This may have been talked about already but my search-fu is not so hot today. So the subject has the base queation but here is why I ask. I live about an hour north of San Francisco in wine country and we have one gaming store. I go into it once in a while but overall I don't enjoy the experience. It's poorly run in my experience, it has one third of it's floor space dominated by folding tables for people to play mostly on which is usually dominated by MtG. They sell comics as well which is fine. The staff is not all that helpful or well informed. Now ignoring that I live near a bad gaming store (or maybe that I'm old and overly critical) we have the computer age. You can get book at Amazon for a fraction of the price you can at a local gaming store. Plus folks like Paizo who I buy most my stuff through because I love them and want to support them. You have a lot of books being only in PDF format or in dual formats so you can just download your next product.
Is there really a place for a local gaming store five years from now, ten years from now? Does it have to have the gaming tables so that its a hang out as well to get people to buy while they are there?
And just so I don't sound like I'm here to complain about my local gaming store, the reason I ask is that I'm considering doing something about having a bad local gaming store, opening my own. So input from folks that own their own shops would be great. What does a store need to survive? Does it need to have gaming supplies, comics, food and a gathering area? Just trying to get an idea what other people think.
We had a store like this in my state. It was the first real gaming store I'd been in back in its glory days. Located in a rouch neighborhood and plagued by poor management, it became a run down store where people socialized more than anything. Eventually after over 2 decades, they closed their doors and opened an internet store.
Now in the same Metro area, we have one of the biggest and best gaming stores in the country as well. This place has staff which is long-lasting, extremely knowledgeable and has to keep re-arranging because they carry so many products (games, comics, related stuff). They keep outgrowing their store. Everyone is always happy, love to talk you leg off, always asking if they can help, recommending products, havign blowout sales a couple of times a year, participates in D&D and get celebrities like Monte Cook, Larry Elmore, Mike Mearls, and Dave Arneson.
Sounds like your store is similiar to the first one described above. As for dollar saving, I would much rather shop at these stores than go online. Things might cost more, but I love to look at all the merchandise, feel the comics in my hand, talk to the staff about how D&D is doing, seening what Legion memorbila I can find, etc.
I think we will see some big changes in the FLGS situation. No, I don't own a store, but I have worked in one (briefly). And, I'm witnessing some changes here locally (Indianapolis) that are probably reflected elsewhere.
Before I begin, make sure your do your market research about your target customers. There might be a reason that the one store only sells MtG.
Just yesterday I went into a store that doesn't have a large selection. Primarily Warmachine/Hordes/Flames of War/GW. As I was searching through their old stock, I heard one of the hangers-on behind me in the gaming area. He was complaining about not getting enough hours at his job, therefore didn't have money to go see a movie with another hanger-on. Big turn-off (but that might just be me).
A few minutes later, a woman and her daughter entered the store. The employee on duty briefly said hello, then went back to his conversation with the hangers-on. The conversation was the similar inane banter, but I did hear swearing. The woman and her daughter left without purchasing anything.
What can you learn from this?
Most importantly, and I cannot stress this enough: Hire decent help. Its harder than it seems, but the payoff for professional attitudes is tremendous. There are some people who were born for customer service, and then there are gamers who want to work in a hobby store. See the baristas at Starbucks? They're pretty much happy to be working there. You want the same thing. Your employees are the face of your business. No swearing, semi-professional attire and professional attitude.
Maintain new releases. This store in particular was blowing out their Warmachine/Hordes stuff because plastic minis are coming out (supposedly). There was an unadvertised 25% discount, but nothing new. I was kinda hoping for some of the new releases to spend a gift card on, but they weren't interested in serving me up something new.
Another local store gets in new releases only once a month or so (if that). I end up saving up a bunch of money and spending it at GenCon just because I can finally see those releases I've been waiting for (I spent $900 in the dealers' room this past August).
I remember a figure somewhere that something like 3/4 of your sales of RPGs will be new stuff. I could be wrong on that, so don't quote me. I don't need RotRL #1, although its a kick-butt module. But, the latest Pathfinder? Yeah, I'll probably be more interested in that.
Store Events. I'm seeing lots of in-store demos, gaming, painting . . . anything to get new people into the hobby. These are good. Do yourself a favor: Make sure the people you have around are friendly, service-oriented people. I participated in a demo game of Warmachine at the aforementioned store, and the guy who ran it for me was pretty darned good. He explained the basics, answered my questions, and helped me have a good time. Also, make sure the events are semi-consistent. I've tried to go back to that store for paint night, but they're unorganized, and I showed up on a night when no one else was there.
Finally, a bit of business advice. Don't get a loan to operate the store. Do the deals with cash. Why? Because when you have an off month, its much easier to pay all your bills when you don't have an additional loan payment hanging over your head. A business that doesn't have debt won't have to ever file bankruptcy.
