The $139 Board Game

Among the many misconceptions about game stores is the amount of money they make on a sale. I wrote a post like this years ago. A decade has gone by, so let's try it again with fresh numbers.

The first thing to know about the $100 board game from ten years ago is that it's now $139. But for this exercise, we're going to pretend your paycheck has grown enough that you haven't noticed. Yes, I know. You've noticed. You remind me every day. Humor me anyway, because the math is cleaner at $100, and everything below scales to whatever you actually paid at the register.

The second thing to know is that we own our inventory. Once it arrives, it's ours. We don't get to return it if it doesn't sell. We also have no relationship with the publishers to speak of. No rebates, no coupons, no special arrangements that let us pass our costs back up the chain. Nothing like buying a car or owning a book store. We're entirely on our own.

So here's where $100 of a sale actually goes.

Sales Tax: $9.75

On a $100 board game, we also collect sales tax, which here in Concord runs 9.75%, so $9.75. That money sits in our account for three to five weeks until we remit it to the state. 

Ten years ago this was $9. It has crept up to 9.75% since.

Cost of Goods: $54.50

The first thing we do when we sell a $100 board game is order another one. Or, if it stunk, something better. That means we spend about $54.50 on replacement inventory. This is our cost of goods, the raw invoice cost of the thing itself, with shrink pulled out and given its own line below.

Ten years ago I spent $55 here, and I still spend about $54.50 today. Has Cost of Goods gone up or down during this period? I don't know, as part of the last decade has been pricing games appropriately for my store and my market.

Shrink: $2.00

About $2.00 of this $100 is shrink, money that walks out the door: given out in error, received improperly, lifted from the till, or the victim of the five-finger discount. Call it a dollar from my own staff and a dollar from customers, though the truth is we rarely know which is which or who's doing what. It happens every single day and is the reason most retailers slowly lose faith in humanity.

Ten years ago I broke this out at $3.10. I am way better on the staff side, since I meticulously manage purchase orders, and the volume of sales has outstripped thievery.

Staff: $18.42

$18.42 goes to pay our staff, which of course circulates back through the local economy as rent, food, and everything else people spend money on. Most store owners take a salary out of this number, or at least they should. This figure also carries the payroll-processing fees and 401(k) administration that come along with actually having employees.

Ten years ago this was $12.21. This is the one that keeps me up at night. I told you a decade back that California's new minimum wage law would push this up about 10% a year for five years, and it did exactly that, from $10 an hour to north of $17 (we pay $19+). Half again as much of every sale now goes to the good people behind my counter, including my son.

Taxes: $1.61

$1.61 goes directly to taxes: mostly payroll taxes on the wages above, plus the various business taxes the state and county invent. This does not include the property taxes and regional taxes buried in our rent that people keep voting for and then forget about, which is another chunk hidden in the rent line. It also doesn't include income taxes on the manager and owner, which come out of payroll and profit.

Rent: $7.31

$7.31 goes to rent, including the previously mentioned hidden taxes and the maintenance of the building's exterior, called Common Area Maintenance, or CAM.

Ten years ago this was $9.67. This is one of the few lines that got better. My sales grew faster than they could raise the rent. The goal of growth.

Advertising: $0.60

$0.60 goes to advertising. 

Ten years ago I spent $1.99 here, so this is down by two-thirds. Part of that is cheaper ways to reach you, and part of it is that after all these years I do not have to buy quite as much of your attention as I used to.

Utilities: $1.86

$1.86 goes to utilities: the alarm system, internet and phones, garbage, and the big one, electricity, a large chunk of which is keeping our game space at a temperature humans will tolerate.

Ten years ago this was $1.74, so it is up a hair. 

Credit Card Processing: $2.97 (and hiding)

About $2.97 of that $100 goes to the credit card processors. The fee now comes out of my sales at the top, before anything gets booked, so it hides in plain sight. The rate is 2.6% plus a dime a swipe in the store, or 2.6% plus thirty cents if you buy online. It is a fee much higher than the rest of the developed world pays, nearly ten times what merchants are charged in Europe. And they take their 2.6% on the entire transaction, including the $9.75 of sales tax, so I even pay them a quarter or so to help me collect money for the state.

