Quest for Fun!: Six Months of Facebook Posts

Worth posting, more or less...

I post most things on Facebook because that's where the eyeballs are, and I'll get interaction, which is how I learn nowadays. This is around 25 pages in a Word document. Formatting it using ChatGPT was way more work than I expected, but it's readable.

Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/garyraybdg1

The Math of a 15% Price Increase

A 15% increase in price reduces customer demand somewhere in the 18–30% range. This number is based on the "price elasticity of demand," which I’ve historically pegged at 1.55 for board games. That’s a 25% demand reduction.

If I need my board games to perform at 4 turns a year, then anything currently at 4 or below will see a 25% drop. A 4 becomes a 3. Previously safe games are now borderline performers.

I carry 122 board game titles from Asmodee (including card supplies). Removing titles less than a year old—since we lack long-term performance data—I’ve identified 16 that are likely not to perform. That’s about 13% of the catalog. Of those, only 10 are newly subject to clearance scrutiny; the rest were already on clearance.

Titles Flagged for Clearance:

Arkham Horror: 3E (seasonal)
Catan: Traveler (seasonal)
Exploding Kittens: Barking Kittens
Marvel United: Multiverse
Mists Over Carcassonne
My Toxic Ex – Base Pack
Playing Cards: Bicycle: Lion King
Set a Watch: Outriders
Spot It Camping (seasonal)
Ticket to Ride: Europe (seasonal)

Of the 10 clearance games, four may return seasonally. The rest? Possibly gone for good.

I could keep current pricing and simply mark these not to reorder, especially since demand hasn’t dropped—yet. But I’m choosing to drop them now during an ongoing board game sale. It’s a good moment to quietly clear the shelves.

(Also: Slip It In is a strong Asmodee seller, just saying.)

Thinking About Business Education

Every once in a while, I browse the local community college catalog to see what classes might actually be useful for a retail store owner. My son is college-aged, and we’ve been discussing whether business or computer science would serve him best.

For those raised in small business environments—or who are naturally inclined—business degrees can feel redundant. But for the rest of us, I find formal business education genuinely fascinating.

I’ve taken just a few business-related classes: accounting in high school, a business law course in community college, and an economics course titled "Economics of Monsoon Asia." The rest is self-taught, and I’ve got plenty of gaps.

I recently tried mapping out coursework that would cover what I’ve learned through experience. It essentially turned into an associate degree, minus the general ed. Here's what I found valuable:

Core Business Courses (Required)

BUS109 – Introduction to Business (3 units)
BUS250 – Business Communications (3 units)
BUS294 – Business Law (3 units)
BUSMG120 – Introduction to Management Studies (3 units)
BUSAC181 – Applied Accounting (3 units)

Electives

BUSMG121 – Supervision: Practices & Concepts (3 units)
BUSAC185 – QuickBooks Accounting I (1.5 units)
BUSMG191 – Small Business Management (3 units)
CIS116 – Microsoft Excel – Comprehensive (2 units)

Optional but Useful

BUS210 – Introduction to E-Commerce (3 units)
BUSMG226 – Group Behavior and Leadership (3 units)
BUSMK255 – Advertising (3 units)

What’s changed since I looked at this a decade ago? Less focus on website/graphic design, more emphasis on e-commerce. Excel, QuickBooks, and fundamentals remain vital.

Sure, you can learn most of this online, but I’m from the “take a class” generation. I still prefer a classroom and a syllabus, even if the idea now feels exhausting.

I’ve had employees with and without college degrees, and truthfully, ambition matters more than credentials. Still, for those seeking a structured path into retail, this curriculum holds real value—especially for the next generation.

How Final Fantasy Could Have Gone Wrong

If I’m complaining, I’m probably making money. Otherwise, I’m solving the problem—and usually, that problem is me.

After our best sales day ever ($40,000 gross), it’s worth looking at what could have gone wrong with the Final Fantasy release:

1. Pre-Selling

We pre-sold about a third of our product. If the set had underperformed, we’d have been in trouble. It didn’t—but we’ve seen other games spike on release day, then flatline. Pre-selling can be a double-edged sword.

We captured customers who only ever pre-order, so it was worth it. But the risk profile? Stressful. Some of that profit is now tied up in Chinese board games gathering dust.

2. Overprinting

If supply had exceeded demand, prices could’ve tanked. Combined with aggressive pre-orders, that might’ve meant refunding money already spent. Luckily, the print run matched demand.

Still, our invoices nearly equaled our release-day sales. That’s a razor-thin margin of safety.

3. Demand Uncertainty

I know nothing about video games. I leaned on peers who did know. Thankfully, they were right. Final Fantasy was hot, and Wizards didn’t botch the IP like they have with other oddball sets.

4. Distributor Shenanigans

Wave two product arrived on release day. We’d already refunded $4,500 in Commander Collector boxes we assumed wouldn’t show. Oops. If we’d waited 24 hours, we could’ve kept every sale.

5. Store Mismanagement (That Didn’t Happen)

This release was intense. Lines formed before opening. My son wasn’t scheduled to work but jumped in and was immediately overwhelmed. Still—we handled it.

By Sunday, we had all products in stock (except prerelease kits). We may not get restocks, but everyone who really wanted it got it. And the launch nearly covered our invoices.

No meltdown. Just success.

A New Book: The 5-Year Path

If I wrote another book—and I’m not particularly eager—it would be about what comes next: the path to sustained, upper-class income from running a game store.

Working Title:

FLGS: A 5-Year Path to an Upper-Class Income

Premise:

Success isn’t the same for everyone. But successful stores tend to share certain traits. This book would explore those traits through interviews, analysis, and common-sense insights.

Key Questions:

What defines success? For me, it’s doing what you love, sustainably, with enough margin to live well.
How do we reduce confirmation bias? By talking to a broad range of store owners—famous and obscure.
What do the best have in common? That’s the meat of the book.

Early Observations:

Best Practices: Strong location, solid capital, good hiring, excellent execution.
Service-Oriented: Broad product mix and exceptional customer service (especially events).
Persistence: Many succeed by simply not failing. Outlast and out-adapt.
Presence: The most successful store owners still show up. They’re engaged.

I’ve stepped away from daily operations. That’s my trade-off. I’ve had the privilege of traveling with my son before he ages out of our adventures—and that’s my personal definition of success.

But if someone wants to hit that next level—financially, strategically, emotionally—I’d love to explore what that looks like in a second book.

When Is It Okay to Sell at Low Margin?

My store's sales are unpredictable. In theory, you might expect a tidy formula: make X in gross sales, get Y in gross profit, and earn Z in net profit. I’ve met exactly one store owner whose operation works like that. In reality, I’m paying last month’s bills with this month’s sales, and if this month underperforms, I’m in trouble.

This unpredictability comes from being “front list driven.” Our new releases create spikes that make forecasting difficult, but they also keep us alive. Without them, we’d likely be a break-even operation. That’s why when someone asks, “What’s your break-even point?” the answer often depends on what happened last month.

Over time, it averages out: about a 55% cost of goods, healthy six-figure gross monthly sales, and a modest 5–10% net profit. If you get six great months in a row (like our last six—excluding May), you’re profitable, feeling confident, maybe even renting a storage unit to hold extra board games from China. Six bad months, though, and you’re having hard conversations.

So When Is It Okay?