Good luck on your store!
Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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If you are seriously considering opening a brick-and-mortar gaming store, I strongly suggest a national tour of some of the stores that are considered among the finest in the country, to talk to their managers and see what they are doing that others are not.
Yes, I think you do need space for Organized Play in your store in order to succeed these days. I think local game stores can outperform online retailers mainly in the SERVICE sector, which unfortunately is one aspect of business a lot of game stores seem not to be able to grasp.
A knowledgeable, professional sales associate can answer questions, push people toward product, add add-on sales, and develop customer loyalty. It's a lot more difficult for an online store to pull that off, so I think it's here where a game store needs to spend a great deal of its focus.
My personal recommendation would be to visit The Source Comics & Games in St. Anthony (Minneapolis), Minnesota. It is simply the best game store I've ever visited, and I've been to a ton of them. There are lots of others you'll want to check out, but I'll leave other posters to suggest them.
Good luck!
I don't own a gaming store but I do own a small book store (and because of that I'm able to (and have) set up an account with one of my local gaming distributors). Hence I've got a little bit of insight into this type of thing.
I pretty much agree that your far better off not getting into debt in the first place so avoid loans. Not sure how feasible that is however because your going to have to buy your initial stock and that might put you back anywhere for $25,000 to $75,000 dollars. I have a difficult time seeing how any store could have a reasonably good selection of stock without an outlay of at least $25,000.
The next aspect of this I think you should strongly consider is the fact that you can't actually do that much in the day to day selling of stuff in your store. If you want to be a sales guy go get a job at a local gaming store. Your job, if you start this business, is to run the business and that almost certianly means not being the front line staff - not unless this is some kind of a partnership with a number of people. Essentially your job actually will be to wear pretty much every hat but sales staff because you can hire sales staff for reasonably cheap prices but you can't hire an accountant for less then an arm and a leg - so you have to be the accountant and the guy that orders stuff and the manager that makes sure the shipments are coming or finds out WTF the problem is with the critical shipment that STILL has not shown up. You need to make the plans and then organize how they are going to be carried out. You need to arrange your advertising and you need to hire and (hopefully rarely) fire people etc. etc.
Don't walk into a small business thinking you'd love to be the staff at the store because you'll never have time to be the staff, heck you'll probably not have much time to hang out in the general sales area at all - no you'll be in the back managing the business. Hence what you really need is a good plan for what you want your business to be and then you need to break your plan down into steps that you can go through to make it happen.
Essentially your job is to be the boss - not to be the guy shooting the breeze on the best or worst RPGs out there. The people shooting the breeze about gaming and such will be your sales staff - when your doing it your actually just taking a break from your real job of managing a business.
As a business manager your (many) jobs will probably have a lot more in common with the woman across the street that manages the Subway Sandwich shop then it does with your front line staff that actually deals with the customers, games and comics. There simply are not enough hours in the day to both be staff and manager and you can't really hire some one to manage you at your own store.
Have some kind of plan before you start this on what exactly it is thats going to make your store so great. Its going to have to be customer orientated - you can't compete with Amazon on price, forget it - can't be done. So you have to have some GREAT IDEA on why exactly people are going to go through all the hassle of coming to your store (instead of staying at home and ordering their books online in their underwear, for cheaper then what your offering). You have to have a GREAT IDEA thats going to bring them in that door and then your going to have to tell all these customers that your here. Advertising is anything but cheap...its probably out of your price range really and venues to advertise on that are focused on the customers that might be interested in your product and also local is likely to be hard to find.
That probably leaves you with something that amounts to a word of mouth advertising campaign as your only real option. That means you need to get customers to talk about your store to their friends and you want them to do so in a good way. Hence it has to be a cool place to be.
That also probably means you've got to have some means of staying alive for what might be a fairly protracted period of time while you build a customer base. In other words you need to have enough money so that you can essentially drop $25000-$50000 dollars on the table for inventory and then expect to loose money - store rent, your staffs wages, store decor, furniture, about a million things you had not even considered when you started this but cost you money anyway for at least six months. Make sure you budget for your GREAT IDEA and also budget for whatever supplies and equipment you need for your GREAT IDEA.
OK so you've been hemorrhaging cash for six months - even here, and presuming that you have managed to quickly and effectively implement your GREAT IDEA to bring in the warm bodies I'd still not expect to get any profit from the place for a further six months, though hopefully its finally stopped hemorrhaging cash. Even after all this don't expect much pay for a full year beyond this - don't be surprised if the pimply girl young enough to be your daughter, whom you hired to work as staff, is actually pulling down more pay then you are for a significant period of time - probably right through until at least the beginning of year #3 of your store.
