GAMA Is Not Me (Yet)

I am a member of GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, because it's required to attend the GAMA Trade Show. In years I don't attend, I'm not a member. But this year, I'm a member. I certainly don't feel like a member. As a retailer, I feel like a customer, and occasional content provider.

This is because the organization is dominated by manufacturers, and retailers are only tangentially included to help put on the show which represents such a large part of what GAMA does. Retailers are allowed to have a seat at the table, but the short one next to where the adults sit. We retailers are customers and when in leadership roles, show content providers.

GAMA has done a poor job of representing retailers over the years and worse, by taking on this role and doing it poorly, it has prevented a legitimate retailer organization, which serves retailer needs, from taking root. Retail organizations come and go, their leaders undermined, their mission ridiculed, their membership fractured.

These organizations exist because of GAMA's failings, yet they can't prosper while GAMA pretends to serve retailers like me. GAMA is divisive in this way. So what I would really like GAMA to do is stop pretending they serve the interest of retailers. Keep putting on your show and feel free to charge a fee that would include a membership amount of money, because there's strong value there and a low price, but let us go as members and admit you're all about the interest of game publishers.

Or the opposite.

The opposite would be to take a far stronger role in serving game trade retailers, starting with tightening up the mission statement to explain who exactly GAMA serves. You haven't been genuine in the past, so it needs to be right there in writing. That's right, start with stating retailers are sitting at the big table. Because the vague mission statement has been used to underserve a large portion of GAMA constituents, it should be re-written.

If the opposite means letting go of obstructionist leadership, then I'm all for it. I have no doubt the current executive director has great organizational prowess and leadership skill. But I also know the executive director is obstructionist and disinterested in retailer needs and interests. So if finding a new leader is part of the opposite, I'm all for it.

I'm a little excited to think this is the direction GAMA is headed. I'm also a little apprehensive, because I've made it abundantly clear, I don't believe this organization is really about serving me as a retailer. I don't want to be responsible for breaking your organization, if you happen to be a publisher. But I'm also tired of GAMA sucking all the air out of the room and preventing retailers from proper representation. Make it my organization too. I'm a member after all.

I'm Sorry (Tradecraft)

Sometimes customers get upset. They may have been treated shabbily, or they want it one way, but it's the other. We have a culture of false apologies. There's an interesting article about the six types of apologies, with only one of them sincere. Most apologies are to get people to calm down and move along, especially in the corporate world.

It's difficult for a faceless corporation's communications director to show compassion when their company just did something atrocious. They're hardly in a position to take personal responsibility in any sincere way. Apologies are engineered and carefully worded, and vetted by the legal department. We don't have to do that in small business. Your most important asset is you, the person in charge, who built this thing and cares. Plus it's all your fault anyway, as we've established.

If you aren't sorry, the worst thing to do is apologize. If you cut a product line or canceled an event, well that's business. You can say "Sorry, but this isn't working for us as a business any more," but that's an explanation, not an apology, and it will be viewed as such. Disappointing customers is inevitable if you're around long enough and take enough chances. If you've never disappointed a customer, you're either lying to yourself or you have an extremely narrow line of business. Congratulations on playing it safe.

If you've legitimately screwed up, you should sincerely apologize. The article I mentioned calls this the apology from love. It's when you empathize with a person, putting yourself in their shoes, and put yourself out there. It's a real apology. You messed up, you apologize. What happens next is not important. You've done damage and it's up to the aggrieved to decide if it's in their interest to continue to engage you. I think the more you try to retain an aggrieved person in your apology, the more insincere you become.

Because sincere apologies are so rare, especially in business, people will often try to take advantage of you. They assume you're the corporate mouthpiece and now is the time to hit you up for free airline ticket or a discount coupon. Some will use your apology as an admission your business process is broken and their interpretation of how you run your shop should take precedence. I once apologized to someone in a store forum and they agreed to continue being my customer, if I gave control of that forum to someone else. A sincere apologize is an opening to some people, and you've put your heart on the line if you did it properly.

Here's where you need to be firm. "I'm sorry, but no," is what often happens when the opportunist sweeps in with their demands. In my mind "no" often means "get bent" or "GFY." My apology is not an invitation to become my business partner. And here is when you get to decide if you want to continue to engage with them or have them move along. The important thing is to stay firm to your convictions and your processes, provided they're good. You did your job, you've sincerely apologized, you've considered necessary changes. I'm always open to changing bad processes and a complaint will certainly trigger that change. However, many people just want it one way when it's the other.

