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.

Monday Morning Workflow

Here’s how my Monday morning ordering workflow goes. The first question is always: do I have money to buy anything? If you pay COD, that means real cash waiting in the bank for when the shipment arrives. I buy on terms or by credit card, so I ask a different question: is there room in the budget?

That budget is my Open to Buy (OTB) worksheet. With steady sales and discipline, if I only spend what’s available in OTB, I’ll pay my bills and stay profitable. Spend too much and profit slips. Spend too little and sales drop, which also hurts profit. When I delegated buying for a month while on a trip, my manager struggled to spend the full amount, which surprised me. It’s harder than it looks.

So what do I have to spend today? October is my slowest month, impervious to even the strongest new releases. Publishers seem to mark it off on their calendars. My store, like most, thrives on front-list releases. We can limp along on restocks and evergreen sellers, but we really come alive when there’s new hotness. October’s hotness is back loaded, all coming next week. But for now, I’ll ignore that storm on the horizon.

Looking at the numbers, I have $7,800 to spend today. That splits into restocks and new releases. Restocks are straightforward. I generate purchase orders based on reorder thresholds for each distributor. These thresholds shift constantly as items sell. Some go up, some go down, some disappear entirely. Inventory is a zero-sum game. I can’t add new things unless old things come off the list.

I prune throughout the day, but I also notice oddities when I see them on a PO. “What the heck is that?” Usually something from a first order that never moved. Most restocks are the usual suspects. Quantities might shift, but they’re safe bets.

I start with my CCG supplier at $3,100. They often have the best price on supplies, so I get that in first before higher cost suppliers get a bite. CCGs are my biggest category, so this is my biggest restock. Next comes my primary distributor at $650, but I pre-order everything from them, so that number can jump depending on new releases that ships. Budget-wise it averages out, but I often look overdrawn for a few days.

My secondary supplier is steady at $800. Then come the specialists: Games Workshop at $2,800, which I may get cut in half. If I'm really lucky, I'll get an invoice before it arrives. Then there's Asmodee with a "stub order" of $325 in restocks. I call it that because it's enough to get the ball rolling with new releases added on top of that.

That adds up to $7,625 of my $7,800 budget, assuming Games Workshop ships everything (they won’t), not counting $200–400 in new Asmodee releases, and not knowing what surprises my primary distributor might send. It’s messy. If I paid cash terms, it might even be stressful. My budget is rarely balanced, but it works.

If you call plus or minus $1,500 balanced, I’ve hit that mark four times this month. OTB is mostly a trailing indicator, something you check to understand how you’ve behaved, not predict what you’ll do next. In the past month I’ve been $15,000 over budget. Today, oddly enough, I’m sitting on my biggest surplus in the last 30 days.

Am I done ordering? Not quite. I just got a tracking code from a tertiary distributor, probably a CCG item that wasn’t on the calendar. I also have a $5,000 Asmodee order for Star Wars: Unlimited and League of Legends that might ship early. I'm told the League of Legends will ship in waves; I wanted a lot more. If it does ship, I’ll be $5,000 over budget for a week, until it sells out next Friday. That’s how it goes.

There’s nothing fancy about how I order. Most veteran store owners are doing the same thing this morning, some with a quarter of my resources, some with four times as much. The smart play is consistency. Have a system. Follow your best practices. Order often with the right depth. That takes experience, and it’s one of the last things I’d ever hand off.

Am I good at it? Buying assumes a few things. Do I know my customers’ tastes? Do I understand sales velocity? Do I know how well my staff can move product beyond stocking the shelf? Do I have an exit strategy when something needs to be clearanced? I could be better at all of it, especially if I spent more time hand selling or keeping up on product knowledge. I tend to err on the side of FOMO, over-ordering to make sure I never disappoint customers. That keeps them happy, even if it makes my OTB twitch. I can live with that.

Edit: Forgot my $2,125 new release order from Games Workshop. Looks like we're over budget again.

Warding the Game Store

I once asked a shaman if working at a game store could attract spiritual problems. The answer was, “Yes, but not necessarily.” I was reminded of this interaction today while a customer was attempting to cast a spell in the back. We discussed it amongst the staff. Maybe we should have wards like one would have in a spiritual ceremony? Well, in practice, we already have them.

A game store draws all kinds of people, many of them deeply attuned to their imagination. They come here after long days in the mundane world and slip easily into the act of transformation. Maybe they’re wizards, warriors, or something stranger, exhaling the energy they’ve carried from the outside. It’s always surprising to see what people choose to become when they’re given permission to imagine. Some need to blow off steam with power fantasies but others are fulfilling deep seated needs missing in their lives. Not everyone is going up levels.

Every time dice hit the table, players cross a threshold between the ordinary and the mythic. Traditional cultures warded such thresholds, doorways, crossroads, and hearths, not always from fear of what's outside, but from respect for the unseen currents that pass through them when they're at their most vulnerable. In a sense, we provide that doorway. We provide permission. We provide a safe space. Our store is a liminal space where people step out of the everyday and into something older and deeper. Warding, in that context, isn’t about magic. It’s about letting people know they’re safe to open up, to play, to create. 

Warding as Permission and Protection

A ward isn’t a wall. It’s a sign of belonging. It says, this is a space where you are allowed to be yourself. In a psychological sense, it’s permission to let your guard down. In a game store, that might look like a pride flag in the window, a posted code of conduct, or a dragon head on the wall. This place is safe. You are amongst the tribe. We protect our people and slay the beasts Out There. These are modern wards, symbols that say your imagination is safe here.

They also mark a boundary. Psychological safety is the foundation of imaginative work. Without it, creativity becomes guarded and brittle. If you’ve ever had a roommate or partner walk in while you’re role-playing, you know how quickly the energy can drain from the room. When that happens, it's really hard to get back. When you post a code of conduct, keep the store clean, and treat people well, you’re doing more than running a business. You’re keeping the ward strong.

The Nexus and the Noise

An open, imaginative environment doesn’t just invite creativity; it attracts chaos. Trickster energy, you could call it. Sometimes it’s harmless, sometimes it’s not. You see it in people who arrive carrying too much, the ones who blur the line between fantasy and delusion. You see it in the erratic energy of certain customers, or just the sense that we've got "psychic residue" left behind after too many stories have been told in the same place. Get out those Clorox wipes.