Ten years ago this was $1.53, and at least back then it was honest enough to show up as its own line. It has doubled since, and gone into hiding at the same time. If I still reported it the old way, it would be one of the biggest costs on this whole list.

Travel: $0.38

$0.38 goes to travel, meaning transportation, lodging and meals at local conventions.

Ten years ago I spent ninety cents here. Fewer trips, leaner trips, and a lot more sales to spread them over. Next year it will be quite a lot as I send staff to GAMA.

Insurance: $0.67

$0.67 goes to insurance: business liability, the ever-climbing workers' comp premium, and a "key man" life policy that keeps the business running if I get hit by a bus. It also includes my truck insurance, which I've had for about five years.

Ten years ago this was sixty-one cents. It has barely moved.

Outside Services: $0.30

$0.30 goes to outside services: our accountant, storage unit, and Uhaul rentals.

Ten years ago this was thirty-four cents, so about the same. 

Office Expense: $0.89

$0.89 goes to the hundred-plus small office expenses, from stamps for paying bills to pens that immediately run out of ink.

Ten years ago this was thirty-one cents, so it has nearly tripled. No single thing did it, just a thousand little supplies and fees that I would never notice one at a time and that add up faster than anything else on this page.

Debt Service: $0.00

Nothing goes to debt service this year.

Ten years ago I was paying thirty-one cents here to service the loan from our expansion. That loan is paid. In fact, we have interest income at this stage.

The Truck: $0.21

$0.21 goes to my truck, covering, fuel, repairs, and parking (insurance is in that section).

Ten years ago this line was "Big Blue," our old van, and it ran twenty-three cents. Big Blue was sold to the Evil Empire.

Licenses and Permits: $0.12

$0.12 goes to licenses and permits, including the ridiculous county fee for "inspecting" our barcode scanner. 

Ten years ago this was fourteen cents. 

Subscriptions and Dues: $0.59

$0.59 goes to subscriptions and dues: our POS software's annual fee, memberships, cloud backups, and the growing pile of services a modern store can't run without.

Ten years ago this was thirteen cents, so it is up more than fourfold. A decade ago you bought a program once and owned it. Now you rent it forever, there are ten of them, and every one of them raised its price last year.

Net Profit: $8.16

$8.16 is net profit. You can see there is not a whole lot of wiggle room for things like discounts. I could give away an 8% discount and break even, or I could feed my family instead. Most game stores live in the 5 to 10% range. If there is a takeaway here, it is the size of that last number. Eight-ish dollars out of a hundred is what the average retailer has to work with when it comes to price flexibility. About $2.50 of it then goes to income taxes.

Ten years ago this was $7.77. So $8.16 looks great. Before you get too happy for me, step back and look at the whole decade. My sales are up 211%. The wages I pay have nearly doubled, and that is the number I am proudest of. A decade ago the counter was mostly part-time kids passing through on their way to something else. Today it is full-time adults, most of whom have been with me for years, people who have made a career of this and made the store what it is. My distributions, the money I actually take home, are up 53%. So yes, I built a business more than three times the size, I pay a real team a real wage, and my own slice grew the least of anything on that list. I am not complaining. I would rather have this crew than the extra points.

Edition Wars (Gaming)

I've been running D&D as an adult, nonstop, for around 30 years, and playing since I was a kid. Back then "D&D" meant anything we could get our hands on. My first set was the 1977 Holmes Basic box, a Christmas gift from my aunt. At that point, D&D was being featured in the mass media, so it wasn't some counter culture gift decision. 

