Goodbye to Chess

Chess was important growing up. When I finally got my own room as a kid, it was the former den, filled with my father's chess trophies and books from his time on the Penn State chess team. I wasn't terribly into chess, but I read all the books in the den, mostly sports novels (ugh), chess strategy and how-to books. For a while in high school, I brought my chess set and played in science class, where the game was socially acceptable. My player's handbook stayed at home. I was a solid, thinking several moves ahead kinda kid, so the chess books were mostly aspirational. I felt like I wasn't quite smart enough to go full chess, like a wannabe wizard with an eight intelligence. Magic missile was just out of my grasp.

When I opened the store in 2004, I had a very respectable collection of chess sets, amazing really, for a 940 square foot store (amazing equals dumb for non retailers). These were all on full display, and about once a week, I would remove the pieces of each set, dust the board, and put them back on. My father was impressed when he visited. When it came to chess, I knew how to represent. This was all incredibly time consuming and eventually I lost several boxes, making selling them pretty difficult. Oh, and then there were the missing pieces. Realizing the queen is missing from a $250 Egyptian chess set will make you seek out boxed chess sets pretty fast.

As the display sets sold, their replacements tended not to get re-opened, and eventually not re-ordered as the plain white box did nothing to help move them. Chess sets sold poorly. They have always sold poorly. They sell poorly now. Stores in the region who do much better with chess, who dominate with chess? They sell poorly there too. It's a legacy item, an item that says "games" to the general public. It's a touchstone for me and my father. But chess, to be honest, is a complete waste of space.

That's not true everywhere. There are stores in the Midwest that do gangbusters with chess. But here? The serious players buy their sets online, often through chess organizations or just Amazon. In the store, I think it's enough to have a tournament size Staunton set and a roll up travel set, but beyond that there are hundreds of themed chess sets that will make you crazy as customer seek them out. Civil War? Simpsons? Harry Potter? You could stock an entire store with what's out there ... and promptly go out of business.

I used to special order sets and it was time consuming and unrewarding, unlike the work with other types of games. Help a board game customer and you may have created a regular board game customer and maybe even a board game hobbyist. Help someone with a chess set and you've sold them a chess set and you'll never seem them again.

I've watched my classic games numbers stagnate, even when I double or triple my selection. I've tried more and less and different and boxes with pictures and on display and nope, none of it works. It's dead here. I've been foolish not to drop it sooner. I would look at the corner where our "classic" games reside and fantasize about what I would put there. Frisbee golf. A coffee kiosk. Anything but chess.

With 25% Chinese tariffs, I'm extremely concerned about board games. But then there's chess. All those classic games come from China, really. I had forgotten. It's not even on my radar anymore. We just didn't re-order classic games after the holidays and nobody seemed to mind, except the occasional random customer who has clearly never been here before. We send them to the regional store that has a better selection and also doesn't make money selling them. Then that classic game space got taken up with profitable stuff. So with tariffs on the way, a better use of that space, and performance numbers that I use an example at trade shows of what you should drop, I think it's time to say goodbye to chess. Sorry dad.