The short answer is: after you’ve hit your “nut.” Once I’ve achieved six figures in sales at a 45% gross margin, everything beyond that is gravy. But that core volume must be protected. If I tamper with it, say, by cutting prices across the board, I risk breaking the business. I tried selling all Magic products at market rates a few years back. It didn’t boost sales; I just earned less on the same volume. Lesson learned.

That said, preorders can be a good opportunity for lower margin sales. I have customers who drop $4,000–$5,000 on Magic preorders and only buy during those windows. If I don’t offer a competitive discount, they’ll preorder from someone else—and I won't see those dollars later at "full" margin. These sales are essentially "found money" that I wouldn't capture otherwise, so a lower margin is acceptable.

Clearance is another case. About 9% of my inventory is currently on clearance at a 40% discount, and sometimes I have even deeper sales. If they still don’t move, I throw them away. Poor buys, saturated titles, or just aging stock—anything that clogs up my shelves is a drag on the business. Even a dollar recouped here becomes part of a more profitable product cycle. Sometimes, clearing out dead stock is about making space to show off what actually sells.

Card singles are often low-margin as well. If your core sales are solid, and singles don’t interfere with your main operation, they can make sense. I’ve never hit that sweet spot. When we sold singles, they didn’t cover labor or overhead. I needed more scale. Paying staff $25/hour to sort cards just wasn’t viable in California, not until my card operation became a much larger entity. That model only works if it covers its own costs and doesn’t pull resources from higher-margin areas.

There are low-margin, high-volume models in other industries you can use as a thought experiment. When I looked at buying a Subaru, I learned the average dealer earns less than a 5% gross margin. But they sell 1,000 cars a year at $20,000 each—that’s $1 million in gross profit. You might manufacture widgets for $20 and sell them for $21. Same 5% margin. You just need to sell a million widgets to match the Subaru dealership.

In our industry, most stores need standard high-margin sales to stay afloat. Exceptions exist. Some stores succeed on low-margin singles and long hours—the card binders and Lifetime tables model. My impression is those store owners work much harder than necessary, but it’s what they’ve got. They may not have had the $150,000–$200,000+ in capital needed to launch a traditional high-margin retail model.

Bottom Line

Stick with the standard model unless you have very unusual circumstances like extremely low rent, free labor (often yourself), or a unique niche. Protect your core sales. Experiment carefully. And don’t confuse high sales with financial health. When you've cracked that nut and the low hanging fruit is all picked, go ahead and dabble at the margins.

Reminding Myself of the Fundamentals

You can't buy if you don't have any money.
Start liquidating dead stock. Consider reinvesting more profit. Work on incentives like events and demos to get customers into the store.
You can't buy what you don't have.
I would love to single source from the lowest-price vendor, but I usually have to buy from whoever has stock right now. My store is not the cheapest, and I regularly benefit from being the last man standing.
You can't sell what people won't buy.
Tastes and customer mixes evolve. Fifteen years ago, most of my customers were dudes playing Magic, 40K, and D&D. Today, we see more women and interest in cozy games. I don’t understand, but I try to keep an open mind.
You can't grow what you don't feed.
If you're not nurturing new players or reaching new demographics, your store won’t evolve. That evolution has a ceiling.
You can't forecast what you don't track.
If you don’t track sell-through, turn rates, and category performance, you’re flying blind.

Enjoy your day, stay in budget, and burn your dregs.

How I Envision the Store One Year from Now (with 145% Tariffs)

A year from now, I expect our inventory will have expanded by another 25%. Hopefully we'll transition out of our new storage unit as we replace our stocked up board games with other, smaller things.

RPG Miniatures made in China will be gone, replaced by more Warhammer.
Card Sleeves will shift toward Dragon Shields and Katanas. Ultra Pro will be mostly gone.
Dice will become Chessex-only again. The embedded-toy dice era is over.
RPGs will remain steady. D&D is printed in the U.S., Old School Essentials in Lithuania, and indie titles may adapt or struggle with tariffs.
Board Games will take the biggest hit. Expect to carry only 30% of current titles. They're a distressed category with structural problems.

I’ve tolerated board game chaos for 20 years. I’d tolerate it for 20 more. But if board games disappeared tomorrow, I’d sleep easier. They’re the comics of the game trade: love them or not, they’re exhausting.

CCGs still rule. As long as Magic and Pokémon stay strong, retail survives. Most are printed in the U.S., though raw materials might face pricing pressure.

Will new games shift to domestic printing? Not within a year. Maybe not within three. Expect more card games, standees instead of miniatures, and a shift toward direct-to-consumer for overproduced titles.

Sales are up 27% this year, driven by doom spending under Trump. We reinvested into Chinese-made goods, becoming part of the messy trade data behind negative GDP. I’ve never let a crisis go to waste. If we’re crashing, I’ve upgraded to first class.

Observations as a Buyer Under Tariffs

Price increases on Chinese goods are running 40–60%, especially board games and card supplies. This leads to:

Reduced Demand

A 60% price increase means about a 50% drop in sales. Any game that didn’t sell 10 copies last year is now assumed to only sell 5—my average. Only 27% of board games meet that bar.

Culling inventory assumes better uses for the money—and I’ve already found those uses.

Customer Drift

Customers will accept $20 card games. But $60–$100 board games? That’s when they flee to online discounters. Games breaking the $100 threshold—like Wingspan, Heat, Arkham Horror, Slay the Spire, Ticket to Ride: Legacy—are now in danger of falling off the map.

New Normal

Eventually we’ll adjust to a new reality. Some will trade down, treating board games as staycation luxuries. Others will simply leave the hobby. We’re counter-cyclical, but only if customers keep jobs and homes.

If nothing changes, we adapt. If something changes—say, tariffs lift—we rebuild. Either way, the store flies on.

What Do Any of Us Really Know?

I'm in my 21st year of running a hobby game store. Over that time, I’ve developed deep expertise in some areas and remained relatively inexperienced in others. After nearly as many years writing about retail, my opinions have gradually sharpened into two main categories: best practices and things that work for me. These categories often overlap, but not always.

Best practices are methods I’ve come to recognize as objectively better. They’re the gold standard, the result of widespread success across many stores and situations. The things that work for me, on the other hand, are personal solutions that fit my specific store, circumstances, or temperament. Sometimes, readers challenge these personal approaches, and I’ll happily change course if they show me a better way. I’m not attached to being right—I’m attached to doing better. Other times, I’ll respectfully disagree and stick to my own methods, knowing they suit my particular context. I approach this with an academic mindset, always ready to abandon my way in favor of something more effective.

Because experience can be so idiosyncratic, one thing I do in my writing is focus on deeply personal experiences. What did this mean to me? How did it make me feel? In the moment, these experiences often seem unique, specialized, and unlikely to resonate with others. This is another area where I think I know something, but I don’t. More often than not, these moments are common. They may not be particularly special, but they carry weight because there’s a loneliness in this work that shared experiences can bridge. Time and again, my weird little perspective turns out to be exactly what another store owner was thinking. In that way, I am an emotional Dunning-Kruger—imagining my thoughts are unusual, only to stumble into a sense of connection and unexpected intimacy.

When it comes to what I know and don’t know, the contrast can be stark. I spend over eight hours a day immersed in buying and managing inventory. At this point, I feel it in my bones. I can read the data like a second language, the numbers flickering like a matrix of arcane symbols. That’s a space where I have real mastery.

But then there are areas where my experience is far more limited. Take commercial leases, for example. I’ve signed three or four in my career, across two locations. I’ve renegotiated a lease once. That’s more experience than a brand-new store owner, but not much more. This is why I often encourage people to gather multiple perspectives. Even someone with two decades in the business may only have a handful of experiences in a given area. Some decisions require more than anecdotal wisdom. That’s when you call in the professionals—accountants, lawyers, brokers. And yes, you really should.