Also do make sure the plan is actually feasible. No matter how cool your idea is if the number of possible patrons for your store is just not that high you can't succeed. I'm not sure of the demographics of your location but really you want to be in easy travelling distance of a very large number of people...millions would be good... because there really just are not that many gamers out there.
As a hypothetical example lets suppose...
If there are a million people nearby and one in, say, 500 could potentially patronize your store once per year then you'd get 2000 patrons a year...which might, just barely, be enough to survive (thats like 5 or 6 customers a day. Not that many when you realize that your only actually making maybe $16 on that $40 Players Handbook II you just sold (after you factor in shipping and the cut the distributor and publisher took) and your staff costs around $80 a day, not to mention your stores rent. In fact looking over my own example you'd probably need to have either more then a million people nearby or have some percentage higher then 1 in 500 patronize you once every year to really survive. So look around - can the market your in really support a game store? 'Cause if it can't it won't matter how kick ass your GREAT IDEA for making people actually get dressed to leave their homes and come to your store is...it still won't work.
Anyway if you want to think about this I highly recommend you pick up a book called The E Myth and read it before you start to get hot and heavy with the planning.
.My personal recommendation would be to visit The Source Comics & Games in St. Anthony (Minneapolis), Minnesota. It is simply the best game store I've ever visited, and I've been to a ton of them. There are lots of others you'll want to check out, but I'll leave other posters to suggest them.
Good luck!
Erik, are you referring to the Source Comics & Games in Falcon Heights? There were several Source Comics and Games outlets in the Twin Cities but the consolidated into one large store. By the way, my previous post was pertaining to this particular store. Bar none, it is the best gaming store for hundreds of miles. Any chance your ever going to be a guest there on D&D day?
Thanks for everyones input. Erik I did plan to visit a lot of the gaming stores within several driving hours but hadn't thought about a national tour, it's definately something to think about.
Jeremy, you have given a lot of very useful input and a lot for me to think about. I will definately pick up that book and see what I think after reading it.
RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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I know from talking with the Guardtower that Paizo stuff is still doing well, as is WOTC 4e. Though they're seeing distributers offering discounts on the MM and DMG. They also said Gloom is one of their better sellers, as is Hero Clix.
Talking to other stores in the area, it does seem to come down to the mix of having the product, the people who know the product, and the gaming space. And building loyal customers The Soldery was having a successful Mechwarrior group, and the Armoury is happy to have our Pathfinder group.
Obviously (by my tag) all my Paizo stuff comes from Washington direct, but I do buy my Classic Battletech stuff and impulse buy from the Guardtower, out of FLGS loyalty.
It also helps that I can talk shop with the people there. Spreading the info I hear here and other places and getting their data to fill in the holes I have.
That said, starting a new FLGS is a rough road and, if this is your intent, I wish you all the luck.
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Finally, a bit of business advice. Don't get a loan to operate the store. Do the deals with cash. Why? Because when you have an off month, its much easier to pay all your bills when you don't have an additional loan payment hanging over your head. A business that doesn't have debt won't have to ever file bankruptcy.
lol, tell that to some of the UK's biggest retailers!
Good luck Chris!
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Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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Erik, are you referring to the Source Comics & Games in Falcon Heights? There were several Source Comics and Games outlets in the Twin Cities but the consolidated into one large store. By the way, my previous post was pertaining to this particular store. Bar none, it is the best gaming store for hundreds of miles. Any chance your ever going to be a guest there on D&D day?
Yes, that's the one. Falcon Heights, sorry.
And don't think I didn't recognize that _other_ store you mentioned! It used to be my favorite, back in the day.
I'd love to be a guest for D&D Game Day, but something tells me Wizards of the Coast will not be paying for me to fly out there to help promote their products any time soon. :)
Erik, are you referring to the Source Comics & Games in Falcon Heights? There were several Source Comics and Games outlets in the Twin Cities but the consolidated into one large store. By the way, my previous post was pertaining to this particular store. Bar none, it is the best gaming store for hundreds of miles. Any chance your ever going to be a guest there on D&D day?Yes, that's the one. Falcon Heights, sorry.
And don't think I didn't recognize that _other_ store you mentioned! It used to be my favorite, back in the day.
I'd love to be a guest for D&D Game Day, but something tells me Wizards of the Coast will not be paying for me to fly out there to help promote their products any time soon. :)
Yea, I figured you knew. Any respectful Minnesota Gamer would. Remember the soldier they had? Kinda stood out. Wow, that was a long time ago. I really liked that store as well. Kinda sad to see it go the direction it did. The owner always treated me well though. He had a good memory for recalling customers even when I had moved away from the Twin Cities and returned every 3-4 months he remembered me.