeons & Dragons at DSG is, alas, over. The D&D player community has adapted to COVID splendidly, with software-enabled remote play, in-home play among people with a reduced exposure profile, and so on. Reduced sales have tracked these changes, and D&D is in a gradual liquidation status right now at the store.<br />
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In essence, D&D as a game evolved in a way similar to comics, where the market compressed to where the only necessary independent brick/mortar retail presence is the tier-1 FLGS that utterly masters RPGs, and the majority of buyers will get what they need another way, either having it shipped to them or buying digital assets in the first place. Now, I've loved D&D since literally the 1983 Basic Set red box and B2 Keep on the Borderlands, but I don't have the deep expertise in the RPG category that local stores like Imperial Outpost have, or that the late Gateway Games had. As it was with <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/11/horus-hiatus.html" target="_blank">Warhammer in late 2019</a>, this is a situation where I cannot provide a best-in-class experience to the D&D player, so I need to get out of the way. <br />
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This is one of those categorical seismic shifts we knew would happen one day, and current events simply nudged it <i>very hard</i> such that it happened sooner. A bit of an acid test of our decision on exiting RPGs as a category is, will players have a substantially worse experience in their games as a result of what we're doing? It's difficult to argue that they would.<br />
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We have D&D product still inbound for a couple more months for sourcebooks, dice, accessories, and so forth, because of ordering lead times in distribution. Because of this, our players will be able to enjoy some sweet deals and offers as we price those last few things to move. Pending manufacturing timelines in China for various accessories, we think the last D&D item at DSG will be the Icewind Dale sourcebook and custom dice set.<br />
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We are also liquidating board games other than those that are tied to video-game licensed IP. COVID really did nudge things, and what I think it did in the big picture is just skip us a few years ahead to where the market was going to be anyway. Your FLGS that masters general tabletop is going to have to master <i>just</i> that, because it won't have mastery of Magic the way the specialist stores like DSG do, and vice versa. I can imagine a further future convergence where general tabletop stores split off from wargaming even more than we've already seen; most major competitive metros now have independent FLGSes that are "Warhammer stores" and do little else. Obviously in the rural areas, multi-classing fighter/mage/cleric will still be viable for independent game stores.<br />
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An inconvenient truth I have been staring down is that it will probably become correct within the next two years for DSG to split its Magic and video game categories into two separate businesses. I'm probably going to be late to that decision as well, like I was to the separation of comics, wargames, RPGs, and board games. But one thing I learned while working in government is that it is often best to let things play out a little longer or further beyond the point at which I would have preferred to make the call. The clarity gained goes a long way toward galvanizing the decision and putting the business on firmer footing for its <i>next</i> steps.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-79557467615248163852020-08-11T06:30:00.000-07:002020-08-11T06:30:03.834-07:00Eight is More Than EnoughI'm not just talking about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9AXU2rWH88" target="_blank">filling our lives with love</a>, but also celebrating Desert Sky Games making it to the 8-year mark, having opened to the public officially on August 10, 2012. Not bad for any small business, let alone one that sells nerd wizard poker cards for hundreds of dollars somehow.<br />
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The Backstage Pass has been mostly quiet this summer, and <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/05/summer-break-2019-edition.html" target="_blank">unlike last year</a>, this is not an intentional vacation or hiatus. This year, there are many things happening... <i>backstage</i>... both in the business and in my personal life, and they are significantly impacting my writing time. I can't really talk about most of that yet, for reasons that will become crystal clear once I am at liberty to do so.<br />
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Last month's <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/07/hobby-comic-and-game-store-closures.html" target="_blank">semi-annual Game Store Closures article</a> was also quite a bit more work to compile this time, owing to the massacre of small specialty retail by some damned virus this year. I am delighted to see that post already in the Top 5 all-time most read articles here on the blog. If some more official source were tracking those closures in a more statistically rugged manner, it might be more useful to the industry and better for our position in the world of business overall, but until that happens, I'll keep offering up a favorable alternative to no documentation at all.<br />
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Documentation is underdone anywhere that there is not either a profit incentive or a legal requirement, and there's probably no real solution to that. When I worked for <a href="https://www.azdhs.gov/" target="_blank">AZDHS</a>, a routine part of my job as a senior analyst was exhaustive documentation of enactments, changes, amendments, repeals, and so forth, of applicable statutes, and more often, content in Title 9 of the Arizona Administrative Code. This documentation was crucial because I was also assigned to the review, drafting, development, and promulgation of code content outright. Naturally, both statutory authority and Title 1 of the Code (maintained by the Department of Administration) required that these processes be followed. It was essential that the work of <i>literally governing the state</i> be able to continue administering statutory and regulatory authority even if the executives, analysts, attorneys, or whoever worked on it at any point in time, became unavailable for any reason -- moving on to other work, retirement, even death. Plenty of law stretches back a century or more in origin, even out here on the frontier where we were only a territory until 1912.<br />
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I have been a fan of the Canadian progressive rock band Rush all my life, and I spent many years collecting any recordings and memorabilia I could find. By contrast to what I experienced at AZDHS, in Rush's fandom, documentation was mostly voluntary. This is why, until Rush were years into their careers, almost nobody was documenting their performance history (sometimes referred to as a "tourography") and until the <i>later</i> years of their career when portable technology caught up, almost nobody was documenting most of the performances themselves by means of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrBWZscNR18" target="_blank">audio or video recording</a>. (The creation of "concert bootlegs" or "Recordings Of Indeterminate Origin" was a gray-market practice for a long time, but today in the YouTube and smartphone era, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA3TXNwiCvQ" target="_blank">everyone just records whatever they want</a> and no one cares.) Rush's entire late-1975 "Down the Tubes Tour" in support of the album Caress of Steel is so scantily documented that a whopping <i>one</i> concert recording has ever been found, and it wasn't found until around ten years ago, <i>and it sucks</i>. Eyewitness testimony regarding the setlist for the hometown and (presumed) best show on the tour is a subject of veritable archaeology, and provokes <a href="http://www.therushforum.com/index.php?/topic/91720-rush-concerts-setlists-a-history-lesson/page__st__20#entry3438862" target="_blank">no small amount of disagreement</a> (in a positive way, in mutual hope of getting it right). For a point of comparison, despite the crude tech available in 1980, Led Zeppelin's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tour_Over_Europe_1980" target="_blank">entire final tour is completely documented</a>.<br />
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The Backstage Pass didn't start until late 2014, but I am glad that it has served as documentation, to some extent, of the business itself, in addition to what one might glean about greater industry events from my humble articles. The blog is eternally contemporaneous with the events and issues it addresses, except when there is intentional rear-view mirroring for one reason or another. I'm sure once I depart the business, whatever year that is, I will set to work writing a book about it, and these articles will form the backbone of that manuscript. We have some tumultuous chapters coming up, and I know it's going to be quite a ride.<br />
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The trenches-oriented business reality of the comic and hobby game small specialty retail industry has been even <i>better</i> documented by the likes of <a href="https://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Gary Ray</a> and <a href="https://icv2.com/articles/columns/view/46290/rolling-initiative-how-host-gaming-convention-during-epidemic" target="_blank">Scott Thorne</a>, and we have occasionally seen additional input from various others, ranging from <a href="http://toolazytofail.com/" target="_blank">highly credible</a> to downright <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hihge6FFVw" target="_blank">mötley</a>. I'd be here all night if I started charting the various new media channels that we're seeing content of documentary value from. A lot of this documentation is profit-incentivized, either directly or just as an adjacent way to add value to the writer's top-line enterprise. However it's getting done, it's good that it is. This is a strange pinpoint in time, an unusual intersection of narrow niches of business, technology, social media, hobby pastimes, and fandoms. It's great to realize most of it won't be lost to fading memory when it's over. Not all cultural flashpoints are so lucky, and some that are, get documented mainly in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary" target="_blank">Retrospecticus Format</a> with talking heads telling us how it all went down. That can still be done well, as in the link above, but contemporaneous content is broadly superior.<br />
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In any event, thank you for being along for the ride these past eight years, and for the five-plus years that The Backstage Pass has been chronicling it all. There is so much more I hope to do moving forward both with this writing project and other content creation, but the reality right now is that progress within the business is the most crucial and exciting thing I can be working on most of the time. Hopefully I can sketch enough details down in the meanwhile, that it will be possible to chart and analyze the whirlwind afterward, once the storm has calmed down.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-88877425785028416042020-07-29T06:30:00.000-07:002020-07-29T06:30:00.739-07:00ConstraintsOne of the most stressful aspects of the COVID pandemic for game stores is that it artificially amplifies constraints. Dealing with this day in and day out starts to wear on a store owner, and I start to feel like Keanu Reeves in that new Bill & Ted 3 trailer, when he says, "We've been trying to write this song and save the world our whole lives. And I'm <i>tired</i>, dude."<br />