Any place that deals in imagination becomes a magnet for the unpredictable. The solution isn’t to block it or fight it, but to hold space for it, to shape the current through rhythm and attention.

That’s where ritual comes in. Regular cleaning, lighting, music, and a consistent schedule are quiet forms of energetic hygiene. You don’t need sage or ceremony, but you do need intention. This has always been my instinct at the store. Order isn’t optional. Lose it, and the place starts to come apart. I’ve seen it happen, especially during chaotic events like Yu-Gi-Oh nights, when the energy simply refuses to stay contained. It's so disruptive employees enter a state of distress that's not normally part of our calm, ritualized day.

Practical Wards

You don’t need much to ward a game store.

Threshold markers: A symbol at the door, art, motto, or flag, announcing that this is a place of imagination and respect. A pride flag is both an invitation and a shield, a sign that everyone is welcome and the intolerant are not.

Ritual order: Opening and closing routines stabilize energy as much as they maintain the business. Cleaning becomes a ritual act. When someone skips it, the imbalance is felt immediately. Letting the bathroom go uncleaned or a stain linger is a kind of desecration in a place meant to nurture creativity. Staff know this, they feel it. They naturally avoid the disruption. It's for them as much as the customers.

Sound and scent: Ambient music, clean air, maybe the faint smell of dragon soap or print ink. In older times, people believed foul smells carried disease; they weren’t entirely wrong. Scents shape mood and memory. I grew up with cookware stores that sold games, and the smell of those places still feels like home, maybe not my home, but the home I chose.

Community norms: The code of conduct isn’t just a formality. It’s the living boundary of the ward. Inclusivity isn’t a policy; it’s an active practice, a continual fostering of safety and weeding out of intolerance so imagination can thrive without fear.

Finally

A store like this is a living space, a container for imaginative work and a meeting point of countless stories. Treat it with sacred attention. Warding isn’t superstition; it’s stewardship. If you keep rhythm, care, and intention, the space holds strong.

I feel we "mythologize" our stores, tell narratives that make sense of it all. Deep within that narrative is the acknowledgement that what we do is special, even if we're not sure why. You run a nexus. Give it form. Let it breathe. Keep it balanced. Perhaps you already do this and now understand your work has greater significance.

My Twenty-Dollar Assistant (AI in the workplace)

A year ago, I started thinking seriously about hiring what would essentially be a personal assistant. Someone in the buying department who could handle the growing pile of e-commerce work I was generating. There was how I was doing it and how I wanted to do it, and the gap between those two required more labor than I was willing to give.

For years I managed buying between customers at the counter, turning what should be one of the most important parts of owning a store into a nuisance task. I wouldn’t expand buying because I didn’t have the time. Looking back, that was probably one of my bigger mistakes. Now it's my primary job.

I first started using AI to build a new D&D campaign. Combined with a wiki, it was intoxicating. I had continents mapped, pantheons defined, and NPC relationships modeled to the point I could feel how they’d interact by modeling dialogue based on backgrounds, often generated with the help of AI.

In three months I created enough material to last twenty years of gaming. I am not exagerating. Maybe because it was so top heavy, I lost the thread after only six months at the table. We’re now playing a more stripped down Old-School Essentials campaign, still using AI and a wiki, but with a lighter touch and fewer unnecessary details.

I used AI artwork to populate a thousand wiki entries for personal use. The one time I used an AI image for a store post, it got fantastic engagement along with a wave of outrage for “embracing the evils of AI.” I should mention that over the past year I’ve paid real artists to create professional-level D&D maps and regularly pay a graphic designer contractor for the store. I suppose what I’m saying is there’s a time and a place for AI art.

It wasn’t an obvious leap to apply AI to the business. The topic was already getting ethically messy, and it didn’t fit most situations anyway. AI isn’t a genie or a fairy godmother. It’s that personal assistant I was looking for, but not a great one.

Because of all the hype, people expect miracles. What I’ve found is it’s more like having a high school intern. They can take assignments, often save hours of work, but just as often return with the wrong results. You have to explain what went wrong, and they’ll give some excuse about how the assignment was hard. But I pay twenty bucks a month, so you get what you pay for.

In the aggregate, it makes sense if you already know enough to check the answers. You need to be informed enough to spot errors before acting on them. My fear in the outside world is that's likely to go disastrously wrong. Imagine the average person, and then remember half of the world is less smart than them. AI especially suffers from confirmation bias, where you often get the results you want to have, rather than the correct answer.

Yesterday was a good example. I asked AI to cross reference my upcoming trip itinerary with local holidays. It ran through lunar calendars, checked Cambodian observances, and triumphantly announced there would be a festival the same day we’d be at Angkor Wat. Perfect. I started planning around it, but something felt off. I had it recheck its work, and sure enough, it was off by a month. “A common mistake,” it admitted. AI wants to make me happy, so much so it will throw me the holiday party it knows I want, even if it's the wrong date.

For now, AI is great at crunching purchase orders, formatting text, and organizing thoughts. It’s still that high school intern, helpful, fast, and sometimes wrong. Will it get better? Probably. But for now, I remind myself that for twenty dollars a month, I’ve delayed the need for a twenty dollar an hour employee another year.

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Here’s a concise summary of how you’ve used ChatGPT for business so far, based on your conversations:

🏪 Business Operations & Strategy

You’ve used ChatGPT as a management assistant for Black Diamond Games, focusing on:

Inventory and purchasing analysis: creating and cleaning up purchase orders, comparing supplier prices (ACD, Alliance, Magex), calculating GMROI, elasticity, and margin targets.

Payroll and finance: building tables for payroll, inflation adjustments, wage tracking, and workers’ comp rules for S-Corp owners.

Accounting troubleshooting: fixing QuickBooks verification errors, planning a migration from QuickBooks for Mac to Online, and summarizing differences between plan tiers (Simple Start, Essentials, Plus).