The AD&D hardcovers followed soon after, and we devoured and memorized them, mostly because it's all we had to read at the time. As we collected various game books as we could find them, we made little distinction between Basic and AD&D, other than assuming Basic must be for inexperienced players. The Holmes box really was an on-ramp to AD&D, so we weren't entirely wrong, but Basic later grew into its own complete game, all the way to name level and beyond, and we missed that at the time. We blended the two together constantly, and there was a ridiculous amount of product to blend. Through 2000 I'd estimate something like two releases a month.

After high school I ran Oriental Adventures in college, then fell in love with Planescape and moved to AD&D 2nd Edition. Like the Basic versus AD&D thing, I mixed 2nd edition with 1st without much thought.

I swore I would never leave the AD&D universe. I was one of those people who declared they already had everything they'd ever need, so why change. Planescape was the first time I had become a "completist" collector, including hunting down things like promotional convention posters. This was the era of Ebay. 

Then 3rd edition came out, resolved many of AD&D's problems, and I jumped on it and never looked back, at least not until recently. We played 3.0 through 3.5 to the bitter end, then dabbled in 4th edition, which I liked but the players despised. I like to say 4th edition is D&D for people who don't like D&D. 4th made running a game a breeze, while the characters felt soulless. 4E gave way to Pathfinder 1E for us, which we happily played for years, until 5th edition came out and we embraced that too. I played in a Pathfinder 2E game and loved it as a player, but it looked daunting to run. We ran a campaign of 5.5, where the rules changes seemed unnecessary, and then I got the itch to run a megadungeon. For that, I looked back to Basic.

Why go old school

The question I get is why switch to an old school game at all. The game I embraced was Old School Essentials Advanced, a blend of Basic D&D with some nods, not quite enough if you ask me, to AD&D.

Put simply, as editions progressed they aimed to fix problems that many of us now recognize as features. Lethality is one. Resource management is another. Dungeon crawls are about counting torches and losing characters. You don't camp in the dungeon. You get in, do your business, and get the hell out before it closes in around you. That fear is not present in the modern game, and what I learned is that the "bug" gets fixed everywhere beyond the Basic framework, including in the AD&D versions.

A tool for the job

So what we have is a specific tool for a particular job. Basic D&D does granular dungeon adventures very well. What it doesn't do well is offer character options. My players were somewhat unhappy with what their characters could do. But the point of a Basic game is that the main character is the dungeon, not you. You don't need to get too tied up in character options when your character's lifespan isn't terribly long.

When I started a new campaign, I decided to offer more character options and to tell a story. We moved to OSRIC, an AD&D clone, which felt like coming full circle in my gaming career. The game became more story driven, and OSRIC allowed for more survivability. Characters were more powerful, the granularity of resource tracking was lessened, partly because of the system and partly because we weren't dungeon crawling anymore. Suddenly the tool metaphor clicked. If I wanted to tell a story, the last thing I wanted was a bunch of dead story elements scattered across the world. I wanted survivability. I wanted to move the story along, not go back to town to hire torch bearers. OSRIC let me blend a bit of OSE granularity with a story game, though I asked myself several times: if I'm going story, why not just use 5E? The players would certainly prefer it.

Pick the tool that fits

I've come to the conclusion that these editions are all ripe for use, depending on what you want to do. It would be foolish to get attached to just one.

If I want to run a dungeon crawl, OSE or something similar is a requirement. It should feel gritty and dangerous. You should be afraid. We did that running the first six levels of Stonehell, before I frankly lost interest in the grind. If you want to run a story game, a real campaign with a theme and invested characters, you want heroic characters and survivability. AD&D (OSRIC) will suffice, but I think 5E would be the preferred system for players. You'll also have a much easier time recruiting players for the latest edition than for something older.

One player asked why I couldn't just make my current OSRIC campaign 5E. That's an example of not understanding the infrastructure under the campaign: the re-skinned dungeons, many of them famous, many of them completely rewritten because they don't match modern sensibilities. I could certainly tell my story in 5E, and might in the future, but my main joy in running an old school game is discovering so much nostalgic content.