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You said it, Ted "Theodore" Logan. I'm tired, dude. Tired of every business component taking more work than it should. Tired of getting chewed out by every deadbeat who thinks we should price-match limited edition product pre-orders against the smallest store in town who pre-sold-out their one case of boosters in an hour at a nickel over cost. Tired of having arrival traffic down 90% because people call to check pinpoint stock on Nintendo Switches and virtually nothing downstream of that. And tired of the vocal minority who think we're political puppets or worse for keeping the game room closed and requiring facemasks.<br />
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But I think the amplification of constraints is the most difficult thing, because it forms a vicious circle of interdependency. Here, maybe showing you the moving parts will make this clearer.<br />
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The best Dungeons & Dragons product slate <i>ever</i> is on store shelves today. Right now. We have the best new sourcebooks: Theros, Eberron, and Wildemount, with limited edition covers for two of them. We have a staggering variety of dice in every color and material and in every price range. We have the best miniatures the game has ever had in the WizKids Nolzur's Marvelous line, far higher quality at a lower inflation-adjusted price than even the classic Ral Partha pewters. We have maps, dice trays, dice towers, character folios, and more. And now we have Warlock Tiles, head-and-shoulders the finest immersive terrain components D&D has ever seen. <br />
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Despite all of the above, we've seen only a fraction of the sales we'd usually get in the category. Many of our regular players have been in, and their purchasing makes up essentially all the sales we've gotten of this merch. But a majority of D&D players disappeared with COVID. We don't know what this means. In-store play is, of course, not happening, and I wonder whether it will ever be back. Zoom/Skype style play seems to be thriving. Tangible game elements become somewhat less important then. I've long speculated that the "giant table-sized iPad" appliance might virtualize much of the RPG experience, but we might reach the same effective outcome because of remote play instead of digitally-augmented in-person play. I think there will be a COVID vaccine eventually or it will burn through and be subject to herd immunity, and people will come back to the table to have wonderful times adventuring together. How long before that? A year? Three years?<br />
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So since we placed orders well before the pandemic for current D&D stock, and indeed already owned the bulk of our D&D inventory well in advance of that, we now have a huge amount of somewhat illiquid merchandise, that doesn't ship that well and isn't fast-moving like video games or Magic singles, and that even generous bundle specials only modestly move the needle on. It's not a simple case of $N worth of D&D being on the shelf, where we could liquidate it and have $N. It's the frozen turn rate. We should have $N multiplied many times over as the product comes in, sells, is replaced, sells again, and so on. It's difficult to articulate just how great the scale of this can get to an outside observer.<br />
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That same effect is happening in board games as well. We saw reasonable throughput on board games on our way into the lockdown and shortly after re-opening, and board games are a commodity category for DSG anyway. That means we stock greatest hits and new hotness, and discount it all, in order to push for market share and establish a competitive position against other local stores, without risking our <i>real</i> meal tickets, Magic singles and video games. But now that we're kinda sorta reopened, and people are mostly back to work, the public has all the board games it needs, and is buying far fewer of them from us, even with price tags well below Amazon. They just finished a plate of steak and lobster. They don't need seconds. So it stacks up.<br />
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With the two main general tabletop categories slowing down sales, we see them overflowing their racks. And we can't get more of the kind of racks we use right now because restocks from China are still pending transoceanic shipment. So even though we're the biggest game store in the Valley, we actually don't have enough room for all our merchandise right now. Even with a giant empty floor where the game room used to be. We should use game tables to display merch, perhaps, but (1) that's awful looking, (2) it has to be taken back apart anyway once we can reopen the game room, and (3) we're buying some really nice upgraded tables so we're currently selling off the existing ones.<br />
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Less room up front and lower sales of general tabletop means we need to lean harder on singles sales, where space isn't as big of an issue. But we're also constrained on labor! Fast and furious sales via TCGPlayer since the first stimulus landed have resulted in our million-card inventory being whittled down to, as of this writing, about 450,000 cards. We're still buying every single day, for cash or credit, and it's not enough. We have at least 300k cards in the back office right now in various stages of processing that are not entered into TCGPlayer. We're losing sales every day from people who ask for cards we <i>know</i> we have in the next "waves" to process, but aren't done yet, and are cost-ineffective to deep dive for on an ad-hoc basis. Our existing back-office staff are running at red-line, they have almost zero slow time on the clock.<br />
<br />
So why not add more labor? Ah, but how are we going to pay for it? Sales are coming up shallow in D&D and board games, so we don't have "overflow" revenue available to shift toward Magic labor, which is designed to cover its own normal/ordinary pace of intake and sales, and instead is overwhelmed right now. It's fairly common for a game store with large business components to take from some and give unto others, resource-wise, in an internally Marxist fashion of sorts. But when there isn't any surplus elsewhere, and every department is subsidizing every other, there's no wealth to redistribute. (There's probably a greater political lesson to be taught here, but I'm staying well clear of that.)<br />
<br />
Thus, we have a dire shortage of Magic singles, our highest-volume category, which we actually do own but can't get processed into the system fast enough, for which we badly need labor, which we could afford if every product category were performing even at average levels, but the two general tabletop categories are <i>both</i> running very thin right now, constraining all parts of this resource chain. And thus it is that Griffin and I spend significant parts of our working days plugging in labor wherever it fits, so as to give both front-of-house and back-of-house staff as much unobstructed throughput as possible. <i>And it's still not enough.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I'm tired, dude.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-43180750056877076742020-07-21T06:30:00.000-07:002020-08-20T12:00:32.765-07:00Hobby Comic and Game Store Closures, First Half of 2020<div>
Okaaaaay then. The first-half list for 2020 is short, of course, owing to no particular disruptive events across the industry or our economy.<br />
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If only that were true. What a first half of the year we've all had, and somehow the second half has not started off especially better. Small businesses have taken it on the chin, and we are here to mark the passage of some that took that blow and did not get back up.<br />
<br />
New to this post or to The Backstage Pass? <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/01/hobby-comic-and-game-store-closures.html" target="_blank">Here's what we're doing</a>. These store closure posts are among the highest-read and highest-shared articles I write, and one would think some more official source like <a href="https://www.gama.org/?" target="_blank">GAMA</a> would take up the mantle of tracking this, but I guess not so far.<br />
<br />
Today's list has a tag of "<b>COVID</b>" for stores that cite specifically the pandemic disruption as their cause of closure, or which closed during state shutdowns and were discovered not to have reopened. Obviously a store that was already in trouble might use COVID-19 as an excuse for why they failed, but for the purpose of this article, I am taking it at face value. The situation was bad for everyone except the mass market, and I see no need to flog a corpse. Moreover, stores not closing specifically due to COVID surely were done no favors by the gigantic worldwide mess the pandemic caused.</div>
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<br /></div>
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AND NOW THE LIST.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<b><u>Announced or Discovered Closed: </u></b></div>
<div>
<ol>
<li><i>Chain</i>: GAME (40 stores in UK closing out of ~260) </li>
<li>1000 Lives Gaming (Hartsville, SC) </li>
<li>2nd Chance Games (Milton, WV) <b>COVID</b></li>
<li>42 Ale House (St Francis, WI) </li>
<li>ABC and Toy Zone (Chanhassen, MN) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Action Toys & Collectibles (Jacksonville, FL)</li>
<li>Advantage Games (Northglenn, CO) <b>COVID</b></li>
<li>Aero Hobbies & Games (Santa Monica, CA) </li>
<li>AK Comics (Beloit, WI) </li>
<li>All About Books and Comics (Phoenix, AZ) </li>
<li>Apache Comics (Mesa, AZ)</li>
<li>Apex Gaming Center (Irving, TX) </li>
<li>Baxter's Tempe SAK Gaming (Tempe, AZ) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Big Rapids Hobby Shop (Big Rapids, MI) </li>
<li>Board Game Barrister (Greenfield, WI) Other locations remain open </li>
<li>Boards & Beans (Regina, SK, Canada) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Boardwalk Hobby Shop (Mount Lookout, OH) </li>
<li>Bobe's Hobby House (Pensacola, FL)</li>
<li>Bonanza Books and Comics (Modesto, CA) </li>
<li>CCG-Singles.com (Portland, OR) </li>
<li>ChronoCade (Kalamazoo, MI) </li>
<li>Coffee With Comics (Glendale, AZ) </li>
<li>Collector's Edition (North Little Rock, AR) </li>
<li>Comic Book ER (Cadillac, MI) </li>
<li>The Comic Book Store (Little Rock, AR) </li>
<li>Comics Dungeon (Seattle, WA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Connected Gaming (Phoenix, AZ) </li>
<li>Corner Comics (Kirkland, WA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Critical Strike Games (Edmonds, WA)</li>
<li>Dice Bag Games (Duncan, BC, Canada) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Dice & Donuts (Preston, Lancashire, UK)</li>
<li>The Dragon and Meeple (Los Angeles, CA) </li>
<li>Dragon's Keep Gaming and Miniatures (Portland, OR) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Dragon's Lair WarGames and Hobby Supplies (Shreveport, LA) </li>
<li>Emerald Phoenix Comics (Aldergrove, BC, Canada) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Empire Collectibles (San Diego, CA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Ever Green Game and Hobby (Missoula, MT) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Fables of Calhoun (Calhoun, GA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Family Game Night (Orlando, FL) </li>
<li>Fanatix (Dothan, AL) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Fight or Flight Comics (Raleigh, NC) </li>
