The Pocket Knife

My son passed his knife safety "whittling chip" class at scout camp this weekend. They learn the "blood circle," how to safely pass your knife to someone else, and how to sharpen and store their knife when not in use. He's nine years old and he took this deadly seriously, as he should. Then they practiced whittling on soap bars.

While watching my boy with a butter knife, responsibly, slowly whittling bits of Irish Spring into the shape of a sports car, I decided he had earned the privilege of carrying a folding blade knife. I wanted his first knife to come from his dad.

That's when I became conflicted. Retail has changed my brain chemistry to where "buying things" the activity that I facilitate for the vast majority of my waking hours, is never an easy thing.

Where should I buy this pocket knife? As a brick and mortar retailer, surviving on very thin profit margins, it pains me to pay full price for anything. I am not cheap, because I tend to buy top of the line products, another retailer trait. I buy top quality because I don't want to buy it again. It's a "buy once, cry once" mentality that comes from not having the resources to replace stuff most of the time (It's also a bit of a Gen X trait as well; fewer things of the highest quality). Looking at "return on investment" isn't a conscious thing any longer, it's how my mind works. But being frugal, not wanting to spend a lot, that's different. It's a bit paradoxical.

It's paradoxical because I know where the cheapest price resides, and it's not with brethren brick and mortar store owners like myself. It's in the small store killers like Amazon and Wal-Mart. It's difficult not to give them my money without being a total sell out, but often I have no choice when my tastes outstrip local resources.

We went to a very good army-navy store. Victory Stores has been in Vallejo nearly forever. The owner is a solid guy, the kind who bends over backwards to help, has mastered special orders (despite it being on a notepad), and sincerely thanks you every time you make a purchase. The rest of the staff is just as professional. I wanted my son to experience this store. I wanted this even though the knife I wanted to buy him was much cheaper online.

When we entered, I announced my intentions to the owner and he assigned us a staff member, an older gentleman, to help us select a knife. We had many requirements, including price, the opening and closing mechanism, the blade style and length, and a knife that would fit his small hand. There was no good way to figure all this stuff out online. Knives that seemed perfect had locking mechanisms he couldn't disengage. One was perfectly balanced for me but was far too heavy for him. And again, I wanted him to have that now rare experience of solid customer service. I would be giving him his first blade, but he would be choosing it. They would be expertly facilitating that choice. It would have more meaning this way.

If you've ever seen the movie, The Matrix, that's how I see retail stores, especially ones I know well. The zeroes and ones make up the various product lines, the quick sellers, the long tail items, the mid level merchandise and what passes for top quality. It's all on display systematically, on endcaps and gondolas and gridwall, terms I didn't know a decade ago. It's also not uncommon to find me in someone else's store, re-shelving goods, organizing products, or helping customers. I don't intend to do it. It's kind of an affliction. I wouldn't have gone ten years owning a store if there wasn't some personal satisfaction in that.

We found his pocket knife. The owner said he had just put it on sale for 20% off, which felt good. He thanked us sincerely for our business. We thanked him and the gentleman who assisted us. It was good to know you could still have that experience. It was really good to know that store was still there.

The Magic Box

Around a third of all hobby game sales are of one product line. This game has releases quarterly, and as it fluctuates in popularity, businesses ebb and flow, including game distributors and every hobby game store. Stores choose their POS systems based on how well it handles this one product. Business plans, if they exist, focus on how to feature and support this one product.

It's such a popular product, that it's saved, hoarded, and tracked like currency over decades. It's the original Bitcoin. It's not inconceivable to forgo the stock market in favor of collecting this product. Thieves regularly break into game stores to steal it. It's published in ten different languages and we carry product for seven of them. Other than a couple games in Spanish, there's nothing else like it in our store. I'm referring to Magic the Gathering, of course. Today is the release date of Khans of Tarkir, the hottest set in at least a couple years for the hottest game in the world.

I previously discussed the Magic pre-release. It's a product of limited supply, with a huge demand, tied to an event that can only happen on two days ever, at a location with limited seating. It's a unicorn of sorts, with incredibly tight sales parameters that inevitably leads to profitability in a trade joked about for its lack of profitability. Magic the Gathering booster boxes are the exact opposite of this.

Booster boxes are often called commodity items, as in ubiquitous items of nearly unlimited supply. However, booster boxes fail the fungibility test, as in only Wizards of the Coast produces them. So they're not quite a commodity item, but they are widely available, nearly limitless in supply, and in high enough demand that the price of one is rarely the MSRP.