Cherry-picking 35 years

My current OSRIC game mixes OSE, OSR, Basic, AD&D, AD&D 2nd Edition, and even Adventurer Conqueror King adventures as if they're the same game. That means I get to cherry pick the best of maybe 30 to 35 years of content. None of this cherry-picking would even be possible without the Open Game License, the 2000 document that let publishers reprint and clone the old rules. OSRIC, OSE, and Adventurer Conqueror King are all children of the OGL. I get to run classic AD&D adventures like Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth while also discovering gems from Basic that we missed or overlooked, like the absolutely bonkers Night's Dark Terror. We started with Sinister Stone of Sakkara, an Adventurer Conqueror King adventure, followed by an OSE sewer crawl, a sojourn into Night's Dark Terror, then another OSE, then a couple of OSR, then AD&D, and so on, without any concern for compatibility. What stayed stable was the desire to keep the story moving forward and to treat the players as the main characters, rather than the campaign.

And because of that, I think 5E is likely better for that job. I'm not really sure the AD&D era did much for the DM, even if the players liked it more. I believe each era of D&D was attempting to fix an undefined problem, chasing a feeling, a desire to make characters more real, while creating more tools to tell stories. Fourth edition is the exception that proves it. Whatever I think of it at the table, it knew exactly what it was fixing: the DM's prep load and the math of a balanced encounter. 

In 4E, I could take a cool, low level adventure and in an hour, scale it to a high level adventure. You can't do that in any other edition. It answered a defined problem while the rest chased an undefined one, which may be why it feels so unlike the others. D&D is really two games, in my DM's mind: the deadly, granular dungeon crawl and the heroic, story driven campaign. Various editions are exploring a tension between the two, rather than some aim at perfection.

Getting Edumacated (10 Years Later)

A decade ago I wrote a post recommending college courses for anyone who wanted a more formal education for the game trade. I say this as a guy with a scant business education at best, my bachelor's and master's are in far less worldly pursuits, but you don't need a business degree to spot the skill sets that keep a store alive. The courses were simply a convenient place to go get those skills.

Ten years on, I care even less about how you pick these skills up. There are a dozen ways now: YouTube, online certificates, a business owner willing to talk your ear off. What matters is that you actually get them, in some useful fashion, before the market teaches you the expensive way. That's how I learned.

What's different this time is personal. I have a son working in the business who's expressed interest in learning this stuff, whether through community college or somewhere else. For him, in-person classes work best. He may never chase a formal degree, and honestly that's more a personal decision than a job requirement around here. But who knows what happens once he gets a few of these under his belt. So I went back to the Diablo Valley College catalog to see what a year of coursework looks like today.

Turns out, a lot has changed. I feel the 2016 courses were a bit behind the times, while the 2026 courses seem right on the money. That said, I'm probably a little behind the times. There are also a lot more courses that seem tantalizing today, and my one year of courses could easily balloon to two. 

Then (2016)

My original list ran 28 units, about a year of credits:

• BUS-018 Microsoft Excel for Windows (3)
• BUS-027 Small Business Management (3)
• BUS-096 Time Management and Goal Setting (0.5)
• BUS-294 Business Law (3)
• BUSAC-181 Applied Accounting (3)
• BUSAC-185 QuickBooks Accounting for Business I (1.5)
• BUSMG-167 Writing and Presenting a Business Plan (0.5)
• BUSMG-168 Customer Service (0.5)
• BUSMK-255 Advertising (3)
• CIS-108 Introduction to WordPress (2)
• CIS-130 Adobe Photoshop Elements (2)
• ECON-221 Introduction to Microeconomic Principles (3)
• MANGT-050 Introduction to Supervision (3)

It was heavy on do-it-yourself web and design, WordPress and Photoshop. You still couldn't go wrong with this education today.

What I'd take in 2026

31.5 credits — Foundation 12, Money 7.5, People 3, Selling 9.