Insurance and compliance: researching key person insurance payouts, and confirming state requirements (e.g., California minimum wage, workers’ comp exemptions).

💸 Product & Marketing Content

You’ve had me draft clean, SEO-friendly product descriptions for your online store using these principles:

No sales hype or fourth-wall breaks.

Include award links or official quickstarts when relevant.

Avoid disclaimers or cross-product references.
You also have me format these descriptions so they’re scraping-friendly for ecommerce uploads.

📦 Retail Data & Tools

You frequently use me to:

Build CSV or spreadsheet exports (POs, invoices, payroll, pricing updates).

Generate business metrics like ROI, stock ratios, or price-sensitivity calculations.

Write summaries of distributor trends, e.g., supply shortages (DragonShield Night Blue) or CCG allocation analysis.

🧠 Writing & Publishing

I’ve helped polish essays, blog posts, and book-length material in your “Friendly Local Game Store” voice — for example:

Opinion essays

Appendix N literary analyses for your personal page.


🧩 Game Design & Worldbuilding

For your Old-School Essentials campaign and published materials:

I generate encounter summaries, XP values, NPC tables, and stronghold cost breakdowns.

I format OSE-style character and item blocks.

I expand on Stonehell, Ember Bastion, and Ashkarin Concorde lore for campaigns.

🧰 Systems & Workflow

You’ve used ChatGPT as a workflow hub, integrating:

Google Sheets and CSV exports for business data.

Calendar and trip planning for long-term store and family projects.

Detailed structured outputs (tables, invoices, formatted PDFs, and campaign maps).

Last Man Standing: Life at the Bottom of the Retail Funnel

In roleplaying games there is the funnel. You throw a bunch of zero level townsfolk into a meat grinder and see who crawls out. The survivors become heroes. Retail has its own funnel.

Our value proposition is simple. We do not have the lowest price. We do not have infinite selection. We have the thing you want, right here, right now. If a store cannot master that, it will not be around long. That reality makes us front list driven. We live in the land of release days and the Next Thing.

Most game players are not hobbyists. For many people we are just “the store.” They come in once a month, scan the shelves, ask a question, maybe check their phone, and walk out with a box of fun. I do not pretend they never buy online. Some refuse to touch the online world at all and will not even use my web store to check stock. Most are hybrids. 

These customers buy from me, online, across town, and occasionally from a guy with a blanket at the train station. They do not optimize like alpha gamers who stretch every dollar for maximum cardboard. They buy something that looks fun. Our proposition resonates with those customers, and we do everything we can to turn up that resonance. For example, most do not use our Game Center, but they shop with us because we have one. They support a community they're tangentially part of.

Because of this, you learn to read the pattern. You see the Matrix in your sales data. Most of the time it hums along predictably. Then something glitches. A disruption hits the product funnel and you can feel it in your bones before you can chart it in your POS.

Here is how that funnel looks on the ground. There is a new hot game. You know it is hot because you bought it when it was just potential. You ordered deep. You brought it in for Jack, and Olivia, and Liam, and a dozen other actual people in your head. You matched your local demand with your local supply. Then the game catches fire.

The fire starts far away. It climbs the Amazon charts, then disappears. The fire spreads. It sells out at the publisher and at the large third parties. Most publishers now run multiple channels. The vast online-only crowd and the big corporate retail shoppers are happily buying from those channels. They do not know us and we do not know them. When I talk about standing outside a game renaissance hurricane, catching demand with a thimble, those folks are the hurricane.

Soon the publisher declares the game sold out. Yet my back room has a neat stack reserved for Jack, and Olivia, and Liam. The fire spreads to my little building in Concord. Customers begin to arrive. Not in a stampede, but in waves you can feel. The question comes like clockwork: “Why do you have this?”

Sometimes it is "Why do you have this when it's sold out?" or “Why do you have this when my favorite store across town does not?” Sometimes it is “Why do you have the Kickstarter version before I do?” I have heard the same person ask that more than once, which led me to ask in return, “If you know I have it, why keep going back to the place that doesn't?” Often it is online-only buyers who suddenly recognize my core value. I have what they want today. They wince at paying regular price. They notice I do not have a Walmart quantity. Then they buy it anyway. Some see me as some sort of predatory monster, preying on the ignorant. That is life at the bottom of the funnel.

Being the last man standing feels bittersweet. We want to be the first thought for hobby gamers, not the necessary evil at the end of a long search. We focus on pleasing Jack, and Olivia, and Liam, the people who follow our social media, who show up every week and share their wins and losses. So it stings a little when the stack sells out before our locals have had a full cycle to pick it up. I am grateful for the revenue. I also resent being the necessary evil for a hurricane of customers who learned about the game from someone else, planned to buy it somewhere else, and now strip my shelves clean like locusts, with a sense of grudging reluctance. 

Twenty years ago we built hobbyists from scratch. We introduced people to games despite every reservation. Many of those customers graduated into hybrids. We do not own customers. We are not owed anything for our effort. That is a hard lesson until you accept the storm for what it is. The hurricane is not ours. The thimble is not ours either. Our job is to hold the thimble steady and fill it. We are here to serve.

The trade was roughly an $800 million market when I started. Today estimates put it around $3 billion. The feeling of being a necessary evil has not changed, and some conditions make it sharper. During COVID, publishers had to build new direct paths to customers while my doors were closed. It took me a year and a half to feel fully functional again. Now tariffs push more publishers to sell direct because they cannot afford to pay the markup friction twice. Distribution has to take a cut. Retail has to take a cut. The math does not always work. So more of the storm bypasses us.

What do you do about this if you run a store, or if you care about the survival of your local?

Keep living on the front list. Be the place where the Next Thing is reliably on the shelf on release day. If you are not that place, your other efforts are bailing water.

Buy like a local. When you back a project or go deep on a title, imagine the real people who will buy it in your community. Those mental preorders keep you honest. They also make you kinder when the hurricane arrives.

Protect the locals’ window. Give regulars a clear chance to get the hot thing. That could be a brief hold period, a preorder list, or a simple message that it arrived. If they pass, let the market do its work. Do not fight the storm. If I feel I've given clear warning of the coming storm, I am not super sympathetic when you're caught unaware.