If you're a casual Magic player, you may not be aware that Magic boosters come from booster boxes. There are 36 packs in each box and there is nothing especially magical about the price of a booster box. A booster box doesn't really have an MSRP from Wizards of the Coast, they just sell us packs that happen to come in boxes.

1,728 boosters, which we then use a calculator to add to our system as 48 boxes (which the system then breaks out as pack again, go figure). And what's with Huey?

Every other product in the store is sold at roughly MSRP. So you would expect a Magic box to be 36 packs times the cost per pack. Since packs have an MSRP of $3.99 that should result in a Magic box price of $143.64. So is that the price? With a nearly unlimited supply and an enormous demand of this near commodity item, nope.

Khans of Tarkir, the hottest set in years, on the release day, right now, with a box cost of $73.08 ($2.03 a pack x 36) can be bought online for as little as $100 plus free shipping. Ignoring shipping, that's a roughly 37% margin for this industry driving, super hot product. With Priority Mail shipping, it's more like a 20% margin for that retailer or a $15 gross profit on a box that "should" sell for $145.
We know why the box is sold at such a low price, because of the market forces. But what is a retailer to do? How does a retailer know how to price this value price eroded product that makes up such a frightening portion of their sales?

First, lets get something straight. If you're not a box "flipper," as in a low box cost, high volume seller of Magic boxes, the vast majority of your pack sales are to casual players. Casual players are the backbone of this product. They allow you to have margins high enough so you can give deep discounts to the serious box buyers. If you're a casual Magic player, know that you're supporting this model. I've always felt bad for you guys. Without you, there would not be the profit that drives the game trade, as a 20% margin doesn't take you very far in a trade that agrees it needs 50% to prosper.

I should also mention the casual player is a very different market than the serious player. They find the concept of a $100 booster box just as obscene and inconceivable as a $145 box. They will not be buying boxes, possibly ever, and what you sell your box for is of no concern to them. These two customer bases are entirely different. Nobody has ever said, "Wait a minute, you're ripping me off by not giving me volume pricing on my booster pack purchase!"

Here's where I would like to be able to show you a chart (below) that demonstrated selling boxes at a higher price is far more beneficial than a lower price, but that's not realistic. The market price is the price. That incredible demand with unlimited supply sets the price and you just need to slot yourself into that equation to maximize your profit. There is no perfect information in the marketplace, no right price for everyone, just a right price for you to sell the most number of boxes at the best price possible.

That number is something you need to experiment with. The first few years of having a store, I sold Magic boxes at $145. Hold that line! When I say I sold them at $145, I really mean I sold one box, two if I was lucky, from each release. I wasn't really participating in the market. I had the wrong price. Since then, I've experimented with $125, $115, and low pre-order prices in the $100 range. By doing this, you start to see your supply and demand curve.

What you're looking for is that equilibrium point, where the price perfectly matches the supply and demand. That price is going to move as well and I suggest you freely adjust your box prices up and down as the supply and demand waxes and wanes. If a set is out of print or in short supply, move it up. If you're sitting on a ton of crappy product (Born of the Gods), mark it down. There's no fear of eroding brand value because the brand is already at near commodity levels. The brand has no absolute value.

If you're a retailer, contact Lincoln Erickson, who gave a presentation on exactly this two years ago at the Gama Trade Show. He experimented with box prices, created supply and demand curves and came up with a price that was right for him. Our price happens to be around $115. That's where I sell the most amount of boxes for the most amount of money. It's a price determined by the local market, the worldwide market and lots of trial and error. At $125, sales drop off. At $100, they don't increase appreciably and I'm giving away money.

The Disclaimer

Only in the game trade do we sometimes feel compelled to apologize for making money. There were concerns with my last post that some might get the idea that there's easy money in this whole game store endeavor. This post is to let you know that's not the case. Let me tell you how I've done.

I made no money for the first three years. It wasn't until the financial crisis, when my personal net worth cratered, that I got serious about running the business. Before then, it was just a thing I did while my house appreciated at an astronomical level. I was still one of the lucky ones.

56% of small businesses fail by year four, according to the SBA. So most make nothing and end up with years of debt. When you skip on your lease, which for us is worth nearly a million dollars, they tend to come looking for you. Everything you do as a small business is under your name, not some protective corporate entity.