If I were building the year over from scratch, I'd organize it by the skills instead of the catalog. Here's where I'd point my son.

Foundation. BUS-109 Introduction to Business, BUS-250 Business Communications, BUS-294 Business Law, and BUSMG-120 Introduction to Management Studies. 

I took a community college business law class in high school and it formed my foundational understanding of how businesses operate.

Money. BUSAC-181 Applied Accounting and BUSAC-185 QuickBooks I, enough to read your own statements and keep your own books. Then BUS-161 Personal Financial Management, the course that speaks to my old sermon about 40% of owners retiring with nothing.

I took a year of accounting in high school mostly to satisfy a math requirement, but it was also foundational. It allowed me to drop into a Quickbooks ledger like it was nothing special. Quickbooks I is enough to get the fundamentals down, since I probably use 10% of that program (there is a Quickbooks II if you really dig it). Part of my educational goals for others is that you should finish knowing more than me.

People. BUSMG-121 Supervision is the place to start. There are additional HR management courses that make sense if this topic excites (not me, thanks). 

Selling. This is where things change the most. BUS-210 Introduction to E-Commerce, BUSMK-256 Marketing, and BUSMK-259 Digital Marketing Fundamentals. Advertising (BUSMK-255).

That's the core. Line it up against 2016 and the difference are obvious. A decade ago, half my year went to being my own webmaster and ad man: WordPress, Photoshop, and a handful of half-unit skills courses that have since been folded into meatier ones. The 2026 version hands that time to selling everywhere at once, e-commerce, digital marketing, and social media, plus the people side I skipped entirely the first go-round. Business law and a little accounting haven't moved. What changed is that the focus is no longer brick and mortar.

There's another year of courses I think are applicable. See me after class, once you've got these down.

The Expense Post

The Expense Post (Or: Why I Stopped Posting My Numbers)

I was at a game convention yesterday, hanging out with industry friends, talking store numbers. One of them said, "You used to post your actual numbers, but it looks like you stopped. Is that because you're making too much money?"

It took about a nanosecond to say yes. I hadn't put it in those words before, but I knew it immediately. It's not that I'm wildly successful. It's that I'm successful enough that I'd prefer the business to keep running over having people come at me to take it away. For many years, either outcome would have been fine. Burn it down or turn a profit, whatever. Now? I'd prefer what it provides me and my family. 

Rather than talk revenue, I want to walk through some of my expense categories, because people are wildly off base when they try to imagine what running a store costs. You can do your own math to understand my income, if that's your goal. 

A customer recently asked if my rent is like a mortgage payment. Sure, if you have a multi-million dollar house. My rent is over $10,000 a month. This is normal.

I used to talk about three buckets: rent, payroll, and other. Three roughly equal buckets after your cost of goods. It's a restaurant industry model, so don't blame me. At one point my buckets were equal, which is why the framework resonated and I kept using it. Now those buckets are a bit absurd.

Bucket One: Payroll — $375,000 (61% of post-COGS expenses)

This is where the money goes. My payroll is lean, and if there's any guilt associated with running this business, it comes from worrying I don't have enough staff, or that I'm not compensating them enough, or that I'll wake up one day to a revolt because I sleepwalked through something important.

That $375K includes my salary of $80K, which is what's reasonable for someone in my position in this industry and is only part of my total compensation. Payroll is where you find your poverty, either by over-investing or under-investing. You need adequate staff, well compensated and well managed, or your sales simply won't reach their potential. I don't think we've reached our potential yet, but I really hate laying people off, so I'm cautious.

Bucket Two: Rent — $135,000

Much smaller than the compensation bucket, and thankfully it grows at roughly inflation while wages grow at a completely different rate. Rent doesn't include any repairs or maintenance inside the building or insuring what's inside. Door breaks, toilet leaks, AC units fail, that's on me.