One of the key lessons I’ve learned as a veteran store owner is knowing what I don’t know. I’m a capable bookkeeper, but I’m not an accountant. I’ve studied business law, but I’m not a lawyer. I’ve found and managed retail locations, but I’ll absolutely hire a broker for our next move. When it comes to HR, I have a working understanding at best. For property maintenance, I have someone I call. Knowing when to delegate is not a weakness. It’s a strength. Delegation should be one of your core competencies. I have peers who are genuine experts in some of these areas, but rarely in more than one.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect describes the trap of being too inexperienced to realize how little you know. I still get caught in it sometimes. There are moments when my lack of knowledge causes me to underestimate the complexity of a problem. True expertise means understanding the limits of your own understanding. It’s about recognizing degrees of certainty, and how those diminish as you move farther from your area of strength.

That’s why best practices matter so much. They help fill in the gaps when our experience falls short. And occasionally, when I’ve earned it through mastery, I deviate from those standards in favor of something that simply works better—for me.

My Role Is Happiness

My job is to make you happy. I run a wonder emporium, a place of respite and joy. As much as I would like to lean into the events of the day, tariffs that threaten to destroy entire segments of the game trade, reduce customer choice, and shutter beloved companies, that is not my role. My job is to offer a brief escape from the suffering of everyday life. That is what I tell myself.

So when it comes to stocking my store, you might expect talk of supply chain disruptions, dead products, and fading categories. But again, that is not my place in this story. My role is happiness. To that end, I am spending tens of thousands of dollars to protect endangered species. Chief among them are board games and card sleeves.

If Trump's destructive tariffs turn out to be temporary, this moment will be a blip in the system. It will be an overreaction, a premature stock-up ahead of the holidays and beyond. I have bought a full year of product in that hope. But if the tariffs remain, many of these items may quietly disappear, fading from shelves like relics of a golden age. That is a problem for next year.

I am not trying to sway voters or stir discontent. Believe me, I am discontented and stressed, and it would be easy to share that burden. But my customers did not vote against their interests. I do not live in that kind of place, quite intentionally. My customers are just as stressed and just as trapped in this policy mess. They can confront their politics in their own time.

When they walk into my store, I want them to find comfort. A familiar game, a beloved card sleeve, a reliable escape. I want to help soothe that wound, not deepen it. It would be easy to boycott, to rage, to make a statement. But that is not my role in this war.

My role is to hold the line and preserve joy for as long as I can. And if the storm passes, I hope not a single ounce of this stress ever touches them.

People I Don’t Know

Last year, my store sold well over 10,000 board games, yet I only vaguely understand my market.

My ideal board game customer is best described as "people I don’t know." The best board game customer is always a new one, someone just getting into the hobby. Unlike seasoned buyers, they aren’t yet entangled in the fragmented and hyper-competitive ecosystem where publishers, Kickstarter, Amazon, and discounters are constantly undercutting one another. We can attract new customers for a while, but eventually, they move on. That is an old story.

Our existing customers, who we absolutely cater to, are deeply embedded in this ecosystem. They back games on Kickstarter, buy directly from publishers, and, because they are value-conscious and volume oriented, turn to Amazon and online discounters. They support us when their interests align with ours, but that alignment does not happen as often as we would like. This is no surprise in a market where store buyers often wait for a game to accumulate hundreds or even thousands of positive reviews as a pre-requisite for making a purchase. It is astonishing that this system works at all.

Some customers love us for our quarterly ding and dent sales, where we sell damaged or discontinued games at deep discounts. We even have a private Facebook group of 500 regional customers eagerly waiting for the next sale. This was my attempt at creating a "Magic singles" style secondary market for board games, a niche we have cultivated for nearly 20 years. It was once as lucrative as CCG singles, but rising shipping costs have reduced its profitability.

We host board game events, but they rarely translate into board game sales. Some stores excel at handselling specific games, but when we experimented with this, it did not make a significant impact. We once had a board game-focused manager who was fantastic at this and sold a large number of games to our most engaged customers. When they left, the momentum disappeared completely. Having a product champion is an incredible advantage.

Ultimately, our best method of selling board games is simple. Have them when they are hot and avoid them when they are not. It is more of a buying challenge than a selling one, as there seems a limitless demand on a board game title until suddenly, there isn't. You can sense your place in the broader ecosystem when we get games significantly early to sell (thanks AEG), or when you're the last man standing before desire fades into oblivion. Just don't stand there for too long.

Part of buying well is knowing how to offload excess stock. We have both in-store and online clearance sections, perpetually priced at 40 percent off. At any given time, we have around 50 titles in clearance online, ranging from “the last copy” to “the game that never sold.” That represents less than 10 percent of our board game inventory, and it is a continuous cycle. If we shipped, an online store or eBay might serve as our exhaust port for clearance stock.

At one point, I asked myself if an infinite budget could allow me to fully saturate the market and meet all demand. It's a finicky market, perhaps I just wasn't hitting all the notes? When government money temporarily made me wealthy, I put that theory to the test. We doubled our board game selection, both in breadth and depth, which was absolutely the right choice, but we also hit a clear ceiling. Local markets get the stores they deserve, and I believe we have done everything possible to reflect ours. Our board game sales in 2024 were 210% higher than 2019.

It is far easier to influence collectible card game sales than to predict board game success. My best-selling board game last year was Wyrmspan, with 110 copies sold. However, 13 different collectible card game products outsold Wyrmspan, across Magic, Pokémon, and Star Wars Unlimited.

It is always easier to organize another Magic event or source an elite Pokémon product than to guess which board game will take off. Most new game stores recognize this. Many even choose their point-of-sale system based on how well it integrates with collectible card game singles. I can't argue with them, but I also don't want to live in that world.

I am an old-school believer in full-spectrum game stores that serve the broader community, and we certainly do that. However, I would not necessarily recommend this approach. I wouldn't put all my eggs in one basket, but if I were to do it again, I would be budgeting for robots. As I consider my next project, I hesitate to repeat this model. The ecosystem takes bites out of every customer, not just board gamers. I believe it is a rising tide that keeps us above water.

Vendor Behavior and the Price of Integrity

As a buyer, my ideal small vendor sends clear order cues.

They offer enough product variety and flexible shipping policies to allow me to place my next order as soon as the previous one arrives. With so many small vendors to choose from, this kind of workflow makes it easy to reorder consistently.

A strong product lineup includes a steady trickle of new items replacing those that are tired or sold out. Many small vendors don’t refresh their product lines often enough, forcing me to sell through nearly everything before reordering. This is a bit exhausting and sometimes I just let them go.

A continuous stream of fresh products makes a big difference. There’s joy in discovering a new line from an existing vendor, whether it’s national park notebooks from Field Notes or a new dice series from Foam Brain. In fact, bringing in all of Indie Press Revolution’s “Bestsellers” has moved them into my regular restock cycle.

Other Key Features of an Ideal Vendor:

A streamlined online store - no multi-step approvals or manual intervention.
Credit card payments accepted, preferably with Paypal.
A reasonable shipping threshold for free or discounted shipping.
A "New Arrivals" section.
A "Bestsellers" or recommended section, perhaps starter bundles.
An easy-to-navigate website that allows for simple data scraping—no obscure data formats or copy restrictions on descriptions, prices or product codes.
Complete product details for every item, including title, price, cost, code, and description for every item variation.
Clear inventory status—whether an item is temporarily out of stock or permanently discontinued.