Wages (Tradecraft)

I want everyone to make as much money as possible, including my employees. However, when it comes to wages, retail is where the rubber hits the road. It doesn't matter how liberal you are as a store owner, you are still subject to math. Math doesn't lie or hold a political opinion, it's quite indifferent to your views, much like the science of global warming. So although I'm fairly liberal, and would like nothing more than my employees to make a middle class income from their jobs, I don't see how most small businesses will survive on their way to a $15 minimum wage (currently at $11) at the rate it's scheduled.

We can look at the math by examining our three buckets. In retail, we have three buckets of expenses after cost of goods: labor, rent and other. When these buckets start to overflow, growing in size, our revenue needs to increase to cover them. So if the labor bucket increases by 10% a year, as it is generally doing with minimum wage, our revenue needs to increase by a third of that, or 3.3%. If we don't increase revenue by 3.3%, that money is coming from profits or if you're on the edge, you're losing money. Lose money long enough and you and your jobs go away, like it or not.

But what about inflation? We need 3.3% to cover increasing wages every year, as we've established. Inflation doesn't include wages. So now retailers also need to grow to cover inflation. Did you know inflation is actually growing pretty quickly despite low interest rates? Inflation last year in my region was 3.6%. That's another headwind to deal with, and nobody likes to talk about this, but it might be related to fast growing wages. Rather than needing to cover a 3.3% mandated wage increase, small business now needs to add that 3.6% inflation to the mix. That's roughly 7%. So should we expect small retailers to grow 7% to cover these costs?

When you look at recent historical numbers, 7% growth for retail is phenomenal. It's emerging market growth like that of China and India. Mumbai, Shanghai and Beijing had recent historical growth in this range, but most other cities are far lower. The growth rate in California cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles is 1.5-3%, not even keeping up with current inflation levels or wage growth. Certainly not both.

So when you ask a California retailer to grow 7%, you're picking winners and losers. You're essentially cutting the legs out from all marginal businesses and many average businesses and giving a gift to profitable businesses, who regardless of whether they hit that absurd growth target, can always absorb wage growth with profits. Those businesses will inevitably be large, like Wal Mart and Target. If I had local competition, I might actually like this and hunker down to wait them out, but they've already failed.

This fast wage growth scheme is really a gift to big business at the expense of small business. When I predict small businesses will disappear because of this, taking jobs with them, of which the job market is roughly half small business, this is what I'm talking about. I'm not being gloomy, I'm looking at math. The math is not good. I have no political horse in this race, I want everyone to get as much as they can.

The hope with 10%+ wage growth is the rising tides theory, but again, you're expecting growth rates of 7% for small business. The left regularly mocks Trump for predicting 4% GDP growth as impossible, but they don't seem to care when unreasonable high growth is expected from small business. A more reasonable approach to this, if we decide dictating wages is the right choice, would be a slower progression that isn't so destructive to small business. The problem is it isn't politically expedient to provide a slow correction, just like Trump's ridiculous 4% annual GDP (I know it peaked there for a quarter, but that can't last).

Finally, I really, truly, hope I'm completely wrong. I hope I'm talking out of the wrong orifice. California will be seen as an economic miracle, which it already is, but now by raising up the bottom tier of workers. It will be glorious and will be copied across the country. It pains me that I'm on the same side as the Koch brothers in this debate. As the saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day. I really hope I'm wrong on this.

Teen Jobs and Game Retail

There's an interesting article that states only a third of teens look for summer jobs rather than half, as they did when I was a kid in the 80's. I've got some ideas about that, some of which are specific to my store in California but others are more general.

Labor costs. My labor costs in California have skyrocketed as minimum wage moves towards $15 an hour. Labor costs are rising over 10% a year, which means the first 3-4% of my growth each year goes just to cover labor. This year my growth is flat, so labor is crushing me right now. I'm looking at cutting labor costs, and there are no easy targets.

This means fewer workers, more efficient workers, and reduced hours for workers. I don't want this to happen, but I have little choice unless I want to roll up my sleeves and take more shifts. That's coming. So you can imagine my reluctance to having someone on staff whose not 100% up to speed and who is still learning how to human in the marketplace. It's an expensive public service I can't afford.

When you change the costs of labor, you change the nature of labor. You begin deciding what is worth doing and who can do it. If you thought the labor market at $7/hour would be the same at $15/hour, you were mistaken. It just won't work that way.