Say yes with a smile. When the necessary-evil customer walks in, sell them the game, answer their one question, and send them on their way feeling good. Do not scold them for their purchasing history. Some will be back. Some will not. Both outcomes are fine.

Invest in your resonance. If your only value is “we have it right now,” you live and die by allocation and luck. Layer on community, events, trusted curation, and a store that is pleasant to visit. Those things turn a one-time hurricane buyer into an occasional customer, and sometimes into a Jack, Olivia, or Liam. Understand you have a value proposition and people can either engage with it or not. It's probably not going to bend to their whim.

Accept the limits. We do not control the storm. We can only widen our thimble and keep it upright. Some weeks the thimble feels small. Lately it feels smaller as channels multiply and costs climb. Yet the storm is bigger than ever, and there is still plenty of water for the patient and prepared.

That is the retail funnel. It is not glamorous. It is not fair. It works. On a good week the locals get what they were waiting for, the hurricane pays the light bill, and the next stack arrives just in time. On a great week, one of those hurricane buyers sticks around and learns our names. Either way, the job is the same. Keep the Next Thing in stock. Keep faith with your people. Keep the thimble ready.

Gary Goes Car Shopping

This week, the car I bought for store deliveries during COVID, the one I planned to keep until the wheels fell off, had the wheels fall off. It was parked in San Francisco and got hit hard enough to jump the curb. Just about every door panel, front and rear bumper and even the exhaust system needed repair or replacement. My little Lexus IS, with 100,000 miles on it, was supposed to go another 200,000, maybe even 300,000. But the insurance company totaled it.

I’ve bought more than 25 cars in my life, and honestly, I’m over it. Over the process, the pricing, the pattern of nonsense that happens every time. I think buying an RV, with its archaic process and practices outlawed in the auto world, finally broke me. Thanks Camping World. I’m also trying to live by the motto: Debt is the promise of future work. That includes car debt. So this is the story of how I bought vehicle number 26, or whatever number we’re on.

First, I make sure to shop with someone who will be patient or else I go alone. I don’t bring my wife anymore. The last time I did, she took the side of the closer. “Extended warranty? Sounds great!” She doesn’t care about cars. This time I brought my son, mostly to help spot things that would annoy his mom. I'm really buying this so she can drive him around.

Second, I know what I want. In this case, I wanted a cockroach. Something unkillable. A jellybean that would run for hundreds of thousands of miles. I wanted Certified Pre-Owned, so it would be vetted and come with a decent warranty. I was willing to pay more for that. Basically, a new used car.

She needed ground clearance because of our driveway. The Lexus had its front and rear bumpers nearly torn off trying to get in and out. The back bumper cover is still sitting on the side of the house; it would have been destroyed in the accident. She also needed space for plants and instruments. The day I saw dirt ground into the white seats of the Lexus, I knew my vehicle choice had been ... sub optimal. I didn’t want to think about this vehicle again. I already have a Ford and an RV to worry about. I just needed something beyond reliable, with a warranty, and no drama.

So really, it came down to the cheapest certified cockroach between Toyota and Honda. Lexus was too expensive. We only had one because I got a stripped-down, off-lease model during the COVID shutdown for a steal.

I test drove the cheapest certified Honda CR-V first. I had read it was a better driving experience than the Toyota RAV4. I was planning to buy the Toyota, but I needed to rule out the Honda. Due diligence. The CR-V was as nice as the Lexus it was replacing, according to my son, but it had a turbo engine, direct injection, and a CVT transmission. I follow cars closely and that's three strikes in my book. Three knocks on long-term reliability. But Honda does those three things better than anyone else. There's apparently a big difference between say, a Nissan CVT and a Honda CVT.

The next day I went to Toyota, ready to buy the RAV4. I was hoping to feel that it was simply better, even though people said it was less refined. I was hoping for some confirmation bias. I’ve owned two Toyota products already, and my next vehicle will probably be a Toyota. I wanted to like it. I really did. I was willing to overlook flaws.

Boy was I wrong.

The seats were uncomfortable, a common Toyota issue. The cabin felt cramped and gave me the beginnings of a panic attack. The Lexus does that to me too; just a little too tight. The engine sounded harsh and buzzy. The whole thing felt more like a Corolla than a Camry. And it cost more than the Honda. "How do you like it sir?" "Ha! I don't like it at all!"

I started doing the math. I could put some repair money into that Honda over time and still come out ahead. And every owner I talked to with a Honda said the same thing. It lasts. Two hundred to three hundred thousand miles, easy.

So I went back to Honda and put down a deposit on the CR-V. The three-strike cockroach won. It's a boring little silver jelly bean from 2021 with a slow head unit and cloth seats. Perfect. If we she can just keep it on the road for the foreseeable future, that would be great.

Remote Manage: Another Look

After years of running my game store, I now manage it remotely. Here’s what that actually requires—and what I’ve learned along the way.

Process Improvement

For years, I met weekly with my manager to tackle problems big and small—special orders, maintenance issues, even a broken bathroom door. A consistent agenda meant no blind spots.

That discipline built a culture of excellence. We don’t tolerate broken things or process loopholes. While the "broken window theory" may be discredited, I believe problems attract more problems. Apathy grows in environments with broken systems. Small issues signal a bigger decline—something we actively fight. We have a premium store mindset and we better live up to that.

Excellent Management and Staff

My best managers have come from within. That’s because our staff are taught our values from day one. Outside hires? It’s a coin toss—about 50/50. And when those hires fail, it’s often due to value misalignment, not skill.

Good managers are worth more when you’re remote. I compensate mine better than if I were present every day. Why? Because turnover is disruptive, especially when you want the freedom to travel. It’s vastly cheaper to retain great people than to replace them.

IT Infrastructure

I’ve built my system for remote work:

• Fast internet at home and at the store and when I'm remote (with failover backup).

• A robust POS system (Lightspeed) optimized for physical retail, not online sales like Shopify.

• MacBook Pro for longevity—mine last 5–8 years.

• Automated payroll, 401K, workers comp, and utility payments.