<li>Freaks & Geeks (Denton, TX) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>G33k Out (Ocala, FL) </li>
<li>Galaxy Comics (Somerset, KY) </li>
<li>Game Empire (Pasadena, CA) </li>
<li>Game Essentials (Superior, WI) </li>
<li>Game Hunters (Frederick, MD) </li>
<li>Game Kastle (Mountain View, CA) chain location </li>
<li>Game Quest Games (St Croix Falls, WI) </li>
<li>Game Quest Inc (Radford, VA) </li>
<li>Gamer's Cache (Mountain Home, ID) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Gamer's Gambit (Danbury, CT) </li>
<li>Gamers Vault (Montgomeryville, PA) </li>
<li>Game Rules (Portland, OR) </li>
<li>GameStreet (Mississauga, ON, Canada) </li>
<li>Games N Go (Roseville, MN) </li>
<li>The Gaming Keep (Hastings, MI) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Gaming on Grand (Escondido, CA) </li>
<li>Gathering Games (Tampa, FL) </li>
<li>G Cubed (Bunbury, Western Australia) </li>
<li>Geekygami's (Bartlesville, OK) </li>
<li>Geeky Villain (Everett, WA) </li>
<li>Gerard's Gaming & LAN Center (Webster, TX) </li>
<li>Hellbent 4 Cardboard (St Petersburg, FL) </li>
<li>Henchmans Games (Swaffham, UK) </li>
<li>Heroes 4 Sale (Southbury, CT) </li>
<li>Hieroglyphic Games (Cincinnati, OH) </li>
<li>Hidden Treasures Collectibles & Comics (Alexandria, MN) entire plaza destroyed by fire </li>
<li>Hillside Games and Comics (Asheville, NC) </li>
<li>Hobby Knights (West Bend, WI) </li>
<li>Hungry Hippo Board Game Cafe (Decatur, IL) </li>
<li>Hyperspace (Lakewood, CO) </li>
<li>Imagine! Hobbies & Games (Sherwood, AR)</li>
<li>Inconceivable Toys and Games (Monument, CO) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>JJGames dot com (Englewood, CO) </li>
<li>Joe Garage Games & More (Suwanee, GA) </li>
<li>Kapow Comics (Cumming, GA) </li>
<li>Killer Rabbit Comics & Games (Williston, VT) </li>
<li>Lee's Comics (Mountain View, CA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Mad Reads (Brighton, CO)</li>
<li>Magic Mike's (Portland, OR) </li>
<li>MaximuM Comics (Henderson, NV) </li>
<li>Nerdcore Toys and Collectibles (Ellensburg, WA)</li>
<li>Netherworld (Warrington, England, UK) </li>
<li>The Nexus 419 (Rossford, OH) </li>
<li>Now Playing Movies and Games (Tylertown, MS) </li>
<li>NuGames (Eureka, CA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Oblivion Games Inc (Mansfield, TX) </li>
<li>OOP Games & Hobby (Lynnwood, WA) </li>
<li>PlayLIVE Nation (Mission Viejo, CA) <b>COVID</b>, chain </li>
<li>The Portland Game Store (Portland, OR) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Prime Time Gaming (Macon, GA)</li>
<li>Purple Turtle Comics (Vallejo, CA) </li>
<li>The Raven's Nest (Marietta, GA) </li>
<li>Realms Comics & Games (North Richland Hills, TX) </li>
<li>Revolution Video Games & Movies LLC (Tampa, FL) </li>
<li>Rocket's Hideout (Baton Rouge, LA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Rockhead's Comics & Games (Kenosha, WI) </li>
<li>Rogue Nation Games (Richmond, BC Canada) </li>
<li>Ronin Games (Castro Valley, CA) </li>
<li>San Diego Comics (San Diego, CA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Seann's Anime and Comics (Sylvania, OH) </li>
<li>Sho'Nuff Comics (Tuscaloosa, AL) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Silver Key Lounge (Mesa, AZ) <b>COVID</b>, indefinite </li>
<li>Skol Games (Eagan, MN)</li>
<li>Splat! Gaming (Burleson, TX)</li>
<li>The Storm Crow Tavern (Vancouver, BC, Canada) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Table Top Cafe (Edmonton, AB, Canada) <b>COVID</b>, consolidating into remaining location </li>
<li>Teahouse Comics (Sandy Springs, GA) </li>
<li>Tolly's Game Store & Lounge (West Jefferson, NC) </li>
<li>Toys Cubed (Toronto, ON, Canada) Erin Mills Town Centre location </li>
<li>Toys Cubed (Toronto, ON, Canada) Oshawa Centre location </li>
<li>Toys Cubed (Toronto, ON, Canada) Scarborough Town Centre location </li>
<li>Toys Cubed (Toronto, ON, Canada) Square One Centre location </li>
<li>Toys Cubed (Toronto, ON, Canada) Vaughan Mills location </li>
<li>Video Game Trader (Calgary, AB, Canada) <b>COVID</b>, 2 locations closing and 1 remains open </li>
<li>Video Game Trader (Forest Lawn, AB, Canada) <b>COVID</b>, 2 locations closing and 1 remains open </li>
<li>Vigilante Gastropub & Games (Austin, TX) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Villains Comics & Collectibles (Monroe, LA) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Wandering Havoc Games (Marysville, WA) </li>
<li>Warcraft Games (Mission, BC, Canada) </li>
<li>Weekend Warlords (Loughborough, England, UK) </li>
<li>Weird Realms (Cleveland, OH) <b>COVID</b> </li>
<li>Wizards Keep Games (Renton, WA) </li>
<li>Yellow Jacket Comics (Tempe, AZ)</li>
</ol>
</div>
<div>
[End of list]</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
At the time of publication, the list had 123 entries representing 162 stores, totaling chains and multi-location closures as noted in their respective entries. Typically after these articles go up, I receive emails and messages about stores I missed, which I do appreciate as it helps make these articles as useful as they can be in terms of reference.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
The overwhelming lesson of this industry through almost half a year of COVID disruption has got to be something like "You can never assume general business conditions will remain as they are." I can tell you right now that DSG has suffered for not being able to employ our single biggest marketing draw, which is organized play. What happens to a store that has little else in its toolbox? It probably ends up on a list like the one in this article.<br />
<br />
When you realize our industry has had to deal with the sudden near-total elimination of organized play <i>and</i> constant supply chain chaos, both factors completely upending even the most prudently planned square footage deployment (generally the most expensive and least changeable part of a store), it is not difficult to see how even a reasonably stable comic, video game, or hobby game store could find itself suddenly scratching the cloth. And in that unexpected time of peril, resources to weather the downturn may or may not be ready. DSG had a gigantic inventory to lean on. What if we didn't? What about any store that doesn't have a strategic reserve of some kind, whether it's cash, assets, favors to call in, some mixture of those, or what have you?<br />
<br />
I have now seen enough evidentiary performance out of stores of different kinds and places that it has become fairly clear how a comic, video game, or hobby game store experiences wild success to where there is not only no danger, but considerable income for stakeholders. The answer to that question, which so many of us are so avidly chasing, is of course highly dependent on that store's specific physical, financial, and competitive circumstances! But once configured for maximum compatibility with those factors, things get somewhat more straightforward. The operational imperatives crystallize. Don't leave money on the table without getting something to make up for it. Don't spend good money chasing after bad. Don't let yourself get rolled by people who are out to gain at your expense. Get your home situation right. Most importantly, get your head right, because the action follows the thought, and the result follows the action. You will reap what you sow.<br />
<br />
Get on with it.</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-12396591477075628482020-06-23T06:30:00.001-07:002020-06-23T06:30:02.356-07:00Five Weeks of PlentyStarting with the Magic Core Set 2021 on July 3rd -- prereleasing June 26th -- and continuing to Jumpstart on July 17th and Double Masters on August 7th, we are about to get an unprecedented bounty of three enormous, stacked, loaded Magic: the Gathering booster expansions, all released into a tenuous market. And I really do mean "loaded;" the spoilers and set contents thus far are off-the-charts great and follow up on the pace that Mystery Booster set as a reprint panacea.<br />
<br />
It will be extremely interesting to see what the sales curve looks like in terms of pre-orders into release day rack sales into following weeks' sales, and how that compares to a normal booster release's sales curve. Players only earn so much money and they still gots' bills tuh' pay.<br />
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Double Masters is two products of course, including a "VIP pack" targeted at high spenders that features an array of the most demanded cards in the set in each ~$125+ "booster pack." (Pricing is tentative this early on.) It's a substantial enough configuration that I believe it will behave in essence like an additional booster release, except in tightly allocated quantities. For that matter, we're only two weeks removed from Secret Lair Fetchlands, a ~$300+ box set, so we're really looking at a release slate that will feel like five major booster releases over a span of seven weeks. Firehose of product, indeed. But the sets are so loaded, I'm not sure demand will waver much.<br />
<br />
I am more interested to see how game stores handle this overflowing chalice. Many game stores float Magic releases on terms or on credit cards. If the initial movement of a given product is slower than expected, because players have moved on mentally to the next one, that could hit their tripwire and result in a cash flow underrun. Or, worse, if a store has been floating cash from one pre-order run to the next, and distribution forces a cash call or a second shutdown cuts off the daily sales that pay their ordinary overhead, or what have you, the same cash flow underrun danger exists. <br />
<br />
Most stores won't broadcast their cash position, so the telltale sign that they were in trouble will be an unexpected closure or broad clearance sale during or shortly after the big releases drop. In order to teach and be informative, I will now broadcast our cash position and explain what we're doing about all this. <br />
<br />
Video games have run strong during this pandemic. We are sold out of all current-generation systems and cannot get any more until we don't know when because none are arriving from manufacturers, production runs are still in progress as east Asian factories ramp back up post-COVID. We get big shipments of controllers every week and almost immediately sell out. White-hot game titles have been landing and selling through for the most part. And the used market is on fire; we are almost out of Nintendo consoles, period, and low on games for most of them. And we've seen big sales bumps for Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and Sega Genesis, in terms of used games that people are presumably catching up on that they missed.<br />
<br />
Meanwhile, Magic cards have sold just fine, despite the lack of in-store events or gameplay. This is surely a vote of faith on the part of our player community that we will eventually re-open the game room, and they are correct, we will. It's great to have their support now, however, because it puts us in a position to be strong in ways like we're about to be. And the flow of collections coming in on buys has been substantial, because several stores in town are not paying cash on buys, so those players are all coming to us.<br />
<br />
Moreover, our expenses are mostly lower than usual right now, with the glaring exception that we are obligated to pay rent on square footage that includes an empty game room. Due to the lack of events, staff hour counts are down in absolute terms. Due to the product mix tilting so much toward used merch, distribution invoices are a lower percentage of the weekly nut. Payroll and cost of goods are the two largest expense buckets, so when they both run shallow, life is pretty good. And we've been fortunate to avoid any serious emergencies, like last summer's sudden air conditioner failure of one of our three roof units. I'm not driving a Lamborghini just yet, but my stress level while sitting at my desk with the checkbook open is pretty low lately.<br />