Those that survive into profitability can expect a 5-8% net profit. So that $25 per head pre-release, seating 45 people per session, for 5 sessions, gives you gross sales of $2,644. How does that translate to net profit? It could be as low as $132. One of our bathroom sinks broke during our pre-release. Do you think you can get a new sink installed by a plumber for $132? Not unless the sink came from the sink fairy and the plumber got it installed within an hour.

So how is it being successful long term? We've invested a lot of money to develop a world class store. Our return on investment (ROI), is looking to be 10 years. That's right. If you gave me $10,000, ten years ago, I'm just finishing paying you back ... $10,000. I must have gone to business school with Jeff Bezos of Amazon!  What a crappy return!

If you had put that $10,000 into an S&P 500 index fund, it would now be worth $17,950. They (we, me) gave up $7,950 so I could run a game store. Has their game store investment appreciated 80% since we began? Good question. If I sold today, I would probably get 10 cents on the dollar for my inventory and close to nothing for the furniture fixtures and equipment. It's like that for most everyone.

So if you manage to be in the minority and not fail by year four, and if you were smart enough to have a shorter ROI, like five years, what can you look forward to? First, most store owners can't afford staff, so they're taking their managers salary, when they take anything at all. That salary is usually $30,000-35,000 a year. That's significantly less by almost half what they could make managing a mainstream store.

And their profit from this endeavor? The average store grosses around $200,000 a year. The owner will make their salary, plus the net profit from that $200K. In the 5% example, that's a measly $10,000. So we'll call the successful store owners take home pay in the $40,000-45,000 range. That's below the median household income in the US of around $52,000. That's why I'm always joking about having a WWGJ: Wife With A Good Job. Although I'm happy to say nowadays it's increasingly likely to be a HWGJ.

That's the basic economics, but it gets far worse when you consider the opportunity costs. If you're gainfully employed and have a career, you're likely in your 30's or 40's and you will be forgoing your peak earning period to run this store. Based on my last job and modest salary increases, compared to my very meager game store manager salary, combined with profits from those years, I figure I've forgone over $678,000 in income. That doesn't include any of the amazing benefits I did without as well, which would probably balloon that number by 30% or so. It's something my father warned about before I started, but it didn't seem important at the time.

So, you see, it's dumb. When I talk money and margins, it's to keep us below median salary, workaholic, control freaks from crashing and burning. If you get a fascinating inside look into that, all the better. Just don't quit your day job.

Pre-release Pricing

Today I publicly discuss the incredibly touchy subject of pricing. Not just any pricing, the pricing for Magic pre-releases. This is Magic pre-release weekend, one of several times of the year that equate to game retailer Black Friday. We've had three Khans of Tarkir events so far, and each hit capacity, perhaps for the first time since the super popular set, Return to Ravnica. The importance of pre-release money can't be underestimated. It's a huge event.

Pre-releases are special. There are few "products" as exclusive as a Magic pre-release, other examples being other exclusive Magic products. Yet retailers are all over the board on pricing, and many are in a race to the bottom. What's special about a pre-release is this: Every serious Magic player has to go.

When I say has to go, I mean they can't buy it online. Because it's a brick and mortar exclusive, a game retailer unicorn of sorts, we get to see customers who don't normally visit. We see the guy who comes in after each release and buys $100 worth of sleeves for the three cases he bought from racetothebottom.com, or the downright resentful customer who hates that we somehow still have a role in his Magic equation. So with what's essentially a captive audience, how do most retailers price their pre-release?

Magic pre-release pricing is all over the place, but it's not where you would think. At one end of the spectrum, a few are doing it at close to cost, hoping to make it up in Magic singles, or volume, or some other mythical crack addled equation. The baseline is about $25. At the other end of the spectrum is a flat $30. I don't know of anyone higher than that. In between is a dizzying array of value adds, such as early sign up discounts, included food, extra prize support, and in some cases, a combination of all of these which I honestly couldn't unravel. There is no MSRP on a pre-release, so it's interesting to see what individuals come up with, but for the most part, they didn't choose the obvious answer. I'll get to that.