• Bills paperless or forwarded to my home. E-banking emphasis, which is a given nowadays.

• When I lived in Mexico for four months, staff scanned and emailed physical mail, usually just a few items a month. Meanwhile, I moved every account possible online.

Distributors are only just now catching up with uploadable orders—something promised back in 2004. But I can do nearly everything from anywhere.

Simplified Processes

There’s always a tension between customer service and process exceptions. Card singles, for example, demand airtight oversight: theft control, inventory limits, strict buying guidelines. We’re not doing singles right now. We will again, but only with strong systems in place.

Same with online shipping. It's an obvious revenue stream, but requires robust oversight. Right now, we’re not ready. Those are low-hanging fruit for our next expansion.

Staying Informed

If you manage remotely, go to at least one trade show a year. I don’t, but I compensate by being plugged into the social media hive mind. I’m constantly watching what other stores are doing. Most of it isn’t relevant. Some of it is gold.

I don’t speak to sales reps anymore. Allocations are the name of the game: Pokémon, Games Workshop, Magic—all allocated. Final Fantasy Magic was an exception, a rare opportunity where my nerve was the only limitation. My store is big enough that allocations are annoying but manageable. Bigger stores feel the pinch significantly more.

Innovation Will Slow

If you want real innovation, you’ll have to show up and do it yourself. That’s the remote owner's dilemma. There’s only so much innovation you can expect others to initiate. That’s why I still have “low-hanging fruit” waiting to be plucked.

You must accept some inefficiency. Your staff won’t have your OCD. Nobody will care as much as you. You have to be okay with that. "This is fine."

Growth Trade-Off

Stores with on-site owners will likely grow twice as fast as mine. Remote ownership means something else matters more to you: family, travel, gaming, your time. That’s fine. But it comes at a cost. You have to be willing to accept that.

Many owners eventually burn out and close shop. Remote management is a solution only if your store is worth the effort. Most stores aren’t.

Stop Trying to Make It Happen

Here’s a piece of advice I recently got: If you’ve tried everything, turned an issue every which way, and still can’t make it work, let it go.

That doesn’t mean you’ll never do it. It just means it’s not time. Don’t force it. Choose what’s working, and move on. Not being able to wrap your head around a problem so you can change it is the answer. The answer is no.

Final Thought

Remote store management is entirely possible, but it requires structure, support, and a willingness to let go. Growth will slow. Some things won’t get done. You will not be the best at anything, at least not for long, and you'll need to be very conscious of when your Unique Value Proposition becomes simply Useful, and your Useful Value Proposition becomes obsolete. For me, the trade-offs are worth it.

Thoughts on Expansion

 What Comes Next: Six Paths for the Store

I’ve got two years left on my lease, and I’m beginning discussions with property management about the future. My challenges with expansion are the same ones many established stores face.

One Store or Two?

Opening a second store is tempting. It solves the problem of expanding without tampering with a successful formula. But it introduces new problems—management complexity, operational drag, and the unknown. I tell people I only know how to start a store wrong. Could I do it right this time? Sure, in the sense of “do as I say, not as I did.” But do I have the interest and energy to launch something truly new in the same space? Not really.

The Case for Bigger

A larger store has always been my ideal. Bigger stores leverage systems: policies, procedures, staff expertise. I can keep everything in one store in my head. Two stores? They give me literal bad dreams. But a larger single location? That’s manageable at almost any size.

Still, expansion is risky. I run a profitable business. I’m heading toward retirement. Why would I jeopardize that with a high-stakes expansion? I’m not going back to IT after 20 years out of the game. I can’t live on a “game trade adjacent” salary.

I’m wearing golden handcuffs—both the paycheck and the business model. My salary can’t be replicated. My current space includes a self-financed mezzanine that effectively saves us $3,300 a month in rent. If you had a stock portfolio paying $3,300/month in dividends, you’d think twice about touching it.

Still, the need is real: we don’t need more game space. We need more retail.

Scenario 1: Elevation and Separation

We could turn our downstairs event space into retail. Our upstairs space would remain game space, and we’d expand into a third unit for events. But the catch is we’d need to install an elevator. The unique setup makes this possible—but not cheap or easy. We could do this now.

Scenario 2: Wait Out a Neighbor

One neighboring tenant isn’t going anywhere—too much invested in their buildout. But the other’s lease is up in 2029 and may be negotiable. If so, we’d add 3,000 square feet of retail space, with rent increasing by about $12,000 a month.

The goal? Use the next two years to build sales and optimize inventory, testing whether our current customer base can support that much additional space. Can a suburban game store double its retail footprint and remain viable? I need some time to find out and 2029 might be too tight.

Scenario 3: Moving

I have a spreadsheet for moving to a larger space. Originally, it was a “sometime in 2033” idea. But with a 25% sales increase this year, that move feels closer. I’m 57. I imagine one major move before retiring sometime after 70. By then, I project the store to be doing over $5 million annually. I’d rather not move, but long-term survival may demand it.

Scenario 4: Buying a Building

Buying sounds like the smart move. But have you looked at commercial property lately? In my city, there are two available: one in the middle of nowhere for $2.6 million, and one prime location for $4.5 million. They're both between 7,500 and 8,500 square feet. A 10% down payment means needing $260,000 to $450,000 upfront. The first is plausible, just barely. The second is fantasy. And that's the entire market right now. Owning a building seems like a great retirement asset, if you can buy one.

Scenario 5: Stay and Optimize

Use every inch of vertical space. Dramatically increase inventory. Ride the sales trajectory until growth forces us to move. It’s a rational plan. But something in me resists. It feels like saying “enough.” It assumes growth has limits. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it’s just fear in disguise.

Scenario 6: Sell

I have a number. What’s yours? Not necessarily a dollar amount, but a concept—maybe five times net? A year of gross? Everyone in this business should have a number. And with each year that passes, mine becomes more interesting. Maybe I'll head a company that buys up successful game stores. Wouldn't that be a surprising scenario.

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

Why Do You Need to Be Great at This?