<br />
We do have credit terms with distribution and will accept shipments on that basis, and in an ordinary time you'd typically see us tailoring the numbers so that any given shipment is the amount of restock product and a few new releases that will sell through before the invoice comes due, freeing us up to use cash on hand to buy used merch walking in the door. This is common to business. The idea is that you use "someone else's money" to generate sales with margin and then pay back what you were fronted and pocket the profit. Our cash flow is sufficient right now that we are purchasing the maximum available of each new set, and unlike many stores, we went in heavy on Jumpstart from the beginning, expecting it to be a hit and guessing correctly. We're taking amounts well above what would sell through during the invoice's terms, because we already know we can cover the invoice without having to sell all the merch first.<br />
<br />
All Magic products are allocated on release to some degree; as Michael Caffrey of Tales of Adventure noted in a Wizards discussion group, if you ask your distributor for one million dollars worth of a new Magic set and offer to pay up front in cash, they still won't do it. Distributors are limiting all stores to purchases within their historic volume range and will surely continue to do so. In our case this means we'll be getting our biggest ever purchase invoices, plus a bit more for growth, and know in advance that with no urgency to flip the goods quickly, we will be able to keep it in stock long after some of our competitors sell out. We've been climbing into this position for a while now, and it's a far cry from 2015 when we struggled to hit invoices before they came due. Now that constraint is gone, which means we can put our attention on having the goods for as long as possible, which is ultimately one of the strongest means of drawing business.<br />
<br />
So that's where it all sits, today, on the cusp of five weeks of plenty. I hope in week six I can look at the shelves and see a comfortable surplus of product <i>and</i> look in the bank and see a nice substantial balance. Given the demand levels for both the Magic sets and for video games and other things we carry, that outcome seems likely. And that's pretty great.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-39628646794708370412020-06-16T06:30:00.000-07:002020-06-16T06:30:02.415-07:00Calling It Fear Is DishonestYou've heard it before, I'm sure. "Don't live in fear." Don't make your decisions based on fear. Don't work how you work, live how you live, vote how you vote, based on fear. You should just do whatever they're trying to roll you into doing, because if you don't, it must be because of fear, and fear is bad, and to be avoided. No good person admits they experience fear.<br />
<br />
That's dishonest, and it eliminates the most important layer of meaning from the Fear equation. When someone says that about Fear, what they are really condemning is something anyone would condemn, and something that anyone would want to avoid, and that is Fear's bastard child, Cowardice. And we'll explore that more in a moment.<br />
<br />
But Fear has a legitimate child as well, and it is your ally. A costly ally, but one that can be depended on through the worst challenges life has to throw at you. And that is Responsibility. Because when you harness the power of Responsibility, you gain Control. And control of your life leads to stability, and contentment, and ultimately happiness.<br />
<br />
To understand this, it's crucial to understand what fear means and does. Because fear, as your ally, is a powerful tool.<br />
<br />
In the child's mind, fear is the life preserver, the watchful eye and readiness to flee potential danger. It's a simple kill switch and it usually works, and thus most children survive into adulthood none the worse for wear. <br />
<br />
In the adult's mind, fear is more than that. It builds the guideposts, and it raises the warning signs. Fear builds layers of context until a mature human being can make decisions six mistakes upstream and avoid going bust or worse.<br />
<br />
(1) You don't have that third beer because you need to be up early because your boss has warned you about late starts and you need that money to pay the bills or you end up hitting the breadline and the bricks. <br />
(2) You don't have that third beer because it's the 29th of the month and you know the cops are going to be fishing for DUI arrests and you have a 24-mile commute each way and losing your license is essentially guaranteed unemployment, and you need that money to pay the bills or you end up hitting the breadline and the bricks. <br />
(3) You don't have that third beer because that pretty thing you've been chatting up all night might not remember giving consent, and oh damn now you don't remember for sure either, and then your spouse isn't particularly amused at having to post your bail, and next thing you know all your stuff is out on the front lawn, and she cleans out your joint account, and you have no money and nowhere to stay, and you miss work again because of the arraignment, and now you have to fight a sexual assault charge, and your boss fires you, and you end up hitting the breadline and the bricks.<br />
(4) You don't have that third beer because you don't want to pass out at 75 miles an hour on the I-10 overpass and end your tenure on this earth in a crush of metal and glass.<br />
<br />
Nobody thinks through that in full conscious lucidity, but the adult brain <i>processes</i> it all through means of the <i>fear</i> of being left to the breadline and the bricks, or worse, by whatever twisting event sequence you get there, and in that ponderous moment... <b>you lay off that third beer</b>. And the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect" target="_blank">butterfly never flaps its wings, and Shanghai is spared the typhoon</a>.<br />
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I'm sure we can all think of low points in our lives, or even unpleasant situations that weren't part of low points but were just acutely awful by themselves, and the inner urge to avoid revisiting those situations is fear working as a tool for you. I fear going bust, because I've been there. I have run completely out of money and been sleeping in someone else's garage, without a mailing address of my own, albeit briefly (I am fortunate) and I was able to take responsibility, gain control, and grind my way back up to solvency because I feared being at zero and being <i>de facto</i> helpless. I will not allow myself to go bust again, it motivates me every day even though I am now a gigantic distance away from the point where such an outcome would be at risk again. I am responsible for my own life, and thus I am not relinquishing control.<br />
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Cowardice is where the weak person quails in the face of fear and abdicates control. Where instead of acting and moving forward, or even attempting it, the coward expects someone else to come along and save them. And when it becomes an indecent spectacle because they grow to rationalize that they are entitled to be saved, embracing their impotence.<br />
<br />
There are times when cowardice is forgivable. Sufficiently traumatic experiences can overwhelm the conscious mind with a degree of fear that eludes grasp. But that's not the everyday cowardice that ruins most lives. The everyday cowardice is at a much lower and more basic level, and can be found in the routine evasion of necessary things. In essence, in the failure to take responsibility, and thus to take control of one's life. It's all written off to bad luck. And that's the most corrosive way a person can lie to themselves. Because everyone knows bad luck isn't your fault, right?<br />
<br />
It's OK to get help. It's not OK to demand it as if by right. But it's OK to accept and admit what you fear, and then be responsible for overcoming it, thus taking control.<br />
<br />
An encapsulation of the above concept can be found in the pilot episode of "Firefly," in Malcolm Reynolds's decisive moment right when all seems lost for the heroes:<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"You depend on luck, you end up on the drift. No fuel, no prospects, beggin' for Alliance make-work. And towed out to the scrap belt. That ain't us. Not ever. There's obstacles in our path, and we're gonna deal with them. One by one."</i></blockquote>
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<br />
And now, I'll leave you with a look at how we do this in the hobby game industry.<br />
<br />
Q: Don't you fear widespread economic disaster?<br />
A: After the way the last few months have gone, I fear this less than I fear localized disasters. At least when everything was kaput due to COVID, everybody was in the same boat. Well, a lot of us were. Seems like the mass market <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/04/wally-world.html" target="_blank">wasn't suffering much at all</a>. But we were able to take shelter in the near-universalness of the bad situation. Nobody would condemn us for being closed for the shutdown, or for adopting limited opening hours afterward. Relatively few players are hassling us about the game room continuing to be closed, since most rational adults understand what is going on. Customers, by and large, supported us generously and continue to do so. It has been a struggle in many ways just to make sure we're still running the engine, but the answer to this has been to spend every day working either to generate revenue or on the maintenance of the infrastructure to generate revenue. I've said before right here on this weblog, every day is an opportunity to advance the business some small amount.<br />
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Q: Don't you fear Amazon?<br />
A: There is plenty to fear in Amazon's ability to deploy seemingly limitless resources to ruin the independent retailer facet of any particular product, line, category, or even business if Bezos and his minions so desire. Rather than the coward's answer of cursing at the sky or hoping someone will take Amazon out of the equation somehow, the responsible retailer builds answers. First, dealing in merchandise that does better with in-person shopping than via the Amazon marketplace, such as used video games. Second, dealing in niche markets that have top-of-mind focus that Amazon isn't nimble enough to match, such as Magic singles. Third, appropriately, with Third Place Theory, hosting events and gameplay. Fourth, instead of beating them, by joining them, and selling through Amazon's platform. There are other approaches that can work as well, but those are four clear viable ones.<br />
<br />
Q: Don't you fear digital delivery obsoleting physical video game media?<br />