My POS shows 82 active vendors. Every Monday morning, I place orders with five of them, then check my budget and decide which of the remaining 77 deserve some attention. The vendors in steady rotation stay top of mind.

I was once offered $1,000 to allow an adult film to be made in the store after hours. I said no. I was ready with that "no" because I wasn’t the first game store owner to be asked.

I have a reputation to uphold, an image. We are a safe space, a wonder emporium, a bright light on a hill where many game stores are shabby and smell of cat pee. We have a duty of care to our employees to keep them safe and protected from creeps with innuendo.

But what if they had offered me $1,000 every week? Imagine a weekly adult show with recurring revenue. Hmm, how adult? See, now we have questions. Suddenly, the adult film producer is paying my salary. They are my boss. And what is my role? To maintain the store’s image. Because maintaining the image keeps the film revenue flowing.

Over time, the film set image becomes enshrined. We stop innovating because the store has to look the way it did in the films. Our customer base shifts—fewer families, fewer kids. Instead, we cater to adults familiar with the work, alongside our aging regulars who like that we have gobs of money to re-invest.

And that’s what it means to be captured by corporate interests. It’s like publishing a game like Dungeons & Dragons under the rule of shareholders - the pornographers of Wall Street. Their focus isn’t on the slow-selling, expensive-to-produce game books, but on whatever brings in fast, scalable digital revenue. They have completely lost their connection with their core customers, but at least the money is good.

Most of us in business have a price. I won’t take $1,000 to turn my store into an adult film set, but each year, I get a little closer to the moment when I’d take a year’s worth of revenue for the keys. Until then, we can joke about that one time the crazy thing happened.

The More Things Change

If you worked for me 10 years ago and had to step back onto the sales floor today, it wouldn’t feel all that different. That’s about how long it’s been since I was a dedicated sales employee.

Half of the top 10 brands from a decade ago are still in the top 10. You’d brush up on the latest Magic set or two and get familiar with the current meta.

Pokémon practically sells itself, as do Warhammer 40K and D&D. The key difference between D&D 5.0 and 5.5? There isn’t much of one. Just be glad 4th edition is gone.

Board games would take some catching up. Of our top 20 board games from 2011, only one would still be familiar—Betrayal at House on the Hill! The top three back then were Catan (now #61 in 2025), Ticket to Ride (#208), and Carcassonne (#217). They’re still considered “evergreen,” if that’s any comfort. Today, we carry over 1,000 board games—about 40% more than in 2011.

Really, not much has changed, except now we have a mezzanine level and twice the customers. Yet, we still have that lingering fear that the sky is about to fall, that any day now, the bottom will drop out. Maybe it will. Maybe I'll say the wrong thing. Maybe the Game Trade Singularity will finally collapse. But do we dare to believe otherwise? Absolutely.

If you had told me a decade ago that I’d still be selling roughly the same things, in roughly the same ways, to twice as many people, just by keeping at it, I would’ve thought you were insane. If you told me I would be working from home, I would have known you were on drugs, which at that time were illegal. Now, when I predict the same outcome 10 years from today, people ask, “How is that even possible?”

Beats me. Let’s find out.

The Illusion of Wealth

Before I owned a store, I didn’t reconcile my checking account or keep a budget. I owned a home and had a growing 401K, but when it came to finance, I mostly winged it. I can’t say a lot has changed, but the stakes are much higher now.

Imagine this common scenario. You generate two million dollars a year in income. Of that two million, about $100,000 is profit, or 5%. The remaining $1,900,000 is spread across rent, credit cards, payroll, and vendor payments, often not aligned with where the income is generated. On paper, you look like a rich person, but the margin for error is razor-thin, and vendors often treat you like a vagrant.

A friend once asked me how I deal with the stress of that. Ha. A few things. First, the human condition allows us to get used to just about anything that doesn’t kill us. You become hyper-focused on cash flow, which can be dangerous because it often leads to short-term thinking. Second, the only real relief from the pressure comes when there’s money in the bank, measured in time.

A month’s worth of cash means I sleep like a baby. Right now, after paying annual personal taxes and some one-time expenses, I’m down to about ten days. Ten days requires careful attention and I can't wait to build it up again. I’ve been down to just a few and have even missed payroll once by a day. I vowed not to have that happen again. That kind of stress takes a toll on your health. Having money in the bank helps, and so does a modest line of credit, just in case.

Day to day, I think about risk in relation to my credit line. When my Magic: Final Fantasy preorder starts to creep toward maxing out my line of credit, I pull back a little. I learned when I had six figures in savings, I could afford to make about three big mistakes before I was likely sunk. It’s important to identify those signposts. There's one. Ooops, there's two. Is this going to make it three?

The holiday season usually buys me a little breathing room until tax time, when I pull savings to pay my personal taxes. I have money set aside for new product, taxes, and my point-of-sale subscription (something I never used to have), but mostly, that money just lets me relax.

This is something only small business owners truly understand. The huge gross sales that make it look to outsiders like you’re rolling in cash. The tiny net profits that make people think you must be mismanaging something. The stress that stays bottled up until you can vent with peers who actually get it.

This is fine.

The Infinite Asshole

There was a moment, coming down from a psilocybin journey*, when being one with the universe ended and the ego re-established itself, where I made the public declaration: “I am the infinite asshole!”
Just moments before, I was one with the cosmos, floating in a state of perfect clarity. But as the discerning and judging part of my brain returned—the "default mode network"—guilt was the first thing waiting, and it was awfully big. Just when you think you've resolved your issues (ha!), another one pops up.

Capitalism is inherently cruel, especially from the vantage point of an employer. We do what we can to soften the edges—higher wages, bonuses, the occasional and much-maligned offering of pizza. My accountant gets on me about spending too much money on food. At its core, running a business means making hard decisions that impact people’s lives. And that weight doesn’t leave you, no matter how well-intentioned you are.

My companions around our circle reminded me of the good I’ve done. I’m not an evil employer. I’ve created jobs, given opportunities, built a space that brings joy to customers and employees alike, even when my motivation is survival and making rent.

But what sticks with me are the hard times. The now-thirteen banned miscreants, the employees who weren’t the right fit, the 30 to 40 people who’ve passed through my payroll, some of whom I can barely keep track of anymore. I’m fond of almost all of them. Some became friends. I’ve held hands through heartbreak, replaced car windows after break-ins. But mostly, I keep my distance. Logically, it’s for the best. Spiritually?

“I am the infinite asshole.”

I often wish I could have done more. Paid more. Been there more. There’s a deep guilt in this work—the Doctor Who effect of running a small business. You take on a young, bright-eyed crew, travel together on an adventure, and then, inevitably, they burn out, move on, get left behind. And then you pick up new companions, younger ones, and start the cycle over again.

Those who remain friends look back on our time with both nostalgia and ghosts in their eyes. I know the feeling. I followed my own Doctor once, only to find myself left behind, wondering what it all meant, wondering, after some recent discoveries, if perhaps he was an infinite asshole. I don't go in any more and that haunts me the most.

So what’s the resolution to being the infinite asshole? It’s not some grand gesture, some final redemption arc. It’s just acceptance. Life is hard. We don’t live in a Star Trek utopia of fulfilling work free from economic struggle. We work because we have to, and we do what we can to make it as painless as possible.