One time in grad school, I gave a ride to a Korean Buddhist monk. He was older than me, soft-spoken but perceptive, and asked if I planned to become a professor. I told him no. I had considered it. At the time, I was fascinated by Central Asian Buddhism, a field that demanded fluency in Chinese, Tibetan, and Uyghur. And because nearly all the scholars working in that space were Japanese, it also meant mastering my academic nemesis: Nihongo.

My fascination was sincere, but my aptitude for languages lagged behind my curiosity. In hindsight, I suspect I was drawn to the field because the path was so impossibly difficult. There’s a kind of romance in chasing something you know you’ll never catch. I told him, “No. I’m not great at languages, and if I were to be a professor, I’d want to be a great one, not just another mediocre academic.”

He listened, paused, and then, in broken English, asked me a question that pierced straight through my carefully assembled logic:

“Why do you need to be great at this?”

My brain sputtered.

There are parts of ourselves we knowingly try to improve—our weaknesses, our habits, our interpersonal skills. But then there are the unexamined convictions buried in our operating system, deep beliefs that we mistake for truths. For me, the need to be great at something wasn’t just a goal. It was a foundational belief, an assumed necessity. Even though I was only 23 and demonstrably not great at anything, this belief shaped how I saw my potential and self-worth.

The monk's question was a kind of koan—a riddle not meant to be answered directly, but to be lived with, puzzled over, and slowly absorbed. “Why do you need to be great at this?” wasn’t just a passing curiosity. It was a gift, one that would take decades to unpack.

At first, it hit me like a challenge. But over time, I realized it wasn’t a test—it was an invitation to freedom. The belief that I had to be great was, in fact, a source of suffering. It was preventing me from engaging with the things I loved unless I could already excel at them. What if my curiosity and my modest talents, applied with diligence, were enough? What if good could be good enough?

That koan stayed with me.

I eventually finished my graduate work. My honors thesis included a zany chapter analyzing Buddhist enlightenment theories through the lens of Ries and Trout’s Immutable Laws of Marketing. It was filler, really—more playful than academic—but it slipped through. Turns out Buddhist studies professors have a surprisingly sharp sense of humor.

One of those "immutable laws" said that if you can’t be number one in a category, create a smaller niche where you can be. If you can’t be the top shoemaker, be the best running shoemaker. If you can’t be the best car company, be the best sports car company. Find a segment you can own. Even if that means being “the best dad on the block,” you’ve staked out your ground.

This marketing maxim harmonized with the monk’s question. It gave me a conceptual framework to accept the idea of not needing to be great in the abstract. I didn’t need to dominate the whole mountain—just find a trail I could enjoy climbing.

Over the years, I’ve continued to deconstruct this need for greatness. I grew up in a supportive household. My siblings were gifted, driven, successful. My parents’ story was one of bootstrapping from hardship to comfort. The idea of being “great” was never forced on me, but it was implied. It hovered in the background like a destiny waiting to be fulfilled. And it always felt expected.

But what about happiness?

As I tell my son: My job is to raise you so you're moral and self-supporting. Happiness is your job. It’s not guaranteed, and I can’t tell you how to get there. I can only point out the connection: moral behavior and self-reliance often lead to conditions where happiness can arise. Being great? That’s incidental. It may show up as a byproduct of living well, or not at all. Either is fine.

If greatness arrives, wonderful. If not, also fine. Happiness, too, is impermanent—welcome it when it visits, but don’t expect it to stay. And whatever it is, I can’t give it to my son, and it’s not the end goal of a spiritual path.

“Why do you need to be great at this?” remains my koan. I still nibble at the edges, still catch myself wrestling with that impulse. I enjoy defining greatness in others. But needing to be great? I’ve mostly let that go. It only took about 35 years of quiet reflection and stubborn internal debate.

These days, I carry a new koan:

“Does this bring me freedom?”

That’s the better question now. It’s what I use to guide decisions, big and small. One of my favorite corollaries is: “Debt is the promise of future work.” It’s a reminder that every obligation takes a piece of freedom with it, and that freedom—not greatness—may be the better compass.

Talking to Myself

 AI: Hey Gary, sounds like things are going well. You mentioned being up 20% last month and 25% year-to-date—that’s some serious growth. Are you feeling optimistic?

Gary:
Yeah, overall it’s been a strong year. We’re firing on all cylinders. That said, I’m seeing growing issues with product availability. A wide variety of board and card games are just missing. Not from lack of demand—but from lack of supply.

AI:
Interesting. Is that mostly China-based stuff, or broader than that?

Gary:
It’s both China and Europe. And I didn’t invest in the European products when this started. I had to make a choice and leaned into games from China when the tariff hit 145%. I didn’t do that expecting sales—I did it to hedge against unavailability.

AI:
So it was a supply continuity move, not a demand one. Have those hedged games started selling faster now that availability’s drying up?

Gary:
Not yet. I think they’re still in the pipeline—on store shelves, in warehouses. But once that inventory is gone, I expect a sharp spike in demand. It could also be that we’re seeing a broader consumer slowdown and my sales are outperforming what’s happening elsewhere.

AI:
Right, your “normal” might be stronger than the rest of the market, so you’re not seeing the same signs. Have you seen any distributor signals that a major wave of product shortages is coming?

Gary:
Distributor communication is usually vague, so not much there. But availability is murky enough that I suspect it’s post–Lunar New Year disruption and shipping shortfalls. Products just aren’t showing up.

AI:
That lines up. A lot of freight lanes were disrupted, and smaller publishers probably didn’t have the cash to rebook space. Are you seeing this reflected in pre-orders or early solicitations?

AI:
Not directly. What I am seeing is a lot of Q1 board game clearance, and a larger-than-usual glut from that post-holiday period. It feels like board game demand pulled back earlier this year and we're still dealing with the overhang.

AI:
That could definitely be the case. If that dip started in January, and you're seeing it now as empty shelves + clearance, you’re probably looking at a lagging demand signal. Are you still seeing strong sell-through in other categories?

Gary:
CCGs are still the engine, especially sets like Pokemon: Destined Rivals and Magic: Final Fantasy. Those are "high" normal releases for us, but I can’t adjust my orders close to release, so I’m locked in. That’s where the bulk of our budget went. If there was a real slowdown, my Open to Buy would show a surplus—and it hasn’t.