A: I've reached this issue before here on the Backstage Pass, but really, we don't. No single service is a true Netflix-for-Video-Games, although Xbox Game Pass is absolutely great and everyone should take advantage of it. But with video games, it's not nearly as easy to create a seamless streaming catalog and interface that matches what physical media can do. Not just in terms of fidelity, since that part will surely catch up as bandwidth and processing strength improve. But in terms of licensing as well: Barely a fraction of the games out there are available via Xbox Game Pass, Playstation Now, or Nintendo Online. Not <i>that</i> many more are available to buy from Xbox Live, Playstation Store, and Nintendo Network (now just Switch, <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/24/21234205/nintendo-account-hack-nnid-breach-security-hacking-attempt" target="_blank">thanks to the hax0rs</a>). And, de-listing happens all the time. If you absolutely, positively, want to play a specific game, owning the physical media containing it is still the gold standard. And that's just counting current games, not the immense depth of the retro back-catalog. Even movie streaming is suffering from some of these same problems now. Netflix today isn't the Netflix of a few years ago. Each of the other services has carved off its licenses and exclusives. To watch anything on demand, you'd have to subscribe to enough streams to make old-fashioned cable TV seem a bargain by comparison... or you could just own the disc and never face the question. There's surely a trend line here, and I think we'll see an adjustment around five or ten years ahead. Retro will still exist, but as old hardware ages and new audio and video technology continues to change, the used video game market will finally end up not cost-effective for the center-of-the-bell-curve mainstream gamer. That means for the time being, our responsible play is to make hay while the sun shines.<br />
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Q: Don't you fear Magic dying?<br />
A: If Magic can survive Homelands, Prophecy, and Saviors of Kamigawa, it's probably fine for the foreseeable. Even with COVID forcing many players onto Arena, and things looking a little wee-woo back around April, the consensus has roared back loud and clear that the Magic experience is still at its best on the physical tabletop against live opponents. I have some concern that the Reserved List continues to be something of a ticking time bomb, but in the progression of Modern Horizons, the Pioneer format, and the 2020 Year of Reprints, we can see Wizards setting the table for the eventual consignment of Reserved cards into unsupported play at some point. Removing the Reserved List cards from Commander is the next big step that has to be taken. Before you say they'd never do it, recognize that Wizards of the Coast has, <a href="https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/depictions-racism-magic-2020-06-10" target="_blank">very recently</a>, shown that they are ready to remove cards from tournament play purely for reasons having nothing to do with card mechanics. Anyway, even if they never printed another Magic card starting right this moment, Magic would still be played for <i>decades</i>. The secondary market would undergo some pretty ferocious adjustments, but it would go on. Far lesser TCGs that have been dead for years still have avid fan bases, and when you proportion that up against Magic, you can begin to appreciate the enormity of the latter. And that's how most of us running game stores know we'll be punching our own ticket out long before Magic ever crumbles into dust. So our plan becomes to monetize it for as long as we want, on terms that work for us, in business structures that work for us, and be ready to move on when it's no longer advantageous from our vantage point to do so.<br />
<br />
Most other fears in this industry can be broken down similarly into components, and as long as our particular game store business can find a way to answer each component problem, we are responsible for our own sustainment and we are in control of our future. It's a stark difference from the litany of retailers in many of the social media retailer groups whose first reaction to any problem of the moment is to curse the heavens and demand that someone, often a publisher, often Wizards of the Coast, rescue them somehow from whatever mundane problem their own incompetence has made blow up in their laps. Wizards just fronted game stores a free rack of Mystery money <i>and</i> a loaded promo giveaway slate to help the responsible among us push forward past the difficulties of today so we can still sell their wares tomorrow. The cowardice is pathetic indeed that takes such a boon and still refuses to fuel their own engine with it.<br />
<br />
Above all, don't be trapped by the dishonest assertion that you are failing because of fear. We can choose the coward's path, or we can choose responsibility and then attain control. That choice will determine whether fear helped us or hindered us. But there was no shame in knowing fear, and never will be.<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-34844660213353043152020-06-02T06:30:00.000-07:002020-06-02T06:30:01.150-07:00Rot<div style="text-align: center;">
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"The most disgusting lies are dressed in beauty that'll rot."</div>
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- <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVddwjEJ3Qk" target="_blank">Lacey Sturm</a>
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<br />
Upon lease execution with a five-year personal guaranty, the hobby game store tenant discovered the real reason that suite was empty for as long as it was, at the bargain price it was offered.<br />
<br />
After a torturous migration and thousands of dollars in sunk labor, the whiz-bang point-of-sale system that was promised to be fast, accurate, and rugged, turned out to be about the same as the one the store was using before. In some ways, worse.<br />
<br />
"Capital Funding" provided the partners with a fast deposit of $30,000 to cover the shortfalls from slow sales of overlapping high-profile TCG and wargames releases, money fronted with barely any questions asked and no credit check. Two years later, the store was finally clear of the principal, having repaid a total of $52,516.<br />
<br />
Two hot #1 spec books appeared on comic invoices for the week, and boxholders were lining up to pay a premium at their Friendly Local Comic Store to be sure they locked in copies without having to buy on eBay at ten times cover. The comic distributor shorted all 50 copies of hottest spec book, and sent damaged copies of the second-hottest spec book. The store filed a timely damage report, and was credited the wholesale price of the books.<br />
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The popular indie publisher touted the Friendly Local Game Store as the preferred channel for resale of their white-hot title, but then kept the entire next print run for themselves to sell on Amazon.<br />
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The wargame publisher offered generous terms and a top-flight IP. The store discovered only later that most of the local player base for the game was content to play the figures they had already long since purchased from previously existing game stores, and that effectively sole distribution by the publisher meant any order error caused chaos with the store's efforts to impress the faithful players that remained.<br />
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A distributor promised generous allocations of the hot limited edition box set, and on delivery day provided its client stores with a modest quantity. Plenty of stock was available to the public at market price on the distributor's backdoor direct-to-public website.<br />
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The enormous orders for hundreds of long-since-rotated staples seemed like easy money from somebody's silly spec, with none of the cards being factors in Modern or Legacy. A week later, the Pioneer format was announced, and each of those cards looked likely to debut as metagame all-stars, and spiked tenfold in listed median price.<br />
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The rising star employee taking home that game without adding it to their tab was totally inadvertent, a complete accident. Such a trusted individual would never steal from the company.<br />
<br />
The eager beaver with Uncle Rich's bequeathal stood ready to change the tabletop world with their innovative game store idea. Their $85,700 discharge under Chapter VII of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code will remain on their credit report until 2027.<br />
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Crowdfunding seemed like a natural way to ensure a title never lost money. Only upon completion, when the final bills came due, was it apparent the "wild success" was financially catastrophic. Game stores the world over fielded angry phone calls from buyers who wanted to know when stock would be delivered, and whether the store would match the original Kickstarter backer discount, even as the publisher prepared to crowdfund the second print run as a pyramid scheme to pay off obligations from the first.<br />
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He was the bright young prospect on the store's qualifying circuit team. After coming close to the money and falling short due to inferior deck selection, he went on a grinding tear, living from deck to deck with the store and maxing out an entire rotisserie of credit cards before suddenly disappearing entirely. Conflicting reports from other players say his parents were on the hook for five figures in co-signed credit cards, or they had forced him to attend Gamblers Anonymous, or both.<br />
<br />
She grew weary of her family asking when she was going to "get a real job," and stopped telling them about the tight budget weeks and about the trials and travails of the industry. Soon, she stopped telling them about her successes as well. Eventually, she and her family stopped talking at all.<br />
<br />
Nobody picked up on the cues at first. The edgelord player nobody liked was suddenly the soul of courtesy. Under the façade, the player was angry about being shot down for his unwelcome advances on the new female employee. Then one night he tried to follow her home. She says she feels safe for now, but ownership worries she's just putting on a brave face, and that the store ban, trespass order, and injunction won't be enough.<br />
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The sole proprietor turned to substance abuse as a brute-force means of fighting exhaustion, desperate to bottle lightning from the hot new release cycle before the revenue slowed. And it worked! The cash register sang and the customers happily spent. He soon found himself turning to substance abuse as a comfort. And then, eventually, long after squandering the windfall profit, he turned to it out of agony, because he couldn't stop.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Art credit: Varvara Snegiriova</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Details have been altered/anonymized for references in this article to the experiences of individuals</i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-27645996161533239262020-05-26T06:00:00.000-07:002020-05-25T11:20:56.895-07:00General Announcement Regarding Reopening DSG's Game Room<b>QUICK AND DIRECT NEWS:</b> The exact reopening date of the game room at Desert Sky Games will depend on CDC and AZDHS guidance for gatherings over the course of the next several weeks, and on Wizards of the Coast's decisions regarding the date that sanctioned play may resume. The absolute soonest it will happen will be June 5th; we are not considering any dates before that. We believe a more likely date is circa June 26th, the Magic Core Set 2021 Prerelease Week kickoff day. However, it remains a moving target. At this time we believe it is still imprudent for game stores to resume hosting tabletop gameplay, even though several are doing so.<br />
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<b>RELEVANT AUTHORITY:</b> Rumor has it that <a href="https://azgovernor.gov/governor/reopening-guidance" target="_blank">Governor Ducey</a> will give us essentially free rein to re-open all aspects of our business on or around June 1st, to the extent that we don't have it already. The CDC has already <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/how-covid-spreads.html" target="_blank">issued updated guidance</a> that surface contact is no longer believed to be a critical vector for COVID spread, so we could in theory reopen the arcade at any time. However, the CDC's same updated guidance re-emphasized that person-to-person respiratory spread is still considered a serious risk. COVID is, after all, <i>a respiratory virus</i>. <br />