Complexity. Working in my business is wickedly complex. We have a need for computer systems mastery. However, what's really critical is the various policies and procedures that need to be acquired. It's what makes an alright store, which is completely untenable in the American marketplace, into a good store. It takes about six months for a new employee to be completely up to speed, a time period I've heard from other retailers as well.

Running a strong, service oriented business can be summarized by our policies and procedures, three inch, three ring binder. Acquiring that knowledge over summer break isn't possible. It's not going to happen. Likewise, we don't hire adults as temporary workers. We do hire permanent part-time people, so there is room for that. Most kids who apply make it clear they have no intention of staying after the break. By the way, I generally consider my employees new until they've hit the three year mark, and they do tend to stay five or more years if they work out. So if we don't think someone is in it for the long term, we're really not interested.

Liability. Employees recently sued a company in California for the right to sit in a chair, and they won. The legal landscape has changed dramatically over the last decade, and just saying the wrong thing can destroy my business. Having a child on staff unaware of workplace norms is dangerous. It's not only dangerous from a legal standpoint, but we live in an age where review culture can destroy a small business just as fast as a lawsuit.

Consumers made the landscape the way it is. They voted in the laws and they are responsible for an increasingly hostile business culture. It wasn't this way when I started 15 years ago, but it's the world we live in now.

By the way, my 13 year old son is an official store employee. He makes minimum wage. He gets worked hard when he's on staff, because I can't afford to pay him for less than adult work. He cleans bathrooms and sorts cards. That is, when he's around. We do everything legally, so he can only work when his school sanctioned work permit allows. That means a ridiculously few number of days a year, although that will increase with time. He needs to save for college. It's not like his dad is making it rich selling hobby games.

On the Road Store Management (Tradecraft)

Last year I spent five weeks driving cross country over the summer. I would place sales orders on my laptop from hotels with fast WiFi. I would pay bills the old fashioned way, dropping hand signed checks in a mailbox. More often than not, the check was closer to its destination than if I had mailed it back home.

This year I was more ambitious, with a plan to drive through Mexico and Central America, our farthest end point being Honduras where we would visit the Copan ruins. I had been there 17 years ago and got as far as the road to the ruins before we were stopped by a "peasant uprising." Despite driving days to get to Honduras, including abandoning our vehicle in the border and hitchhiking the final few miles, not seeing the ruins in this fashion was the highlight of my trip. This time we would get there.

Along the 8,000 mile trip, I visited game stores in Mexico and Guatemala. A friend helped translate so I could get  a glimpse of hobby gaming in these countries. I wrote about that and posted photos on my Facebook author page. Game stores in these countries are in their early phases. Customers play Magic, about half with English cards and half in Spanish. RPGs and board games are just starting to germinate, with only one store I visited in Guatemala City having any stock at all. Part of this was cultural and part was economic. It's an exciting time for the trade in these countries, and as the market emerges, it will be interesting to see where it goes.

The Hideout, in Guatemala City. Oldest and best stocked store of the trip

Preparing for this trip business wise meant first setting up online banking. There would be no checks in the mail. It took this trip to bring me into the modern world of Internet banking, something I've had for my personal accounts for well over a decade. There would also be no trips to the bank for emergencies, like when my old payroll company insisted on a wire transfer after we were short one day. I wire transfer is like asking for a hand delivery from the Wells Fargo stagecoach driver, a giant manual pain in the ass for everyone involved. Adjusting to online banking was difficult, with its week in advance scheduling and plus or minus a day check arrivals (usually minus). I eventually adapted.

I handed off my weekly ordering to my manager, which meant I was truly free this time on vacation, unleashed from phone calls and the grind. My job was to make sure money was in the bank, which sometimes was difficult, and pay bills once a week from a Google sheets document. I was able to get my work load down to four hours a week. Disconnecting from day to day activity was not only critical for relaxation, but it protected me from the unknown, notably the availability of wifi and cellular service.

My cell phone is on AT&T and the way that worked was Mexico was included in my bucket of minutes and regular roaming, but Guatemala and Honduras were not. I set my account up ahead of time to transition to a "day pass" while in those other countries. This meant I was charged $10 a day for roaming. That seemed like a lot of money at the time, so in Mexico, with some help, I bought a wireless hot spot and a sim chip to get cheaper local rates. What it took weeks for me to learn and many hours at kiosks, was I'm a giant user of data, and there was no data plan big enough for my American style usage. $10 a day was a bargain, and I gladly went back to that and sold off my hot spot. The roaming cost $120 and the hotspot, which sold was $140.