The cost of the pre-release just went up in price. My guess is most game stores didn't even notice. This was a surprise to many retailers and it wasn't announced. In fact, many retailers had already sold pre-release spots at their original price before other retailers noticed this jump in price and alerted them. That was a bit irresponsible on Wizards of the Coasts part and my guess is it happened because they don't actually understand the calculus that goes into pre-release pricing. It's clear to me other retailers don't understand it as well, and most just do what others do or react to their local market. For their sake (really because I was curious), I made this handy chart:

The chart is helpful as a means to compare one price to another. For example a $30 pre-release makes roughly the same amount of money with 25 people as the $25 pre-release store makes with 35 people and the $23 pre-release store makes with 45. These are the kinds of equations smart retailers use all the time with pricing of things like Magic boxes. Yes, competitor, you sold 100 boxes at ten dollars over cost, but you still made less money than my 30 boxes at twenty over. If you're hitting capacity every time in your small store, you might especially consider supply and demand in this equation and bump up your pricing.

$20 pre-release stores don't even make it on this chart. They would need a whopping 62 participants to make the same amount of money as the $30 store makes with 25 participants.  This is a captive audience. This is a hotel room model, where every empty slot is a potential lost sales, either because its empty or because its full. We only have so many packs and so much space to pack people. There is a very tight supply and demand in these equations. So why lowball it? Why don't retailers discuss this stuff more often?

It mostly comes down to misplaced attitudes towards customer satisfaction and the need to be liked, especially with glorified hobbyists who start a store. And not having a chart showing you'll be just fine holding the line. As a business model, it's choosing to fail. Or worse, it's choosing to ignore all the things you need money for in a small business. It's not being able to afford furniture, fixtures and equipment and the staff necessary for a store. It's the stuff that keeps a small game store in "gamer pit" territory and keeps it from breaking out into the mainstream. The thing is, most retailers don't have the tools to understand this, both at this micro level and the overall macro level.

Lets talk margin for a minute. A game store has traditionally thrived at around a 50% margin. This is part history, part folklore, but it's how things used to be, back on the Earth that was. The reality nowadays is you're lucky if you can get an overall margin of 45%. In our tenth year, we've managed to bump that as high as 47%, but with a lot of higher margin used items that have trade offs in other areas, like slow turns.

I've written about how game stores are stuck between MSRP and a discount model that squeezes them on both ends, making the game trade a retail swamp of its own making. So why would the vast majority of game stores, with a captive audience with this one product, sell it below a 50% margin? At the average of $25, they're getting a 47% margin. $26.50 would be keystoning it for that 50% margin, and it wouldn't be crazy in this situation to go a bit higher.

We've been doing $30 in the past and decided to add a food component to our pre-release this time. It was more as a thank you to our loyal base, who have many other options, but I think it will be part of our equation going forward. My food budget is $3.50 per head to get to my $26.50 keystone number. If you were wondering why there's a $26.50 on the chart, this is why. I'll also mention there was nothing wrong with our $30 price point. Heck there's nothing wrong with $35, if you can do it, but I bet there's bacon involved.

If you're reading this as a Magic player and you're howling in anger, disgust and alarm, know this is an attempt to keep the doors open. Nobody is getting rich here. Nobody will ever even get well off in the game trade again, thanks to the steam releasing valve of the Internet and micro supplies of hot products. In fact, these are the kinds of events that keep many a game store's doors open. Now go find the best value out there for your pre-release, and make sure you include things like staff quality, cleanliness, and the likelihood that business will be there to keep your hobby growing for years to come. You want to play with passionate players. You want your game store owner staying up at night worrying about how to keep you perpetually entertained.

Take the Money and Run (Tradecraft)

There is a glut of "Magic" stores. Las Vegas, for example, has a population of 600,000 with 16 game stores. Normally a city like Las Vegas would have about four or five, and sure enough, there are four or five "real" game stores in Las Vegas, as in full spectrum game stores that carry a variety of game products. These stores have been around a long time and will remain after the Cardpocalypse. The other ten are various comic book stores and card shops that run Magic events. Many, many Magic events. This is typical of a lot of regions around the country. Those four to five game store are exasperated as the wind in their sales are depleted by these carpet baggers.

Before, I wrote something like, if you're less than five years old and Magic is more than 35% of your sales, you're at risk. This is still true. My new position? Don't diversify, just bank the cash. You have inadvertently hit on a boom. The idea of diversification, of taking profits from your highly efficient inventory, CCG sales, probably between 10-15 turns a year, and plowing them back into 2-3 turn product, is kind of stupid. It's not just counter intuitive, it's lacking in all sense. It's madness.