<br />
<b>EXPLANATION:</b> Look, I have been a strong advocate of limiting the duration of the shutdowns and getting businesses back open. I am a capitalist's own capitalist. Nobody on this planet should think I'm making this decision from a standpoint of fear or an agenda to keep small businesses (including mine, apparently) stifled so I can, I don't know, enjoy quarantine or something? I get that some people have taken advantage of this shutdown to enjoy a leisurely schedule of telework, if not an outright paid vacation. And I'm enough of an anti-commuting advocate to appreciate how much some people may be enjoying the extra daily time. But not all of us are lounging through this thing. Obviously health professionals are slammed. Everyone in food service has been working their tails off. I've also been busy beyond all insanity since the shutdown began. Turns out a couple of owners doing the work of ten staff members, or even half that, presents difficulty.<br />
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As <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/04/when-will-magic-be-gathering.html" target="_blank">I wrote recently</a>, there is a very strong financial motive for DSG to reopen the game room. It is going to happen. Just not yet. And the bottom line is we need to see the numbers continue to improve/flatten/trend_better before it seems prudent from a business standpoint to proceed, and even better would be that occurring in tandem with more favorable official guidance.<br />
<br />
We're not a church, fortunately, because <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6919e6.htm" target="_blank">choirs were apparently early spread vectors</a>, and basically <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/05/18/coronalinks-5-18-20-when-all-you-have-is-a-hammer-everything-starts-looking-like-a-dance/" target="_blank">rooms full of speaking or singing people are very dangerous</a>, which is why all the concerts are still getting postponed. A TCG tournament, however, is very like these things in terms of droplet emission, and a Dungeons & Dragons game is even worse so for its participants. In-store gameplay remains an acute concern, while ordinary shopping activity at DSG is reasonably safe at this point by current reckoning. And <b>yes</b>, we are buying Magic cards and video games and systems at this time.<br />
<br />
Thank goodness, it's scorching hot outside already, and respiratory virii fare poorly under those conditions. Once you come indoors, a sick person or asymptomatic carrier can still spread COVID via droplets, however, so we're not out of the woods yet on that count either.<br />
<br />
Thanks to the CDC guidance update cited above, we will likely open the arcade in the near future before opening the rest of the game room. We're wrapping up some upgrades and maintenance, and we're excited to let you all try them out.<br />
<br />
Once we do re-open, the likelihood of us requiring waivers is high. Unless the <a href="https://www.azleg.gov/session-summaries/" target="_blank">Arizona House's</a> bill to shield businesses from COVID lawsuits, a bill that passed just before the chamber adjourned <i>sine die,</i> gets taken up and passed in the state Senate, we're forced to make all comers sign a binding contract indemnifying us from their own potential plague-ridden outcomes, which also means we won't be able to let minors into the game room without parental accompaniment, since minors cannot be bound under contract, which is what a waiver is. I need the logistical hassle of running essentially a bowling alley but there's just the pro shop and no lanes, like I need a hole in my head. So as you might imagine, even if we were not already inclined to wait for the health and protection of our staff and player community, we are also inclined to wait to give the legal landscape time to get dressed and compose itself.<br />
<br />
I mentioned the Magic Core Set 2021 Prerelease Week above. This is a tremendously smart thing Wizards has <a href="https://wpn.wizards.com/en/article/scheduling-core-set-2021-what-you-need-know" target="_blank">afforded stores the latitude to do</a>. The prerelease may be run as any number of events (not limited to nine) over the course of the entire week. Stores that want to run a long series of eight-player pods, one at a time, to keep player counts low and reduce contagion risk, may do so, while still being able to sell through our prerelease product allotments and provide the prerelease gameplay experience our players enjoy so much. DSG won't be re-opening the game room for this event in the direct face of strongly prohibitive guidance at that time, but if the coast is about as clear as we can realistically expect in today's circumstances, we will end up going ahead with it.<br />
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Thank you for your continued understanding and cooperation.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-f6ez0RrslOFXvf9QdT6iyIGUKW6CX2WPv4EHb835gmnkUkA30hPWZpTK43aSF-3bCXEmebQh1e-wAoAwwgcGFufQlwyNGDbDPwGZ2ql9VQjRciejpYEqgn7JGMBQh7bo2ghP3yswwls/s1600/1280px-US_CDC_logo.svg.png" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-f6ez0RrslOFXvf9QdT6iyIGUKW6CX2WPv4EHb835gmnkUkA30hPWZpTK43aSF-3bCXEmebQh1e-wAoAwwgcGFufQlwyNGDbDPwGZ2ql9VQjRciejpYEqgn7JGMBQh7bo2ghP3yswwls/s320/1280px-US_CDC_logo.svg.png" width="320" /></a></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-25093767965521911202020-05-19T06:30:00.000-07:002020-05-19T06:30:01.594-07:00Returning to Cruising AltitudeI've been wanting to finish a couple of different incubating articles about broader industry topics, but I can barely find a few free hours these days. Since so much plot is going by so quickly, I figured this would be another good opportunity to document some of what is happening.<br />
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We'll do this in no particular order.<br />
<br />
The Governor's stay-at-home order for the month of April ended up lasting until just after the end of the month. Most mass-market businesses never closed, so there was a real element of unfairness that I think we're going to see fallout from for years, in terms of how much the competitive table tilted against small businesses. <br />
<br />
But in any event, on May 4th, small stores were allowed to open to shopping by appointment and curbside sales. These were actually not permitted during the April shutdown in Arizona, but many stores just broke the rules and did whatever. Given that none faced any penalties or consequences, it sounds like they guessed right. <br />
<br />
Then, starting May 8th, we were allowed to open outright. However, the 10-person-gathering limit is still in place, which makes it pointless to try to open the game room. I am well aware that events can be run with as few as eight players, and that we would have two staff members at the front and shoppers wouldn't be near the players if we seated them deep in the room. That calculus unfortunately misses the point that a game room is only cost-effective to have at all, if it is being filled and used with sales-driving events to a substantial amount of its capacity. Even our reduced game room needs to see 20 to 30 people seated throughout a day to be worth opening and maintaining and so forth, and that's a scrape minimum. So until we see significantly more lenient guidance on gatherings, our tables will remain off-limits.<br />
<br />
The MTG Ikoria combined prerelease and release fell short in sales over the course of the weekend against the Theros and Eldraine prerelease weekends, but looks much better once I start correcting for differences. Ikoria's release Friday of May 15th set a new record day for in-store sales. The previous record was set on Mystery Booster release day, which had almost no pre-orders because Mystery didn't heat up until it was practically in our hands. Ikoria had the most pre-orders we've fielded since probably Dominaria, possibly War of the Spark (they count differently but both did very well) and <i>still</i> posted a record sales day. It was sweet both to set the new record and to have it break a record that only stood for two months, after <i>that</i> record had finally beaten the one from the release Friday of Modern Masters 2017. But sure, Arena is killing paper Magic. Whatevs, horse. Anyway we're closed Sundays right now for a number of reasons and the Saturday fall-off for Ikoria wasn't too awful but put together it definitely made the weekend's entire take lower than that for a proper three-day prerelease, and in a few days we'll have a Memorial Day weekend that won't see the same voltage as a Magic release weekend following a prerelease, but Ikoria is still basically non-stop holy water after the enforced thirst of April.<br />
<br />
One quick side note on Ikoria. With the entire COVID mess, this may quietly go without a lot of notice, but the way that Wizards used an "overlay" to re-skin cards for the Godzilla IP is a huge step forward to bringing great licensed IP to the Magic: the Gathering universe. Since every overlay is tied to a normal Magic card with Wizards's own IP, there is no danger of mechanically-unique reprints becoming impossible by means of an expiring license. The game can use Hasbro's IP outright, and they can license basically anything else, and <i>have it work</i> without it ruining Magic as it otherwise could. I posted the other day to Facebook that the team responsible for this idea deserved bonus checks. I can't wait to see how far they take this. Dungeons & Dragons? Almost too easy, they could just print those cards outright but I suspect they want to future-proof that move. Star Wars? That's not especially Magic-esque, but possibly. World of Darkness seems ideal, with very flavorful overlays on the Innistrad plane. I think the richest vein will be those licensable properties that already overlap the most thematically, such as Harry Potter. But they just did Godzilla and it was great, even though Godzilla has nothing to do with Magic, so what do I know.<br />
<br />
Anyway, we started bringing the staff back on April 27th, the week before the re-opening. Griffin and I had spent basically an entire month shipping online orders and doing store renovation projects, like upgrading our central video game merchandise "island" (photo above) and installing real cabinets for all the video game media. The game room is smaller now but looks way nicer. There are now color display cases on the racks for almost all cartridge titles, a subtle upgrade that adds tremendously to the shoppability of that merchandise. The sales floor has been reconfigured to make more room for human beings during what we assume will be a prolonged period of social distancing. The arcade has been under maintenance, but it's also not yet re-opened so that part isn't done. And we have pleasant lighting effects added throughout the store with more still to come. With the staff back on hand, we were able to restart most of the normal business processes and get ready to serve human beings on the premises. That meant a bunch of quick cleanup of tools and materials and postponing a few upgrades for later.<br />
<br />