AI:
So the budget’s fully utilized, but inventory is disappearing in some areas and still healthy in others. That suggests the system is stressed, not necessarily demand. Any worries about where that money gets reallocated?

Gary:
That’s the issue. My Open to Buy doesn’t discriminate by category, so if board games vanish and RPGs are available, money shifts there. But that’s not a 1:1 demand swap. The RPG audience can’t absorb 50% more product. We risk over-investing in available categories that aren’t necessarily the strongest performers.

AI:
That’s a subtle but dangerous trend. If inventory starts chasing availability instead of demand, it creates imbalance that could hurt you in Q3 and Q4. Have you started capping some categories?

Gary:
Not formally, but I’m watching it. I'm cautious about restocking low-velocity categories too aggressively just because they’re in stock.

AI:
Good call. Have you adjusted prices much this year?

Gary:
We’ve mostly passed on increases. Where we’re already above MSRP—like with paints or sleeves—we’ve absorbed some of it. But overall, the expectation is to raise prices where it makes sense. It hasn’t been a big change yet, though.

AI:
That’s a smart balance. Hold the line where customer sensitivity is high, pass it through elsewhere. Have distributors changed anything about allocations or terms?

Gary:
Not really. They're just out of a lot of stuff. I threw what money I could at high-risk inventory, but now the second- and third-tier products are gone too.

AI:
Let’s talk publishers for a second. You mentioned some scary numbers—25% may go out of business, and half may shift to DTC?

Gary:
Yeah. The industry survey results were grim. A lot of publishers won’t survive the tariffs, at least when they were surveyed at the 145% level, and those that do might bypass distribution entirely. And there’s no domestic production solution waiting in the wings—nothing scalable. We’re probably looking at a permanent reduction in the number of SKUs available to hobby retail.

AI:
That’s seismic. You’re not just managing inventory anymore—you’re managing the slow collapse of part of the supply chain.

Gary:
Exactly. And there's no elegant way to solve it. If publishers disappear or bypass us, the game changes. Even if demand holds, we won’t have product to meet it.

AI:
Sounds like this is the summer to tread carefully. 

Pro Active Price Increases

 Consumers see retailers raising prices ahead of tariffs as something unethical. It seems to depend on whether they like your store. If the retailer is dealing with other issues, such as Target, the criticism tends to be much harsher.

However, If I had to absorb the full cost of expected tariff increases up front, it would put me out of business. The added costs are about twice my annual profits. Prices need to go up on existing inventory before you restock your shelves.

When I hear about an upcoming price increase, it is essential that I adjust my prices before I sell out of the current stock and have to restock at higher costs. If I can do this for about half my inventory, I estimate I can neutralize the initial cost impact of the tariffs. If I wait and take a "power to the people" approach, my business will not survive.

There is a downside, of course. Higher prices lead to lower sales. As we have discussed before, a ten percent price increase typically results in a twelve percent drop in sales. Larger increases are even worse, which means many products may need to be cut entirely.

To give a specific example, I sell Pathfinder, a roleplaying game published by Paizo and manufactured in China. If those imports continue, I expect to see a fifty-eight percent price increase and a sixty-nine percent decline in demand. That would be enough to make the product unsustainable in my store. In a case like that, I may keep prices the same but stop reordering altogether. Paizo is currently one of my top 20 publishers, so I'm hoping they move production.

Right now, I am stocking up as if it were the holiday season. We have just come off a post-election sales boom, likely fueled by just such an uncertainty. Trust the "wisdom of crowds" I guess. Among my investors, there is ongoing debate about whether to hold back spending or go all in on products most likely to be affected.

My approach is somewhere in the middle. I do not have enough capital to buy with the holidays in mind, but I do have enough to build a small cushion. That might help me weather a short-term disruption. I would not be surprised to see a surge in national wholesale spending in the second quarter as others try to get ahead of these changes. If you don't have the cash, spending close attention to price increases and long term viability of product lines, should be enough to survive unscathed.

Whatever your strategy, you need to be pro active with these price increases. Your customers may appreciate you being the last person standing at the low price, but you're probably not going to have enough money to survive.

Trump Tariffs and the Flight to Quality

My first impression is that the new tariffs will increase my store’s cost of goods by around 23 percent, most of which will be passed on to consumers. I already had the spreadsheet made.

There will be a big attempt to pivot away from problematic products. This 23 percent amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars in what amounts to a tax, just pushed down the chain to the end user.

Here’s what I expect to happen:

• Some games will become clearly untenable because they’re simply too expensive to carry. An $80 Catan? Sure, we'll keep carrying it, but we won’t be selling nearly as many.

• Other games may seem viable at first, but as customer behavior shifts, we’ll end up stuck with them. That means we need to be more cautious. This always happens during a recession, and...

• There will likely be a recession.

• Inflation is likely to spike.

• Unemployment could double, over 7%. That’s what economists are predicting.

We’ll probably see a “flight to quality,” where people adjust their spending habits. Big purchases like cars and vacations might get postponed. But hobby games? People will still buy them—even more so, even at 23 percent higher prices. Hopefully from me still.

This will definitely change our product mix. Board games and non–Games Workshop miniature lines could start to disappear from our shelves.

If I had to guess, I’d go through our best-selling board games, cut projected sales in half, and keep only the ones that still meet our metrics. I think about 20 percent of our current lineup will make the cut. We carry a lot of marginal board games. We carry a lot of marginal everything.

It’s possible we no longer carry marginal things—anything I wouldn't order by the case. That’s not good news for the game trade.

We’ll probably survive. We might even prosper. We’re selling life preservers on the Titanic. Great! Until your socks get wet.

This is not madness. It’s simply a regressive tax that helps fund tax cuts for the wealthy. There was nothing wrong with the previous economic order. Nobody was getting taken advantage of. Manufacturing isn’t going to change locations. The job market won’t fundamentally shift. We certainly won’t be hiring for a while.

Pokemon Supply and Demand

Balancing supply, demand, allocations, and the realities of a collector-driven market.