Hotels in these regions often offered WiFi. We would pick hotels based first on secure parking, because of our fancy vehicles, and second on WiFi availability. Although hotels would advertise WiFi, it often left much to be desired. WiFi would sometimes be down. Like just broken and we're sorry. WiFi might only work in the lobby. WiFi might be so slow and unpredictable as to be useless. However, 3G cellular service was all it took to log in and pay bills, and most often than not, access my POS system back home. So WiFi was a luxury, but 3G was plentiful in any reasonably sized town.

Most of my store problems, like my trip last year, were about me, rather than staff. I shorted a payroll for the first time with our new payroll company. They apologized to me, and asked if I just wanted to run it again, which they did with no charge. A big cash buffer might have gotten my four hours a week down to three. Most game trade pre orders have about a three month in advance window, and since I pre order every single item that comes into my store, those things rolled on in while I was gone. Any disconnect from the buying process won't be felt until late fall, and don't think I'm not worried about that.

Overall, I had a wonderful and relaxing time. Part of this trip was fantasizing about retirement in the region. I visited city after city saying, "I could live here!" I'm wondering if six months a year might be enough and how my store would function without me for that long. That's probably just vacation withdrawal talking, but if I start writing about visiting Guatemala for a six week Spanish intensive, you can bet it's on the horizon.

10 POS Requirements (Tradecraft)

I regularly get asked about which point of sale system to buy. I spent 10 years in IT, so I have some idiosyncratic ideas about technology, but it mostly comes down to computing ubiquity. It needs to be transparent and just work. I'm not interested in multiple updates, migrations, servers, or new features.

I currently use Lightspeed Onsite. Do I recommend it? No. Why do I continue using it? I'm grandfathered in and pay a support contract once a year rather than a monthly fee. I pay more for remote access to my POS each year, than I pay for my POS. When looking for a new POS, which I may be doing this year, here are ten considerations:

1. When the software breaks, who gets called? Is it a dude? Dudes get hit by buses. I want an 800 number and an organization so when I'm driving through the jungles of Central America, my staff can get things fixed by calling an organization, rather than chasing down a dude (why my AC has been broken for a month).

2. When the hardware breaks, who gets called? We have consultants we can call, but we don't have a support contract with them, so they may be a couple days out. This is not acceptable, really, but it's the best we could do with a Mac based system. Meanwhile, staff can muddle through with Square on their phones or a store tablet, as they're all trained for that.

3. Does it generate purchase orders? This is the keystone to our purchasing, which is often $10,000 a week. It should generate POs based on re-order quantities by item. If it can't do that, I don't want it. For example, when the Player's Handbook, gets below 4 copies, order up to X, or order X copies from Y supplier.

4. Does it generate cost of goods numbers? This data is generated from #3, purchase orders, and it should use either the COGS from the last purchased item or better yet, perform cost averaging. I need this for my Open to Buy worksheet and it's non negotiable. Some good systems can't do this.

5. Does it do reporting? Better question, does it do the right *kind* of reporting, as most POS reports are useless to me. I need to do turn rate analysis (which often requires an export to Excel), top sellers, customer reports, sales tax reports, general sales reports, and end of day reports. Does it allow for custom reports and saved reports?

6. Does it handle special orders? Not some layaway work around, but does it offer separate tracking of customer purchases of things I don't currently have in a robust system? There's only one system I know of that does that well, and I'm using it. We do over 400 special orders a year.

7. Is the company supporting the software? I care more about bug and security fixes than software features. It's also possible the company "supports" the software, but they place most of their effort on a newer product (Lightspeed). Security standards change so quickly nowadays versus a decade ago, an abandoned POS system is quickly out of date and may incur additional fees from credit card processors. 

8. Does the game trade integrate or work well with the software? Can I upload purchase orders to suppliers and have it interact with their database? Most don't do this. Can I export POs to common file formats? I can't export to a CSV so I can't order direct from Reaper, for example. Can I create "bundles" or larger units that can be broken down into smaller units (AKA CCG boxes)? Most importantly for some stores, does it integrate with Crystal Commerce of TCGPlayer Pro? This is where ION shines, but the top off the shelf POS systems will never have this.