When I look at expansion, I try to calculate how much additional revenue I'd need to cover new rent, the utilities it requires, the staff time it consumes. I am just as in the dark on that math as a new store owner. I am speculating on my sales expectations. There's no spreadsheet that makes it obvious. We have 4,300 square feet now, which includes our 1,000 rent free mezzanine level. I would like another 3,000. We are full. We will continue to add product for three more years or until my staff cry uncle.

Bucket Three: Other — $100,000

This is the catch-all, and it adds up faster than you'd expect.

• Utilities: $35,000. Escalating, always. Electricity is insane, averaging about $800/month and peaking at $1,500 in the summer. Trash is $650/month.
• Office and operational expenses: $16,000. Every consumable thing. Toilet paper, product labels, you can imagine.
• Insurance: $15,000. I have more policies than I can keep track of: liability, property, workers comp, key person, and since the business owns my truck, auto insurance too.
• Advertising: $11,000. I say I don't advertise, and yet here we are. It's now mostly convention related.
• Miscellaneous: $18,000. Outside services, meals, permits, taxes, bank fees, lodging, parking. The long tail of running a business.

One thing not in this list: credit card processing fees, which are probably $60,000-70,000 a year if I tracked them properly. I don't, because it's just money I never see. It doesn't feel like an expense so much as a haircut on every transaction.

---

What I've learned from watching these buckets over the years is that some are more elastic than others. Expenses that once felt impossible to cover, like rent, recede into the background as you grow. Expenses like wages are permanent friction, always present, always pressing.

At one point I tracked every office supply purchase and wrote a blog post about it. Now that $1,400 a month is just a fact of life I don't think about. Meals are a morale expense that I think have gotten out of hand; I let it slide, even as my accountant scolds me for spending more than I should. You might assume your sales eventually outrun your expenses, and that's partly true. But my profitability over the last ten years has hovered around 6%. The last five years, with what I'd call blockbuster sales, pushed that to 7%.

You can perform your way out of the tent. But you'll always be a clown.

Remotely Managing Your Brick-and-Mortar Hobby Game Store: A 5-Step Guid

Step 1: Have your business model down.

You should know what your store is about and be able to feed it continually. The danger is always a shifting business model, which is practically guaranteed, so change will always be on your mind.

Step 2: Have your policies and procedures settled.

Policies are how you handle day-to-day operations, and they tend to only emerge over time. A living document of P&P that staff can add to and subtract from is critical. Obsolete policies are a telltale sign of an absentee manager, like ghosts going through the motions of their past life.

Step 3: Have well-compensated, trusted staff.

You can't go anywhere while your staff remain untrained, and you can't stay gone long if they're always looking for a new job. Being away requires better compensation, more leeway with expenses, and generally lots of carrots and few sticks.

Step 4: Have a clearly profitable store.

I've been on a trip where we simply ran out of money and I was a day late on payroll. A healthy cash buffer and backup funds aren't strictly necessary, but they remove the stress considerably.

Step 5: Find the pulse and stay engaged.

For me this means being the buyer, but that's probably not required for everyone. Buying is how I sense change in the business, so it's a natural fit. You could delegate buying entirely and just watch the finances. The level of engagement is a sliding scale, from vacation coverage to partial retirement to having more or less handed the store over.

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A remotely managed store is rarely a dynamic, industry-leading one. The arc tends to run from Unique Value Proposition to Useful Value Proposition to quietly questioning its value entirely. That's why remote management works best when paired with active business development goals: larger locations, expanded product lines, event growth. For me right now that means saving for an expansion while growing inventory, something I can do easily from afar. Staying away doesn't have to mean standing still.

Nobody in the trade really likes to talk about this. It's not glamorous, and stepping away doesn't exactly signal high standards. But if the recent boom in hobby game retail has any longevity, remote management will become far more common. 

The Myth of Rational Animals

A game store is, at its essence, an expression of a particular time and place. You decide to open a store now. “Now” is a moment with strict limits on where you can put that store. You’re constrained by what’s available right this second, or maybe what will be available during a tiny window, and you’re forced to build within whatever competitive landscape exists. If you’re smart, you might wait for something ideal to open up, but in the back of your mind you know you could wait for years. So eventually you compromise.