As business owners, we control some things and have no say in others. We can choose to be deeply involved in the lives of our employees, taking on their chaos alongside them. Or we can be like the Doctor—a benevolent traveler with a duty of care, but always moving forward. Nobody’s getting rich here, but that doesn’t change the infinite nature of being an asshole.

Acceptance. Living in contradiction. And maybe, if I can manage it, a little self-forgiveness. Being one with the universe, even for a moment, means opening up to its pain. It's Arjuna on the Kurukshetra battlefield, accepting the contradiction of his inner battle as well as his duty in life. Forgiveness is also acknowledging the beauty within the universe.

Me wondering how I can be any weirder and less approachable to people.

Unix Admins and Purchase Orders

I just wrote my 5,000th purchase order on our "new" POS system implemented in 2020. This milestone has been on my radar, so I've been thinking about purchase orders for a while.

PO 5,000 was a Monument Hobby order for Pro Acryl paints. I highly recommend them, especially their Bold Titanium White. The coverage and pigment is so superior, many hobbyists dip into the Pro Acryl line, just for this color. I carry Bold Titanium White 12 bottles deep, compared to 2–3 for the other paints. You can often pick up Pro Acryl from Alliance, but they're a bit behind on stocking.

What I want from my purchase orders is a combination of technical improvements, which nobody else cares about—often things I once had that were later removed, like dynamic product cost changes—and of course AI. Not brain-dead demand forecasting like our POS company provides, but actual digital assistance in placing orders.

I would like AI to replace my job as buyer, or come close to it. I've experimented a bit in trying to get it to buy for me, but it's still lacking horsepower. It can clearly do the work, but it doesn't have the bandwidth. For example, I asked it to take a list of board games, search the reviews from BoardGameGeek using several important parameters regarding weight, review average, and review totals, and order X amounts based on the results. The answer?

After a bunch of number crunching and waiting ... No.

ChatGPT came back and said “I can't do this, but here's how YOU could go about doing it.” Yes, ChatGPT, I just taught you that. I use ChatGPT to the limit of its free version for my D&D game, but I have yet to find a business case to spend the $20 per month for a subscription. If you have a business case, please let me know.

When someone finally implements worthwhile AI business tools, I believe there will be no hesitation in adopting them. This is especially true for a stupid field like hobby game retail, in which the inefficiencies are legendary and helpfulness is a closely guarded competitive advantage. I'm hoping AI implementations will see a sharp reduction in dumb.

Many stores have grown faster than mine. My 8% average growth rate has been comfortable, although it will be less so in the future. It took 12 years of a niche hobby market to reach a million dollars in sales. It will take 10 more years to reach two million with hobby games going mainstream. It will take 6 more years after that to reach three million, 4 years to reach four million, and I expect to retire at five million.

It's clear the business must evolve, transform, expand, and re-staff for these increases not to steamroll us. I believe AI could buy me a million dollars of time to figure this out. I hope it does it sooner, rather than later.

A Torrential Downpour of Opportunity

GTS recently announced their handling fees would increase to $7.50 per order. This is a weird trade in which "free freight," with no fees of any kind, used to be part of the deal. Order enough games and they just arrived for free. That is mostly gone as shipping costs increase. It's actually a little insane distribution eats shipping, considering their small slice of the pie. Some expect handling fees will increase across the board with GTS moving first.

As a buyer, you might venture out into toy land every once in a while and feel the sting of actual freight charges. Stuff is expensive to move! Most of us learned to mark up our prices to cover that freight, but this is an alien concept to quite a few game retailers. I have one game adjacent supplier where freight is upwards of 15%. In that case I just couldn't justify buying from them any longer, even with a mark up.

I placed 470 orders in 2024, and the handling fees (not freight charges) were $1,426, or about $3 per order when you factor in the various no handling suppliers. In my store, we just eat this, without raising prices.

Handling fees look like this: ACD: 3.50
Alliance: 5.00
GTS: 7.50
PHD: 7.50+
Magazine Exchange: $5-$15 (depending on weight)

These fees are mostly hidden. My POS system has a place to add them to a purchase order, but there's no reporting, requiring an Excel dive to figure out what I paid last year. Originally, I declared I would order less often because of per order fees, but that didn't last long. Now it's just the cost of doing business.

These "hidden" fees are nothing compared to credit card processing fee increases. When I started in 2004, credit card fees were taken out monthly in a big chunk of cash. You knew exactly what you were paying.

Nowadays, fees are siphoned off before the daily deposit is made, making fees opaque, as if you never actually made that gross amount. Our processing fees went from 2.1% to 2.4% in 2025. Rates in Europe are .3%. That's right, point three. I could buy a new car every year with the savings.

Our increase will hit us for $5,000 in extra fees this year, money that we think we made, but will never materialize in our bank account. Imagine $14 a day siphoned from your account, like a banker at Visa/Mastercard putting their lunch on your credit card every day. These rent seekers have a captive audience with their CEOs each making more than $20 million a year.

“This is just classic collusive, monopolistic behavior,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri.... He noted that Visa and Mastercard control about 80% of the market. “This is not a sustainable situation.”

Inventory, Time, and Marketing

The main ingredients of a hobby game store are money (inventory), time and marketing. You can't fudge these.

Inventory is the life blood of a store. You need a lot of it; $100,000, $200,000 and the largest stores have a million dollars or more, usually grown over time. This is often the owners retirement savings, probably misapplied, although most of these people are gone. Inventory should grow over time.

Astroturfing a hobby game store is dangerous, dropping down a fully formed entity into a new community, expecting to have the correct mix. Finding the inventory mix is a slow process of courting the local customer base. If it were fast, the trade would be dominated by a few players who would spam the nation with their stock market funded, cookie cutter stores.

It takes time to fine tune inventory, to gather customers, and to grow the business. It is painfully slow. The concepts and ideas for growth aren't any more complex than other fields, but access to capital and the slow nature of business growth means projects that you could implement in a month elsewhere, will instead take a year or longer. You will often be a project genius with an empty bank account.

Successful stores over the decades are simply ones that were responsive to customers and grew their inventory over time without failing. Not failing is the common denominator of successful, long term stores, which is actually a whole tool bag of hidden skills. "Don't fuck it up" is my core competency. Growing a hobby game store can almost never be rushed, although there are exceptions. Those are the store owners that intrigue me the most. Those who can rush growth. I promise you their mantra is not "Don't fuck it up."

Marketing is the least important thing, but store owners are obsessed with it. Why? Because they are poor and have a vision of a community. They don't have the proper investment for inventory and they are young and want to instantly please the community from which they usually came. Marketing means events primarily, delighting large roomfuls of customers with games each night, sacrificing the owners evenings, social lives, family time, and friends, with this Third Place. Marketing can range from inconsequential to critical to fast growth, depending on how well it's managed. Marketing is almost always done wrong, almost always focuses exclusively on events, and only occasionally generates income or moves the store forward.

You must have the inventory investment, which nowadays is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can almost never compress the time needed to build the business. Almost never. Marketing is over emphasized and often about pleasing crowds rather than growing the business.

The whole endeavor is painstakingly slow, just absolutely, low margin, years in the making, molasses slow. The tendency to "fuck it up" is tremendous; ordering too much of the wrong stuff, failing to pay taxes, losing your lease, getting behind on bills, allowing the wrong people in the store or on staff, and general malfeasance. If you were given a giant sum of money to move your business forward, even the experts would probably blow it half the time. The real wizards of the trade know how to optimize inventory, compress time, and use events to their advantage.