Most of the staff was back in action by last week, and all our full-timers will be back by the start of next week. Business does not support this staffing level yet, as one record sales day is unfortunately not a full offset to many <i>very</i> quiet days, so we went ahead and took the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan. It wasn't a ton of money, we could have survived without it, but the COVID pandemic absolutely had a substantial negative effect on our business, and with the loan fully forgivable if you spend 75% of it on payroll and 25% of it on rent, it was a no-brainer for us. Our payroll and rent figures through June 30th easily exceed the PPP funding total. It could end up being a bit of a mess when we go to have it forgiven, same as when we went through the process of getting it, but in the end it worked out on the front side, so hopefully the same will remain true when it comes time to close it out. <br />
<br />
Many of my peers are taking the Emergency Intervention Disaster Loan (EIDL), and there is a business case that anyone who can qualify should take it as a gigantic hedge, particularly against the possibility of a late-2020 COVID resurgence. I probably should be taking it too, but I really just don't want the debt. Our balance sheet is pretty decent lately and should only get better as business returns to cruising altitude. For the moment it seems like the funding has run out anyway, or is close to it. If Congress reloads the trough, I'll reconsider pulling the trigger.<br />
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Distribution is finally like 90% of the way back. We did get deliveries during the shutdown, despite that there wasn't a need to get some of that product, where the product in question is mainly meant for in-store discovery and purchase. I would love to have gotten triple the video game consoles that were shipped in, but as it happens I'm glad we got what we got because it all has been selling quickly. I wish I could say it has all been selling easily, but nothing is ever easy when you're a small business, and the shopper who has only ever bought from Amazon and Wal-Mart comes in expecting concierge service and abusable returns, all at impossibly low prices, and tends to end up unhappy with the experience that we delight our everyday visitors with.<br />
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Meanwhile, it has now been 90+ days since the last time anyone traded in a Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, or Xbox One S or X. Take that information as you will. Have a great week!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-89842982390952047172020-05-12T06:30:00.000-07:002020-05-12T06:30:06.524-07:00Weekend Triome Resort GetawayYou'll have to pardon the lack of a full and proper article this week. Our MTG Ikoria product arrived Monday, and it's the largest order of anything in our business's history. Processing it and preparing the massive singles outlay is commanding my full attention and that of our staff for the time being.<br />
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This set is so bananas. I'm extremely excited about it. Not just for what's in there, but for what it suggests about what future sets could contain. And I know everyone's angry about the high power level of the Companion ability, but I honestly think it could add a great new dimension to 60-card Magic as it develops further, the way Objectives did to the Star Wars CCG. Not utterly mandatory, but you had to have a good reason not to be using one.<br />
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There has been an attempt at mob rabble against Mark Rosewater and the production team on Twitter and Tumblr with players accusing MaRo and Wizards of fumbling the ball on power balancing and not knowing what they are doing, since we've had some bans lately and we had a bad Standard last fall and winter. It's true that the power level was pushed a bit, and it's certainly frustrating when it leads to an unattractive format. But the reality is that Arena advanced deck tech faster than any tool used before, and brought powerful builds to the forefront at a far quicker cadence than Wizards had become accustomed to making format adjustments. The answer is to expect them to adapt, which I imagine will happen, not to have Wizards significantly scale down card power. Honestly, they should aim high every time, and anyone who thinks otherwise wasn't there during Homelands, Prophecy, or Saviors of Kamigawa.<br />
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That's about it for now, a partial article and concerned wholly with Magic, as there's not much to say about video games at the moment since so much stuff is sold out and distributors are bone dry on it. With a new console generation on deck at the end of the year, I wonder if Sony and Microsoft are a little bit grateful that the quarantine cleared the channel of their old stock just in time for nobody to get stuck on piles of aging inventory. It's a pleasant thought, anyway.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-2288725062553145342020-05-05T06:30:00.000-07:002020-05-05T06:30:02.389-07:00Cinco de MoneyThe 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 <i>triple</i> 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.<br />
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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.<br />
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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.<br />
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My back-office staff will be at full-strength-minus-one starting <i>next</i> 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.<br />
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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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMYDuPWHFAo" target="_blank">one little victory.</a><br />
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Now let's see what happens next week with Ikoria.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-47027729728776483142020-04-28T06:30:00.000-07:002020-04-28T06:30:11.339-07:00When Will Magic Be Gathering?Today's article was directly inspired, to an almost plagiaristic degree, by last week's blog post by my friend Gary Ray from Black Diamond Games in Concord, California. Gary <a href="https://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-future-of-in-store-gaming.html?m=0" target="_blank">discusses the expectations regarding when in-store gameplay will resume</a>, and while our outlook here in the desert isn't <i>exactly</i> the same, it may as well be, especially given that we're following the same rationale.<br />
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Rather than repeat in Bahr-speak everything Gary wrote, I'm going to do a little quoting and riffing here and just develop the discussion a little further. You'll see Gary's text quoted in <b>bold</b> and my replies in <i>italics</i>.<br />
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<b>Without in-store gaming, the hobby game store business model is broken.</b><br />
<i>I think Gary is correct, and I've never been so happy to be straddling the line into video games, which are going to proceed largely unchanged. My TCG, D&D, and board games businesses have taken huge hits since early March as the COVID situation began festering. My video game business, on the other hand, was like Christmas until the governor shut down the state.</i><br />
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<b>Our stores are designed around [in-store gameplay] and our staff and hours reflect it.</b><br />
<i>Absolutely true. It's not an accident our game-room-closed open hours are only noon to 7pm, Monday through Saturday. Without gameplay, that's all the "open" we need to be. People who want to play games will do so at each others' homes all evening. They won't be coming back to the store at 9:30 or even 8pm.</i><br />
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<b>A straight retail store is not a long-term viable business</b><br />
<i>Not in pure tabletop, no. And if you're only talking about new merch to the consumer, also no. I think it's no accident that the straight-retail offerings you see in adjacent categories, from comics to video games to vintage toys and so on, depend so heavily on the secondary market.</i><br />
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<b>Customers ask, when will you have in-store gaming again? I don't know. I can tell you we may have closed our in-store gaming a little late, carefully following bare minimum CDC and county guidelines, but we won't be opening it too early.</b><br />
<i>This is exactly DSG's outlook right now as well. We were neither the first nor the last to close the game room, but knowing what we knew a few days after we did it, we should have just done it the first week of March. In terms of resuming gameplay, obviously the landscape is shifting tectonically every week or so, but my best guess as of this writing is that the game room stays closed until June, notwithstanding <a href="https://www.techtimes.com/articles/249117/20200424/covid-19-update-virus-dies-in-2-minutes-when-faced-on-direct-sunlight-says-us-official.htm" target="_blank">Pence's assumptions to the contrary</a>. That could be too early for some localities, but COVID transmission will be sharply inhibited by the scorching Arizona summer heat, <a href="https://news.miami.edu/stories/2020/04/will-the-summer-heat-save-us-from-covid-19.html" target="_blank">at least until people move indoors</a>.</i><br />
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<b>One of the things I dislike about this community is the inability to hold bad actors responsible.</b><br />
<i>Yeah.</i><br />
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<b>We'll start with curbside delivery, then no more than five customers in the store, then no more than five people gathered for an event, then 50, then 100, then maybe it will be normal again.</b><br />
<i>In essence this resembles our likely roadmap. Our tentative plan for DSG is to allow no more than 10 people into the store at a time, which shouldn't be difficult because we didn't really see any larger crowds than that in late March when we had the game room closed but were still open for shopping. This will mean that lonely Magic players who want to hang out and chit-chat with their friends will have to do it outside. I don't expect to re-open the game room until we get some reasonably solid CDC or Arizona Department of Health Services guidance that gatherings of a given headcount have dropped into the lesser risk range.</i><br />
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[Incidentally, regarding curbside delivery: Of all the things that stores have been trying, DSG has shied away from this one for a number of reasons, the bottom line of which is that it's extremely labor-inefficient to do if the store isn't open for general shopping, and even then, the experience is compromised because so much of our merch is meant to be browsed and does not lend well to a web catalog. Dice, for example, or used console systems. We were happy to notice that Square integrated a curbside pickup option into our web software, but we never ended up turning it on, because Governor Ducey's Stay-at-Home order for Arizona made it a moot point. Stores selling essential items could be open outright, while stores not selling essential items could not transact business in person at all, curbside or otherwise, and were allowed only to ship. We chose at the time not to take a position on how "essential" DSG's offerings might or might not be, and thus our online sales for April have simply been shipped to the customers.]<br />
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<b>I have a strong financial motive to get in-store gaming back up and running as quickly as possible. Don't think I'm dragging my feet. People's livelihoods depend on it eventually happening.</b><br />