When I moved my store to its current location, it happened to be during a lull. One competitor was between one of his regular cycles of opening and closing, because shenanigans. My long-term “five hundred pound gorilla” competitor had just retired. The local Games Workshop store closed soon after. The stage was as well-set as anyone could hope, and I had no idea any of that was coming. And even then, that “quick success” took another five years to materialize. Is success sudden or gradual? Yes.

Location is necessarily self-limiting. Most people will place their store within a reasonable drive of where they live. That’s almost everyone. A few exceptions exist, usually people in limited markets, who think of themselves as retailers rather than gamers, and who make a dramatic personal move to build something better somewhere else. That’s exceedingly rare, but I have friends who did it. 

People will subsistence-farm rocky ground for years simply because that’s where they’re from. Some will manage a chain of stores across regional towns because there is no “there there” in their home community. The game trade isn’t lucrative enough for most people to uproot their lives, start over somewhere more fertile, and rebuild their social world from scratch. People dramatically change their lives to start a business, but rarely do they dramatically change their location.

The location funnel narrows quickly. You start with the country, which already brings issues with distribution, leases, and labor. The game trade is US-centric, and every other country is essentially along for the ride, with a lot of limiting variables. Then you have the state or province. Some store owners wince when I describe doing business in California, but you can’t deny the money is here. I practically need an HR director for ten employees, but I get to go on nice vacations. Even the city you choose can make or break you, beyond demographics.

Then comes the neighborhood, and finally the exact spot on the street. Is it a busy corner or a forgotten alley? You can live or die by that last choice, and the good corner might be forever out of reach financially. Small landlords dream of corporate tenants so they can raise the rent for everyone. When I scoffed at the rates from one landlord, he told me a Starbucks was about to take the corner, so the rent was now 25 percent higher. Each layer constrains the next until you’re down to whatever keys a landlord is willing to hand you today. And sometimes they just say no. My first landlord was going to turn me down until I showed him my bank account had six figures.

Time is the prime variable. Where can I put a store right now? It’s a moving target. And when your current location mostly works, you tend to stick with it.

All of this is to say that stores have countless variables, and store owners are largely self-limited by time, place, and capital. I have friends who started at the same time as me who are doing twice my business. Did they hit the right market at the right time? Are they smarter than me? Better retailers? Better capitalized? The truth is far less grand. We all looked around one day, checked our bank accounts, researched where a store might work within a reasonable commute to where we lived right then, and made the best decision available. Deliberate, decide, move on. An expression of time and place. And yes, some of them are probably better retailers. Sometimes you turn down money for peace of mind.

It’s only in retrospect that we pretend there was more choice than there really was. If I decided today to move my store, I’d look at property listings, find fifty retail spaces, narrow those to twelve by size, then to three by cost. I’d discover that two are in terrible locations and one is merely alright. It’s rare I actually get excited about a location prospect. If I had to move today, I’d take the alright location. In fact, I’d be forced to or risk losing my livelihood. I would make lemonade out of those lemons, which is essentially the job description.

When I look at where I might expand, it’s thirty minutes in the opposite direction of my current store from my house, turning my commute into an hour each way. I don’t want to put a store there. But the underserved market demands it. Anywhere else would be significantly sub-optimal. As an established retailer with some success, I might be willing to move closer to bridge the gap, but most people wouldn’t consider that viable. If I had a Spouse With a Good Job, it would be out of the question. Most people, unfortunately, will enter a crowded market simply because the commute is shorter.

From the outside, you look at game stores and assume they had a business plan and raised $100,000 or more, so surely they picked their location based on a comprehensive market analysis and a sober assessment of need. In almost all cases: nope. It was near my house, available at the time, in whatever competitive market existed that day. We like to joke that customers are not rational animals, but it’s not like store owners are any better.