It's like the debate over home ownership. If you skip home ownership and invest the money, you'll usually come out ahead in the long run. Sure, most people don't have the discipline to take the difference between their rent and mortgage and invest it, but if they did.... Profit. That's where you're at if you've got a "card shop" in this current boom. You can buy a house, diversify into the hobby game market by deep sixing all your profits, or you can invest in a different future. Rent and bank the cash. 

The game trade, other than Magic, is a shambles. Tactical miniature games? Look at Games Workshop. Oh God. Those guys are really phoning it in of late. Did you read the CEO's "you can suck it" letter to investors? How about that new Dungeons & Dragons? Many stores have already moved away from RPGs, and Wizards of the Coast sounds way more interested in the possibility of movies and video games than dead tree entertainment. I don't expect them to produce a lot of content in the future, which is how that game is profitable for me. Board games? Oh the glut, and much of the momentum is arrested by Kickstarter. I'll still be selling these things, with great effort, probably for many years to come, but it's a rough row to hoe compared to your current cash crop.

The game trade outside of Magic is a fool's errand, an attempt to beat the house at it's own game. We compete against the producers of the product who regularly devalue their own creations and sell direct to customers for a quick buck. We're in a trade that waits for the Next Thing, knowing that the days of Next Things are behind us, along with dial up modems. The hottest games of the year have no supply. We work under the threat of the coming miniatures Apocalypse of 3D printing, the threat of Chinese Magic card counterfeiters and the perfect digital tabletop app that revolutionizes role playing. Other than Magic, the game trade is a swamp. 

We're in some weird game trade times with Magic. It won't last, and your best bet is to take that money, bank it, and work on your exit strategy. Why save up for the rainy day, the subsistence farming of the game trade, when you can take the profits from your cash crop and move on? Did you learn nothing from starting a store? Sandwich shop. People gotta eat. Open a sandwich shop.

Or maybe I'm just trying to thin the herd. Who can tell. I'm not a nice guy after all.

Not a Nice Guy (Tradecraft)

A long time ago, a professor friend was going back home to grade some papers. I told him, "Well, be nice." He gave me a sidelong glance and replied, "No, I'll be fair." Before opening the store I think I could have been called a nice guy. Nice is easy when you have limited responsibilities and you're not facing the world, front and center.

When you open a game store, a new set of responsibilities is thrust upon you. You are responsible for your customers, both their safety and their enjoyment. You are also responsible, legally even, to your investors and family for responsibly spending the small amount of capital you've all cobbled together. You will be taking on this role with no net, no unemployment, no disability, none of the safeties of conventional society. You are on the street if you fail, unlike the average employee. You are an employment outlier in the work world wilds.

You represent your community, their standards and expectations, and if you can't live up to them, if you can't maintain order and stability, they'll make your life hard until you do, or they'll close you down. The police will only come out to arrest Yugioh kids so many times before there's a ... conversation. Nice guy will have that conversation. Fair guy will make sure that conversation never happens.

When you open your store, there is also pie. It is assumed you have a giant budgetary pie that you'll be divvying out forthwith. As you are statistically likely to fail, the vultures come for their pie fast and furious. You will be called many times a day, indefinitely, by people assuming you're a fool in need of capital separation. I kid you not. They call every day.  Ten years now. The key is to first screen by caller ID. When that fails, it's a race to see how many seconds it takes before you can hang up. "Can I speak to the person in charge of..." is probably six words too many. These people are time bandits. You don't want to be nice.

When you open your store, you'll also be public facing. If you work in an office, you might think you're public facing as well, but you aren't really public facing until you've worked on main street, where every individual in your community will eventually mosey on in. Besides the usual customers, we get criminals, spies, the insane, people high out of their minds, religious zealots and many combinations.

A nice guy is sunk in these situations. I know this, because I used to be him. I used to engage these people, play a part in their fantasies, scams and intentional attempts to undermine me. I used to want to fix them, want to get to the bottom of their psychosis, want to unwind their crazy religion or dispel their predictions of failure, as if the universe had thrust me into this position to somehow bestow compassion and wisdom. Or maybe, and this is the worst delusion, I'm being tested.

One store owner warned me about leaving before I lost my soul. If that soul was nice guy, it's certainly gone after dealing with these folks. It's the woman who charged into the store in a cloud of fumes with a gas can and slammed it on the counter. It's the meth head who snuck into the office and stole my laptop. It's the criminal duo who tested me to the point where I made it clear I was not a corporate franchise, and hinted I would hurt them if they continued their scam. These guys killed nice guy. But it was for the best.