9. What does it cost? Does it require a large capital purchase up front or can I run this software on a cheap PC or tablet and pay a monthly fee? An onsite version will require hardware, software, accessories and often an integration specialist. It can cost up to $5,000. I can't recommend a new store buy an onsite POS at this stage. Look to the cloud and a modest terminal with a few accessories. Expect to pay monthly either way, but expect a cloud based system to not require a consultant, unless you're migrating.

10. How does it feel? You have to like it. It has to excite you and make you want to engage. If it's on a PC and you're a Mac person, it may turn you off. If it looks like a DOS application from the 80's, and you like graphical interfaces, a crude interface may leave you cold. Some of the most robust systems feel overwhelming to use. Some of the most user friendly only have partial overlap into what we do or lack key features. My own POS was designed for clothing boutiques, and it has some useless features (for me) to prove it.

Sucking (Tradecraft)

It is quite possible, through no fault of your own, that you suck.

Sucking is quite common in game trade retail, or really any small business, because there are few exits besides financial ruin. You run a store, perhaps you become good, then great, and then you really need to go do something else, but you can't. You either don't have the means to go elsewhere, or you have what they call golden handcuffs. You do have means, through painstaking mining of capital and sweat, and if you go now, you'll lose your paycheck. You suck and your stuck.

Not sucking is the goal, and sometimes that means you need to stop doing the same sucky behavior expecting non-suck results. For me that meant giving up my day to day place at the counter. I was burned out, I needed to do something else, but I didn't know how. As it turned out, I was like the baby elephant in the circus, where they chain up its little leg and it learns not to pull on the chain. When it becomes an adult, it never occurs to the big elephant it could break free. You don't want to be the elephant with a chain on its leg.

Luckily for me, I had built the business up enough to have the means to step aside and let someone else bring the day to day passion and enthusiasm to the business. Some will tell you nobody can replace your enthusiasm and passion, just as they'll tell you other lies, like you can't work with friends, or making a hobby into a business will ruin your hobby. You can most definitely hire passionate people. In fact, the advice I often give is you don't personally need to bring the passion, but someone does.

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Now let me take a step back and say a lot of times you are not sucking. We are running businesses here. The business needs to be profitable or there's no point. If your customers are dwindling and your sales are falling, that's certainly your fault and there are things you can and should do to address that. But if your business is growing and you have critics, people angry at you for following your business model, then you may (but not always) be doing something right.

People don't get angry at irrelevant people in their lives. When a random plumber in Ohio is a jerk, well, there's a jerk. When the president of the United States is a jerk, the person who speaks with their voice, in your name, to rest of the world, then you're angry and have something to say. The president has relevance in your life. As a local business person, the angry ones are often those who don't like your behavior, but still see your business as relevant in their lives. Otherwise they would be indifferent. They want it one way, but it's the other. The textbook definition of suffering (I have unusual textbooks).

If you have a bad experience in my small business, it was either:

1. Because you were treated shabbily, in which case I'm truly sorry and you may enjoy learning whoever treated you that way is likely no longer in the business (or customer facing if it was me). My job is trying to minimize those bad experiences through training and improving policies and procedures. We've come a long way. We've always got a long way to go.
2. Because you are a difficult person, in which case you more than likely had it coming, as my staff bends over backwards far, far beyond my spinal tolerances. This is incredibly rare, and you probably know you're a difficult person if you're that difficult. This is not news to you and maybe you have reasons. Whatever.
3. Because you wanted it one way, but it was the other, in which case you need to put yourselves in our shoes and understand the insanity that is running a game store. More than likely you want us to carry something, but there's no market. It's math, not vindictiveness that results in stocking decisions. The other, more common complaint is we have a "pay to play" system in which you add a small amount of money to your store account to use our magnificent play space. It's like going bowling with the promise of buying a slice of pizza in the snack bar. It's frankly a ridiculous system and it blows my mind anyone complains about this. It's entitlement at its worst. The cost for hours of entertainment is so close to zero people often insist it be.

As a store owner, your job is to know which of these things is the issue when a customer is unhappy. Issue number one is obviously intolerable from either you or your staff and you have a lotta 'splaining to do. Issue number two is rough, and you can try bending backwards a little more, but this is usually where I give a well practiced shrug. It's perfectly fine to fire a customer. Issue number three? This is where you might be tempted to change your business model to make people happy. The truth is they still won't be happy, they won't support your store, and they'll sap resources from you that could go to better, real customers that accept your reality. This happens a lot. Stop bending backwards. Stand up straight. Find your spine.