<i>I wanted to call this one out and emphasize that the same is true for me and DSG. Some of our rival stores have managed to persuade free-agent players that DSG, or I personally, don't want to run events or don't want to serve competitive players, or what have you. Never mind that <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/02/so-this-is-where-we-left-off.html" target="_blank">the competitive scene is where I came from</a>, and DSG has a long track record of striving to <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/09/thoughts-part-13.html" target="_blank">run extremely high-quality events</a>. If those bona fides don't convince you, perhaps you can accept at face value my assertion that I have not stopped loving money, and in-store gameplay is utterly critical to driving traffic to the store that ultimately turns into buying and selling cards. Is that a robust enough argument? In-store events will be back because there's a profit to be had.</i><br />
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[I want to reiterate the above even further because with so much uncertainty about events and event scale moving forward, we have reconfigured DSG's layout to spend a lot more floor footage on product racking and shopping, and much less on tables and chairs. The immediate visual impression for some, will be that we have "taken away a lot of the game room," and therefore we must not want players to come to the store. This is not true, we <u>do</u> want players to come to the store. In fact, you'll notice that the scaled-down game room got a beautiful facelift in the meanwhile, as part of our ongoing quest for WPN Premium status. We simply don't know when we will be allowed to resume gameplay! And with what might be a dangerous second winter wave of COVID-19 later this year, we are setting up to ensure we monetize our square footage as well as possible until we are at liberty to go back to high event capacity.]<br />
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<b>Right now, stores doing home or curbside delivery will tell you they're doing only 20% or so of their previous sales.</b><br />
<i>With mostly TCGPlayer singles sales online, and a nice amount of <a href="https://www.desertskygames.com/shop/pre-orders/2" target="_blank">Ikoria pre-orders</a> from the store website, we're at around that level too. What we have not seen is much in the way of <a href="https://www.desertskygames.com/shop/great-games-/3" target="_blank">other items ordered from the store website</a>. We put up an assortment of the most demanded tabletop games, booster boxes, and new release video games. We've sold some of the video games but most of the rest have barely been touched. Unfortunately, this is in line with what I've been teaching for a while here on the Backstage Pass, which is that store-by-store e-commerce isn't really a thing anymore, and <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2019/11/horus-hiatus.html" target="_blank">most online sales go through marketplaces</a> like Amazon, eBay, and TCGPlayer. Aside from Amazon-imposed limitations on how much merch I can ship to them for fulfillment, that channel has been extremely active and profitable. TCGPlayer has been good but not nearly as great as when Direct is active. And eBay continues to devolve into being a junk dump; I cannot wait to abandon it forever.</i><br />
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Gary's article is well worth reading in its entirety, so <a href="https://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-future-of-in-store-gaming.html?m=0" target="_blank">here's that link again</a>. But now you've got my take on it as well.<br />
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By the time this article goes live on Tuesday, April 28th, we may have received updated guidance from the government at some level, whether local, state, or federal. If nothing else happens, the Arizona Stay-at-Home order expires Thursday night. We therefore plan to have the store open for shopping on Friday May 1st, with headcount limits, masks, plexiglass, gloves, wipes, hand sanitizer, the whole banana. But <a href="https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2020/04/23/going-bananas-at-kprc-2-we-arent-masking-our-mistake/" target="_blank">not actual bananas</a>. Stay safe and we hope to see you soon.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-15393079964275710232020-04-21T06:30:00.000-07:002020-04-21T06:30:06.628-07:00Wally WorldI won't get into discussion of the quarantine timeline, since that's most of what is on social media these days and I'm sure you are as tired of it as I am.<br />
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I'll just point out this one thing.<br />
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Big box retail has been allowed to continue, in most localities, selling whatever it wants. And the public, bank accounts overflowing with stimulus TrumpBucks, has been obliging, at <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-crisis-reveals-retail-haves-and-have-nots-11585047603" target="_blank">record scale</a>. This lockdown situation has been more lucrative for the mass market than the greatest marketing promotion Wal-Mart, Target, Amazon, McDonalds, Starbucks, and Best Buy put together have ever achieved on their best day with their best messaging and their greatest advertising spend.<br />
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Please consider spending at least a few dollars with your local small businesses instead, especially if they are selling online only or pickup only or what have you. Especially restaurants, as they are the most fragile and yet the most crucial parts of a healthy local small-business ecosystem.<br />
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If the mass market gets all your money, eventually awful mass-market jobs are going to be the only jobs remaining. Hope y'all like wearing a name tag and a smock.<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2262388638216199070.post-68381656157131384632020-04-07T06:30:00.000-07:002020-04-07T06:30:06.739-07:00It Could Be WorseThe order came down last week and we shut the doors on March 31st after two straight business days with hundreds-of-percent-higher year-over-year sales, and immediately went into very-little-cash-flow mode with only online sales to sustain us.<br />
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There is no <a href="https://seller.tcgplayer.com/sell-with-us/tcgplayer-direct" target="_blank">TCGPlayer Direct</a> right now, so every last tiny order comes in by the hundreds daily, and takes an inordinate amount of time to process, with only two of us on duty. I think now with what I know, I would drop online singles sales altogether if TCG Direct never starts back up, or was otherwise not there. They dropped the $2 purchase minimum some time back and I didn't see a problem in the moment because Direct absorbed most of those sales anyway. Now that I'm seeing more raw data, I think there should be a $5 purchase minimum. Or higher. And I don't sell cards for pennies, either. My condition and rarity floors, which range from 25 cents per card for commons on up, are ideal for the in-store environment but a colossal waste of time otherwise. I have long enjoyed the labor efficiency of TCG Direct, and this experience has reinforced my appreciation for it.<br />
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I'm loathe to stop the music, though, small orders or otherwise, with so little money streaming in. Every sale counts to some extent. TCG and Amazon pay us much later, and eBay pays right away but is a bad platform these days. It seems like most of what we can do right now is a bunch of ad hoc scrambling to gain a little altitude, to be discarded as soon as we're able to reopen the doors. (See photo for metaphor.)<br />
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But we're doing it anyway. We're at zero payroll, as I freed our staff up to go take advantage of the unemployment stimulus with a declarative reduction of hours to zero and a state closure order to top it off. We've applied for relief funding, but as Gary Ray keenly put it on <a href="https://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/2020/04/rescue-and-recovery.html" target="_blank">his blog article this week</a>, you have to proceed as if help is not coming. We're working to earn our way past this ridiculousness in one piece, and we had a modest bankroll on hand to weather the storm with. We will be monstrously strong on the other side, in theory, with a full pantry of goods and money flowing mostly only in the inward direction. I always knew the time might come when I'd lean <i>hard</i> on our million-card singles inventory, and that time is upon us.<br />
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The plus side is that bills are basically zilch right now. Our landlord, who has always been very reasonable to us, knows we will do our best to keep up. Distributors are paid or are about to be, as deposits trickle in. Payroll is zero as I mentioned, utilities are paid, we don't need any supplies, and that's it, there's nothing else on the expense ledger. We'll have to pay March's sales tax in a few weeks and that will feel rough coming from a nearly static bankroll. In April we'll "enjoy" a sales tax filing of zero. May we be so fortunate that it's the only such month.<br />
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There is stress due to the uncertainty. I have been abstinent from alcohol for years now, but I find myself leveraging a nightly salted margarita as this lockout goes on. Sometimes even a mild buzz helps to dull the frustration of not being able to work, produce, and achieve. I have grown accustomed to a certain amount of moneydollars landing in my lap on a regular schedule as a consequence of the work I do and the decisions I make. This unprecedented societal disruption we're going through has lain waste to such frivolous expectations. For those who have their "green card" on account of a chronic case of ice cream headache, I imagine you're having an even better time mellowing through the chaos.<br />
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You know what, though? Uncannily, everyone (well, <i>most</i> everyone) is just rolling with it. This is what should be a catastrophically bad situation -- on paper, it's worse than the Depression or any modern war -- but everyone is fully expecting to get back to business as usual before much longer. In a world where communication technology has been abused so badly the inventors would have suicided had they envisioned how it would unfold, somehow the sheer velocity of information through our connected matrix has gotten humanity moving of a singular purpose. And yes I realize there are vast, <i>vast</i> disagreements among people of various political stripes as to how we should manage this situation, but all that is just arguing over the color of the drapes. We already bought the house. The mortgage is recorded. The science is winning and society will prevail, despite reasonable expectations that we couldn't possibly claw our way through this.<br />
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That mortgage part -- that's a bit of a worry, for sure. As I <a href="https://dsgcw.blogspot.com/2020/03/shuttered.html" target="_blank">mentioned last week</a>, we really are going to be paying for this forever, and that's going to mess things up in an economic sense for decades to come. But <i>also</i> as I mentioned last week, people simply won't tolerate a defunct reality for long. We <i>will</i> get back to our lives as we knew them. More people will die than anyone wants to see die. We will agonize over having lost them, and then we will get on living so their deaths might not be in vain. And that's a pretty reassuring thing to realize.<br />
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Hopefully, Princess Leia's optimistic "It Could Be Worse" won't be followed up by Han Solo wryly remarking, "It's worse."Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0