Speculating with Garbage Bags

How much of a new CCG should I buy? Well, how much money can you afford to lose?

An investment in a CCG entails community interest, a track record, and a schedule of events or other promotional efforts. There is a community in mind, ignoring the fact they have limited resources and you will be cannibalizing your other games. The more you can plan these things for a new game, the more risk you can assume. Investment assumes you have hopes for the future.

Speculating in a CCG is a "pump and dump" calculation with little to no community interest with perhaps a known outlet if things go south. A dead CCG in a game store is pretty much a rock. I speculate on a lot of CCGs, but I speculate in the realm of maybe a case, rather than a pallet. I just barely escaped Altered with my life, breaking even due mostly to the Kickstarter booster boxes. I bought way too many starters for the people we would be flocking to my store to learn to play this game. That was speculation, although with a lot of groundwork based on promises (that didn't get fulfilled).

The difference between a new CCG investment and speculation? There's not much sunlight between them to be honest. New means we are convincing people before a product exists. The difference between investing and speculation is more a fuzzy scale between 1 and 10 than some hard line of separation.

Magic the Gathering's Innnistrad Remastered, which released this weekend to predictable results, is probably a 2, on a scale of one to ten, with little speculation. However, a Digimon release is a 9, with no community and perhaps just a handful of interested parties. It might completely fail with zero sales one day.

I'll buy $10,000 of Innistrad on release, while I'll only buy $500 of Digimon. It takes about three dead Magic sets to cause my operation to seize up (ask me how I know), while I can fail on a $500 CCG pretty much continuously ... until there are too many of them for too long. One time I did some forensic accounting to realize these little $500 CCG buys were the reason I wasn't profitable. You miss every shot you don't take, but you'll only make money by taking careful aim.

When Redakai came out, the poster child for wild speculation, I was still talking with sales reps and taking their advice. I no longer do this. The game would have state of the art "lenticular" transparent cards where you could stack them, like with Gloom, to create a new thing on the table.

This game was from Spinmaster, a toy company who made the uber popular Bakugan franchise worth a billion dollars in annual sales. It was to be launched with a cartoon tie in and toys. Retailers would get it two months before mass market. It was a summer release, the best time. There would be organized play and league kits. It was the Next Big Thing and it couldn't fail. They had me at Gloom, to be honest.

Like all new CCGs, it had to win over existing CCG players and create a new marketplace. It had to nail its marketing efforts, convince influencers and alpha gamers, and it had to hit the supply and demand just right. Redakai was perfection on paper, probably a warning sign. In practice, Redakai did not do any of these things.

The game was expensive costing 50% more than the market rate of CCGs, due to the fancy, lenticular cards. It was unbalanced with broken combos with no desire to fix this. The product packaging was bewildering and the product make up differed among various sales channel. Support for the game by its developers was lacking.

Critics say Spinmaster was more interested in the toys for Redakai and the cartoon series that was released concurrently. Spinmasters was essentially a toy company, not a game company. It's unclear if the tie ins supported the CCG or the CCG supported the tie ins. Hint: you can still buy the toys. Sometimes the cartoon would reference the CCG and give out gaming advice ... that was totally wrong. In other words, the marketing department was leading this project.

At the end, I recall dragging a 50 gallon black garbage bag of Redakai to the dumpster in the back. It was too heavy to lift. One game store friend lamented I should have given it away. Let me tell you, nobody wanted this game.

The difference between a successful, speculative pump and dump and a failure is simply the quantity ordered. I might feel different about Redakai if I had ordered approximately one 50 gallon garbage bag less.

Nowadays, could you catch me out on a Redakai? Oh yeah, for sure. My Gundam CCG pre order, assuming I get it all, would leave a Redakai sized mark if it fails. It won't bury me though and when I placed the order I calculated the debt it might put me in short term. Always keep those 50 gallon garbage bags in stock.

The Daily Grind of Ordering

I've got some ordering statistics from the last year:

431 orders were placed, over the 250 or so business days. There were 3 days I didn't place an order. If it was a business day, there was a 99% chance I was placing an order.
Only 24 vendors were ordered from. I have 80 "active" vendors in my POS and 277 inactive vendors. So only a third of my "active"vendors got an order in 2024. Perhaps I need three categories? Hyperactive vendors.
9 orders arrived late, or 2% of my orders. This is a function of UPS, primarily. Half of those late orders were from Games Workshop. GW being late is why I looked, but it only happened four times over the last year. In my mind it was larger.
Most vendors prefer UPS. Foam Brain and IPR (and Heart of the Deernicorn) use USPS. USPS shows up when it shows up. A few random orders arrived via Fedex from Renegade and Toyhouse. Get with the 1Z folks.
The average time between when an order is placed and when it was received was 1.25 days. This is because I have three major distributors with a one day delivery time. I almost went to pick up our Innistrad order yesterday with my truck.
The average Games Workshop order took 13 days, but many took 20-30 days. When Games Workshop wants to, they can get me an order in 4 days, or in other words, a well functioning GW would get me orders in the same week I placed them.
Over 35,000 items were received, or 81 items per order.
The average number of boxes per order was 2, which I base on the rough estimate of $500 of content per box. Over 1,000 boxes arrived over the year, so many that it requires a dedicated recycling dumpster.
The average order value was $1,200.
The average number of boxes arriving each business day is 4. Some days are heavier than others. For example, Tuesday I estimate we received 30 boxes.
About once a quarter we'll get 50-100 boxes that arrive on a pallet that are not part of these statistics. We got one of those orders on Wednesday.
We fill the recycling dumpster to the top each week with boxes and the recycled trash from customers opening product in store. If the customers took product home to open, we could get away with a recycling trash can. We learned this during COVID.
I have 3,342 items on pre order and back order accounting for $83,692 holding on 29 purchase orders, including some dummy POs that keep things organized. A quarter of that is product from Bandai and a quarter is from Wizards of the Coast. Only 3% is Kickstarter derived.
I'm at the point where I could use some help. I will definitely need to hire someone to help with purchasing in the next 24 months, as growth continues.

Choosing the Cleanest Dirty Shirt

The larger your organization, the more incompetent people are involved, according to Price's Law.
The law states half of the total contribution is made by the square root of the total number of participants. So let's take the Department of Education with 4,400 people. 66 people are doing 50% of the work, according to Price. This is not a dig on the DoE, it's just how all organizations function. Small and nimble is nice to have, but it's not always possible. The incremental gains as you scale up are generally worth the inefficiency, which is why we have large organizations.

If you want to hunt down inefficiency and scale back a work force, good for you. You just need to be careful you don't eliminate those 66 people doing half the work, or signal to them you don't care about them (they certainly have). If you offer a universal buyout to all employees, what are you signaling?

Here are top reasons top performers quit according to a brand analyst:

Lack of Growth Opportunities (check)
Burnout (check, because they do half the work already)
Under appreciation (check)
Poor Leadership (check)
Misalignment with Company Values (check)
Lack of Autonomy (check)
Limited Recognition or Reward (check)
Unclear Expectations (check)

So if you want to destroy an organization, this general invitation to quit is an excellent way to go about it. Do you think Elon Musk took such a cudgel to Twitter? Or did he take a more sophisticated approach? It's the latter.

The End of an Era?