There is a look I've developed over time, perhaps involuntarily. It is the "I am not impressed with your bullshit, and I may hurt you" look. The troublesome know this look extremely well as they see it from law enforcement all the time. My cop friends and I talk about that look. The troublesome move on to greener pastures, where they can find a nice guy. Every veteran retailer has perfected the look. The look is some fantastic shorthand.

I'm not a mean person, but nice guy is long gone (ask my wife). I haven't lost my compassion for these people, even when they threaten to cause harm to my business or threaten me, but I strive more to be fair than the good Samaritan, administering aid. I strive to be more wrathful bodhisattva than angry demon. The pitfalls of striving towards wrathful bodhisattva is arrogance and anger, with arrogance being my likely downfall. My NPC role in this situation is that of shepherd and these are wolves. Like Jules grappling with being the shepherd in Pulp Fiction, the key is not to be the tyranny of evil men.

Fair, not nice, is what my customers and their parents expect of me. It's what my shareholders expect of me. The universe has decided it best you go back to the home, the treatment center, or the hole you crawled out of and reconsider your poor choices. You are a danger to the sheep (or are you the sheep?).

I strive to offer a fair value at a fair price. I don't do favors. I try not to make exceptions that cause trouble for my employees, although I'll bend over backwards to fix a wrong. I'm fair every day, where nice is far harder when it comes to consistency. Fair also includes firing customers, in rare occasions. It includes letting employees go before they do further harm to the business. It includes burning with fire when a product or product line is no longer working. Fair means doing these harsh actions as soon as possible, and not waiting longer than necessary. Fair means we give thousands of dollars of games to charities each year, but have to say no to the many people who would like us to support their cause.

Fair will put my son through college, pay my mortgage, and keep everyone safe.

Plastic Bag Ban

California passed SB270 Saturday banning single use plastic bags and requiring the sale of paper bags (if customers want them). Unless it's vetoed, the statewide ban will go into effect July 1st of 2015. In the Bay Area, many cities have passed similar ordinances, although Concord is not one of them. The bill is aimed clearly at grocery stores and pharmacies, other stores may also voluntarily participate (Section 1, Chapter 5.3, Article 1, G:5).

By voluntarily complying, we would stop using plastic bags and charge ten cents for a paper one. I'm not sure we'll actually sign up, mostly because the bill uses such fun government words as irrevocably, imposed and comply. The bill also makes the mistake (I think) of requiring cumbersome tracking of how that ten cent per bag is used. That was dumb. So we probably won't sign up, but we will stop using plastic bags. When our current supply of bags is gone, we'll switch to paper.

What do I think of the law? I spent $1,089 on 7,500 bags (5,500 plastic, 2,000 paper) over the last year. Over 10 billion plastic bags are used in California each year, according to some numbers, and many end up in landfills or in the ocean. From a business perspective, what's not to like? I save an extra $91 a month if bags were to suddenly fall off my books while making the world a better place.

From a personal perspective, I'm not a big fan of government behavior modification programs. I'm not a big fan of the upcoming (regressive) gas tax that will disproportionately hurt the poor. Personally, I would like to see more stability from year to year, and between the federal and state government, we're not getting that. There's far too much cheese moving behavior. I do believe in man made climate change and the need to protect the environment, and perhaps we don't have the luxury for slower change. But slower change would be nice.

The plastic bag savings will theoretically offset another change we're about to implement. One of the most profitable items in our store is bottled water, with profits about equal to our plastic bag expense each month. Bottled water is incredibly wasteful and is another major trash problem. Our eventual expansion will add two drinking fountains, one on each level, which I expect, from talking with other stores with updated building standards, will greatly reduce the amount of bottled water we sell.

Meanwhile, we're experimenting with carrying totes. One of our Kickstarter rewards is a custom tote, which we'll have for backers at the end of the month. We'll evaluate the totes and likely sell something similar in-store, giving customers one more option for carrying out their shiny new games. The ideal tote will be inexpensive (sold at cost), branded with our logo, and will carry a few good sized board games. If you're a store owner with a successful tote implementation, please share your experience.

We'll still carry paper bags. We'll give them out for free for the next year or so. Then we'll revisit this law and see how we want to proceed with charging customers ten cents for them. If everyone just switches from plastic to paper, there's really not much of a savings.