The Quiet Mind and the Cracked Pot

I was looking at my LinkedIn profile the other day, something I hadn’t done in years. Dear god, I thought, who is this guy? I scrolled through my work record from the decade before I owned the store and saw a pattern of job-hopping in search of the next intellectual challenge. My immediate reaction was I would never hire this guy. However, every move came with more money and the same question: Why do you move around so much? Followed by a job offer.

I was always rewarded for impatience, usually, I suspected, by companies desperate to fill seats, government contractors and startups looking for warm bodies. My behavior shaped who would hire me, and that pattern shaped my idea of the corporate world. The specter of returning to it, what I thought was a nightmare despite the high pay, kept me in the game trade far longer than reason alone might justify. That was over twenty years ago, and I don’t even recognize that guy.

Those first five years of running the store without real profit were, in hindsight, about escaping the corporate fog of vague directives and unsatisfying contributions. In the beginning, it felt transgressive. I was sure someone would walk in one day and drag me back to work. I felt like I was disappointing people, like my old boss. I even had nightmares about forgetting to turn in my time sheet. I still have them. Later, it struck me that for the first time in my adult life, I had to decide exactly what to do. How does one make profit? Maybe it was in a book somewhere, so I read everything I could find. The game trade was a backwater back then, compared to now where you can hit a vein on your first attempt, if you do enough research.

It took years before I realized that the money moving through the store, the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars (there were no millions then), was my money. Too many people told me not to take it personally, but I had to make it personal to move on to the next stage. You should absolutely take it personal. Only then did ownership become real. Running a store wasn’t just a business, it was a psychological transformation from being a cog in an incomprehensible machine to owning every problem and, eventually, every profit.

That transformation, combined with the difficulty of cracking the code of the game trade, is what kept me hooked. I was talking with friends about meditation recently, and a teacher’s story came up: there are two types of students who don’t stay with a Zen practice:

There’s the cracked pot, no matter how much instruction and wisdom you pour in, it leaks out the bottom. They can't benefit from it because they're in their own way. And then there’s the student whose mind goes silent too quickly. Meditation is supposed to teach you to quiet the mind through the struggle of your internal dialogue. If the thoughts stop right away, an incredibly rare occurrence, you learn nothing. You have been deprived of the struggle and thus the transformation. Some might think that’s a nice problem to have, except it completely short circuits real progress. New store owners can sometimes be both types.

Some are cursed with the empty mind. They hit the market at just the right time, sell a million dollars their first year, and think, well, this isn’t so hard. They’re like those rare meditators whose minds fall quiet without effort. However, tough times are coming and the struggle of the trade is the training to survive tough times. I hope they’re learning something, but I often wonder if the struggle itself is the point. And of course, there are plenty of cracked pots in this trade. No matter how much money rains down into their bucket, it just leaks out the bottom. Perhaps they are there For The Community, folks who are allergic to profit.

Profit came with its own kind of guilt, so it's not like there's a free lunch. Starting a business is, at least in theory, about making profit, that’s the point for most people. I’ve written about buying my first new car, a Volkswagen, and how it quietly created a divide between me and some of my poorest customers. My staff never said anything, but I felt it, the tension of earning real money while they made minimum wage. 

That Volkswagen was hard earned, paid for with years of risk and struggle. I was around forty at the time. Isn’t that what a successful business is supposed to look like? Yet as my staff has grown older, from part-time students to working adults with real responsibilities, their needs have become more pronounced: higher wages, and the promise of living wages, with the understanding that building that future takes time unless I want to give up the very gains that have propelled me ... to a middle class income.

When I started working from home, another realization hit me: I’m never going back to work for someone else, at least not because I have to. Sometimes I daydream about taking a job pushing a broom at Home Depot, and my friends look horrified. For me, it’s just about getting out of the house, moving around, letting someone else take the lead. I’m not financially independent, just stable. COVID taught me I could come back and do it again if I had to, and my Home Depot fantasy tells me that maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.