I just re-filled my thirty foot wall of RPG miniatures. It's WizKids with some Reaper Black Series. However, I think this segment is dead, either for me or as a game trade segment. I'm not sure yet. It hasn't worked on paper for some time.
The problem is the supply hasn't been reliable and the demand is very spotty. Lack of demand and lack of supply equals death. Both WizKids and Reaper seem disinterested in supplying the trade. I recently opened a Reaper account, but I'm reluctant to use it for security concerns. I could trim down my miniatures to a core collection, but I've tried that, and sales performance did not improve. I could have a half dozen of every miniature on a hook, but it just means terrible inventory performance. We're giving that a final stab this year.

So why re-fill the thirty foot wall with questionable product? This is kind of a last gasp to prove myself wrong. Perhaps the lack of supply was the lack of demand. Perhaps painters will come out of the woodwork when they see a power display, one lacking quite a bit of power in the form of many SKU holes (we don't actually use those moronic out of stock cards, of course). I'm down to just 61 WizKids back orders.

Why is this happening? I think the RPG painting customers have moved on. These are dungeon masters of D&D, primarily. COVID taught them to use virtual tabletops, even in person. D&D players are notoriously cheap, and they're not likely to buy more than a model or two a year, but it's not uncommon to see my players with 3D color printed character miniatures from HeroForge. Or perhaps ghostly white plastic figures they promise to paint one day. Paintable miniatures are legacy.

We have tried to incentivize RPG miniature painting through painting contests throughout the years, including using the last eight, Wiz Kids paint night kits. I don't see any more of those coming.
As a DM, I take some pride in having the right miniature in every situation. It's a form of mental illness. When possible, I buy my miniatures pre painted on Ebay. I buy them 3D printed or acquire 3D print files and have them painted or paint them myself. Only in the rarest of situations, a last resort, will I bother purchasing a WizKids or Reaper miniature off one of my shelves. These minis aren't bad, they're just not amazing like the infinite options one gets with 3D printing. I've spent thousands of dollars over the last year on miniatures; $5 came from my store.

So this year, I attempt to prove myself wrong with my full wall of miniatures. This might be the end of an era. However, just like we have new fixtures to consolidate and better display RPGs, after magazine racks have become obsolete, there is an awful lot I could do with thirty feet of new wall space. I think that's easily a year of inventory expansion. Most likely dedicated to Games Workshop. If I can get the product.

The Merchant's Dilemma

You're on the battlefield in your chariot, fighting for your kingdom. You notice your enemies are comprised of many of your family and friends. Turning to your best friend and chariot master you tell him you would rather lay down and die than fight this battle. Fighting this fight will tear apart the community.
Your chariot master is unusually wise and tells you that sometimes life puts you in impossible situations, and you can only do your duty. The dude is blue, which means you should probably trust him.
I'm talking about Pokemon, along with the most famous scene in the the Bhagavad Gita. Sometimes we are put in difficult situations. In the case of Pokemon, we can lie down and get trampled in the battlefield, selling to scalpers and resellers as we hold to the MSRP, a pawn in many a side hustle. Pokemon USA made an announcement they were appalled at market prices, a monster they created.

Or you can accept your role as a merchant, a warrior in the battle of supply and demand, and do your duty, fighting your battle with market prices. Being a merchant occasionally puts us in situations where we are forced to act, where there is little to do but submit to the life you've chosen. This can sound overly dramatic, I know, but there's truth to it.
Some people will feel trampled by your chariot. They will leave one star reviews. This is capitalism, with winners and losers, but if you ask me, everyone is far better off than the alternatives. Like a billion people being lifted out of extreme poverty in 20 years. Take your winnings and build a better kingdom with more wonders and opportunities that serves everyone.

The Escort

Investor friends and I were at a fancy restaurant on the ocean having lunch. We were contemplating what was needed to move the business forward. I was eating some local oysters and a "dragon fizz" soda, a snack that would cost me an eye watering forty dollars. But the view.
"An escort? Explain."

"Well, I need someone who will take products I'm buying, add them to our online system, and promote them for pre orders.
When the product comes in, they would take photos, promote the product on social media and in store, and make sure the product was the focus of events.
They would manage the online store, provide shipping which we don't currently offer, and create product offerings across platforms, like on Amazon and Ebay.
Then when a product failed to perform, they would run reports, pull product from shelves, and create sales opportunities. They would escort product from conception to its inevitable death. They wouldn't buy or sell product, just facilitate it's life progression.

"Don't you already do these things now?"

"We all do a little bit of each of these tasks, but they aren't our core job, so we do them kinda poorly. This is a 3M position, as in they don't buy, sell or dispose of product, they just make the buying, selling and disposing of a product better."

"So when are you hiring this person?"

"I need another $120,000 of annual revenue, so probably in a year. The problem is this is a cost center rather than a verifiable income generating position, although shipping from the online store will increase revenue. Marketing will increase revenue somewhat."

"Just one more thing, you'll need to change the name. You can't solicit for an escort...."

Third Places and Table Fees

A business book not often mentioned, probably because it's so ingrained in our thinking, is The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg. Third Place theory is the concept that society needs a third place for socialization, a neutral ground between work/school and home. Game stores can be that third place. I didn't bother reading this book until I was planning a coffee shop. Game stores, we preach, like coffee shops, are that third place. We are anchors, creative outlets, and social meeting places. For publishers we are marketing venues of both a place to view your product as well as play your game. We are the worst option for selling a game for publishers, the last best place to sell a product, since we eat up 60% of the margin with our distribution buddies. It's only after every channel has been exhausted, that some publishers will finally relent and allow us to sell their goods. In this third place, we put eyes on their product that wouldn't see it otherwise, at tremendous cost.

In the post COVID world, getting customer engagement with our third place is harder than ever. My sales are up, but my event attendance is down and it's that way with many, if not most stores. I would not base a business on third place right now, as I think we have some emotional healing to do before it's a viable option. I would still have game space, but I wouldn't be looking to expand it. We may need to skip a generation to recover, perhaps getting a decade out where the 12 year olds never wore a mask. My own kid, now 19, is fine with his friends online and feels no need to see people in what we early online adopters used to call "meat space." Getting people to re-engage in "meat space," with that third place, requires a cultural shift back to normal that we have little control over. We can build it; they may not come. My need for a bigger store is about product space, not assembly space. I have re-claimed some of my event space for product storage, post-COVID.

An important point I want to mention from The Great Good Place is that a third place should be free OR inexpensive. That "OR" is important, as many game store owners are stuck on the free setting. New store owners, often fresh from being a player at another game store (which obviously wasn't good enough for reasons), are reluctant to charge anything at all for table space. However, let Starbucks be your guide. Starbucks this week changed their policy to require a purchase to use their space. This is because they got tired of being abused. A spokesperson in a CNN article said, “By setting clear expectations for behavior and use of our spaces, we can create a better environment for everyone.” Sound familiar?

Americans don't value free. Even a small price, the cost of a cup of coffee for a few hours, is enough to drive away a ton of free loaders, sucking up power, clogging the wifi, and messing up the bathroom. The darker side is Starbucks is a resource for the homeless, a case where our weak societal safety nets are supplemented by private businesses. Starbucks might be able to afford to fund restrooms for the homeless, but I can't. Some sort of purchase to use the space, even my older store credit model ($5 for $5 of store credit), is enough to discourage a ton of freeloaders, as well as remove people who don't belong. If phrases like "don't belong" are offensive to you, don't start a business.

Resentment is probably what drove me to make the change from essentially free to a table fee last year. This was exacerbated by too many RPG groups, a change that happened post COVID when we invited everyone, anyone, back to our game space. Any warm body would do. Before COVID, we had a carefully balanced and curated collection of groups that filled the entire space every night. We are years from that again.

In the case of RPGs, through data, it became clear the GM was spending all the money, and half a dozen people would buy some event store credit, which would then be used on snacks. Imagine a packed room of 50 people in which five of them are actual product customers. As Travis wrote, if you're angry with your customers for doing what you've encouraged them to do, it's your own damn fault. Changing to a table fee meant the table was the product, not the D&D product. If players are pirating books, buying them on Amazon, or not buying anything at all, that's Not My Problem now. My product is the table. They are paying for a service, one that's profitable enough ($5) to be the net profit of a Player's Handbook every gaming session. Of course, this has reduced the size of our RPG crowd, and it may have hurt our reputation, but it removed a major irritant and made room for paying customers (again, my broken system, so my fault). It makes me sad, but it pays the electric bill.

Third places just sorta happen. You can't force it. You can't make your place cool. You can certainly legislate it out of existence with fees and policies and rudeness. However, as Starbucks demonstrates, you need to find a middle ground in which you're creating a third place environment where everyone is getting what they need; the business and the customers. Some people will naturally be excluded from that.

Special Orders and Accountability

Just for fun...

My store does 400 special orders or pre orders each year, a little over one each day. Our success rate is 99%, which you might think is very good, but it generally means 4 people each year are unhappy with something we've done. One each quarter. If you can't handle disappointing customers, special orders are not for you.

There are three words you need to learn to take special orders: I screwed up. Notice the "I". Selling a customer's special order is the most likely scenario, because it wasn't noted on the incoming order, put aside for the customer, or because math is hard. It is going to happen.... four times this year.

"I screwed up" means the responsibility lies with me. The customer who bought the oversold item is absolutely never to be an issue. We don't need to make THAT a mistake too! Take your win with the unknowing customer who bought the reserved item and make it up to the customer who didn't get their item. This is such basic customer service, that I wonder if it needs to be said.

But what if that was a one of a kind sale? When we screw up, it's because we can't solve for X, we can't get another one of whatever was ordered. That's often a Games Workshop army box, an unobtainium box of CCG product, or perhaps a limited edition cover of an RPG book. Store owners regularly send messages in forums, scrambling to find just one more copy of X, from anyone willing to ship it. If the wronged customer is patient, we can often fix the situation.

As an aside, we are regularly learning when not to take these special orders. For a minute, Wizards of the Coast made certain products limited release without telling anyone. It took a couple cycles to realize this. Keeping at least one item in reserve of a Games Workshop release guarantees we won't oversell those; often when eager clerks ignore the math. Me taking the blame in that case means not pulling back before they had to use their counting fingers.

We gave back thousands of dollars to angry customers we didn't know when our first Lorcana allocation was well below 5% of our order. Such astonishing poor planning all around.

"I screwed up." Try it out a few times. It loses its sting after a while. Just work on saying it less tomorrow.

AI, Wikis, and the Digital Dungeon Master

I went digital with my D&D hobby six months ago and it had me concerned about the future of tabletop role playing. I did this with a huge world building project, and with the help of technology, it turned out to be a planet sized endeavor, supercharged by AI.

I am behind. This is not the future of the hobby, but me catching up with a lot of tech that's been around, sometimes up to a decade ago in the case of wikis. The role of the hobby game store in the future is likely tied up in unwinding how our selling of physical stuff interacts with this technology. What I found was a bit disturbing but also reassuring.

I'm using a campaign wiki (Kanka), a technology that appears to be at least a decade old. Combined with AI, which is obviously much newer, I've been able to create about 900 documents in the last six months. This "power couple" is both a blessing and a curse of sorts, in that if you can think it up, you can create it quickly and organize it to be accessible.

When I used paper, there was a point at which the organizational structure determined when I was done. The key is having a vision, planning and focus, which is pretty much the human contribution, when it comes to AI.

I'm also using an encounter generator, Kobold+ Fight Club, to create combat encounters. How do RPG books, those things we sell, come into this?

Generally, if content won't fit into my wiki, I'm not interested. At first this was alarming as a store owner. However, I've bought many RPG books for this campaign, provided I could also get electronic copies. Dumping PDF text dumps into ChatGPT, modifying it to my liking, and generating new content, was a pretty common method when I wasn't writing entirely new content.

Kobold Fight Club has access to 34 published monster source books, of which I've selected 20 to use for my campaign. I've sought out the holes in my physical collection, wanting copies of all 20 of those books.

When it comes to monsters, I need them to be open source, so I can create a hyperlink in my wiki. If not, I need a PDF copy available so I can at least include an image. Kobold Fight Club can get around this, if you use it for combat. If I can't get access to either a hyperlink or a PDF, I won't use that source material.

I don't subscribe to D&D Beyond, which has a lot of official content. I also don't pay for ChatGPT, although I should. The only recurring expense for this project was Kanka, which charges me $5/month for advanced features and additional storage.

The ease of creation of a huge array of content leads me to the understanding that less is more. A more focused, tighter vision, with dynamic content created along the way, is how I would do this in the future.

Perhaps I'm a bit old fashioned in wanting physical copies of books, but that physical content must have an electronic representation of some sort.

In the case of my store, we offer Bits & Mortar copies of books we sell, provided that publisher is part of the B&M program. Many publishers are not members and sometimes I'm leaning on PDF copies sent to me as a store owner by the publisher, who frankly isn't sure what to do with them when it comes to customer distribution.

Finally, there are miniatures. I have a tremendous collection, which ironically leads me to want the exact miniature for any encounter. My preferred method is to buy pre painted collectible WizKids singles on Ebay.

I've got a lot of Lovecraftian monsters, so I'm also buying 3D printed models, or 3D model files. This expense is offset by my sitting at home working on this thing and not traveling, which costs a small fortune.

The 3D files are printed in store on our 3D printer. The 3D models are often ordered on Ebay, then made to order, and sent to me where I paint them myself or outsource them for painting. This process mostly bypasses my store, unfortunately.

My favorite Ebay store is Kings of Light, and if I could have a collection of every pre painted mini for sale like them, I would be happy, but probably poorer for my efforts.

I'm not a trailblazer in this endeavor, although I've been enjoying an experimental D&D 5e implementation of ChatGPT. This version takes my gaming nonsense and ensures it remains D&D formatted and compatible.

One of my small joys is converting AD&D spells to 5E, and including those as rare spells to the players in the wiki. Again, if I can think of it, I can create it quickly -- a double edged sword, but manageable with a database.

I should also mention that players, like all players everywhere, are only mildly interested in these world building shenanigans.

If I were to advise stores on how to be more integrated with such a process, first I would suggest a Bits & Mortar account. We've been a member for many years.

I've talked to some store owners who are opposed to the concept, but some of my alpha RPG customers swear by it and are happy to buy print books while also having us send them PDF copies through B&M.

3D printers have yet to become ubiquitous, as predicted, so perhaps offering a printing service for miniatures and terrain is something you might develop.

Finally, although my store has dropped it, opening collectible miniature boxes of pre painted minis might be a consideration, although it's labor intensive, takes up critical space. It probably requires volume, like any collectible singles, to make it work properly, meaning you'll need enough profitable singles to make up for the dregs.

I've been writing regular world building posts on my personal page for months, but wanted to summarize what I've learned, now that the world building is done. We're now at the phase where new content is written as the game progresses.

Monday, June 23, 2025

Six Months of Facebook Posts