Pricing hot Pokémon products isn’t just about looking at TCGplayer and slapping on a price tag. It's a balancing act between cash flow, allocations, local demand, and national market trends. Here’s a look at how I approach it—and why it’s more complicated than it might seem.

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The First Variable: Paying the Bill

When I receive a Pokémon set, I usually have 30 days to pay the invoice. However, most sets are meant to last through a 90-day release cycle. I don’t want to sell out in 30 days just to cover the bill. I'd rather pace my sales over the full release period and focus on maximizing value, not just speed.

Being a legitimate Pokémon retailer also means I need to have Pokémon product available consistently. Going two out of every three months without stock damages customer trust—and it's often the result of allocation issues.

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Allocation Lessons from the Auto World

To illustrate this, let’s talk about BMW.

Years ago, I looked into buying one and learned their dealerships didn’t play the end-of-month sales game. Why? Because they operate on yearly product allocations. If a dealer only gets 150 cars a year, there’s no reason to hustle to sell car #100 in July. They can’t call the factory and get more.

Instead, they maximize profit per unit and pace their sales based on the year’s allocation. I once found a loophole with European delivery, which didn’t pull from the dealership’s allocation—similar to a customer walking into a game store and asking to buy product direct from the distributor, with the store just passing it through for a small margin.

Some dealers said yes. Others said no. But the model is the same: allocation controls behavior.

Snowy Munich in January on summer performance tires is another story...

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Pokémon Supply: 30-Day Invoice, 90-Day Plan

Back to Pokémon. Even though my bill is due in 30 days, the more important variable is how long the product needs to last. If my allocation is meant to cover 90 days, I plan accordingly.

This is where supply-side logic becomes critical—especially in a collectibles market where reprints aren’t guaranteed.

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Demand: Local Appetite vs. Online Market

On the demand side, I consider both local interest and national pricing trends. Right now, a booster box of Journey Together is selling online for $244. My customers know this. If my price is even a bit higher, they’ll shop online instead.

At this high price point, price sensitivity increases. People compare. They wait. They choose convenience or savings.

Locally, Journey Together is cold. So many customers have washed their hands of it, they’re already asking to preorder the next set—which, ironically, I have even less faith in. I don’t want to sell them a $450 box with unknown supply and potential price collapse. And let’s be honest: they don’t want a $450 box. They want a $145 one.

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Sometimes, Market Prices Leave Your Community Behind

If the market price is too high for your local scene, you’ll eventually need to adjust downward to build momentum. But for me, right now, that’s not urgent. My Journey Together allocation was slashed. I have about 75% of my usual quantity—and it needs to last one to three months.

At current prices, that’s only about a three-week supply—not ideal. If sales were hotter, I’d raise prices above market. If I needed to move it fast, I’d price well below. That’s exactly what I’m considering for the slow-moving One Piece set right now.

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Why This Looks Like a Black Box

To my staff and customers, pricing sometimes feels arbitrary. They’ll notice when we’re above or below market and ask why. The truth is, I’m often not watching the market that closely—until sales start changing. Sales velocity is my signal. When it shifts, I look at pricing. Pricing, after all, is a variable within that velocity.

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What I Really Want (And Probably Won’t Get)

Ideally, I’d have unlimited Pokémon boxes selling at a healthy 35% margin. Instead, I get limited product, slower sales, and a higher 62% margin. As a store owner, I don’t want to deal with allocations and math problems—I want happy customers and a steady flow of product.

But that’s not the system we’re in.

And while many of my peers are angry with Pokémon for underprinting sets, I’m not sure who’s at fault. Right now, there’s nothing but Pokétrash left to order. My backorders trickle in, but the rest of the product line is obliterated.

Publishers often claim victory when a set sells out—but for stores, that’s rarely a win.

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The Kid Problem

Many Pokémon customers are kids. A $244 box means $6.78 per pack. I can’t sell them for less—although some official events distort pricing with artificially low promos. I also can’t steer them to cheaper sets, because I simply don’t have anything else.

That’s the real dilemma: skating from one allocation-restricted CCG release to the next while trying to run the rest of the store like a normal business. For some game stores, this CCG nonsense is the business.

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Magic Isn’t Much Better

Magic players aren’t immune to the chaos, either. There’s a ton of speculation around the Final Fantasy crossover, rumored to be the largest Magic print run ever. If that doesn’t ring alarm bells, you might not know CCG history.

Here’s the takeaway:
Don’t presell more than you can comfortably refund.
Don’t order more than you can fully absorb.

That’s the balance we all have to strike—until something changes.

Paying Suppliers

 How We Pay Our Suppliers

For those curious about the trade, here’s how we handle supplier payments:

Payment Terms

While not a payment method, terms dictate when we pay our bills. They’re harder to secure these days, but I have 30-45 day terms with most suppliers. These terms influence how I buy products, with the goal of selling them before the bill comes due. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t.

But how do I actually send them money?

Payment Methods

1. Credit Card Up Front

   • Many suppliers accept credit cards without extra fees.
   • The IRS considers most cashback rewards non-taxable income, so I take advantage of that.
   • Since I personally guarantee my company’s credit, I also keep the rewards.

2. Mailing a Check

   • Yes, this is still a thing, and it’s how I pay most of my suppliers.
   • I use electronic banking through my local community bank.
   • Games Workshop recently announced they would no longer accept checks. For them, I wait until I’m past due or over my limit and then email them to charge a credit card on file.

3. Payment Portals

   • Almost every supplier has a portal now (looking at you, ACD).
   • Some link to credit cards, while others pull directly from my checking account.
   • Asmodee’s portal is my favorite—it allows scheduling payments on a credit card, meaning I can combine supplier terms with my credit card terms.

Managing Credit Cards

• I recently added a Capital One Spark Cash Plus, which has no preset spending limit.
• This helps spread out large purchases, preventing a single $40,000 bill from hitting right when sales tax and payroll are due. Instead, I make two $20,000 payments at different times of the month—far easier to manage.
• I use this card exclusively for two major vendors who account for half of my credit card expenses. It also simplifies QuickBooks entries with a single "Cost of Goods Sold" entry.

Previously, I relied on a Chase United credit card for travel rewards, but I don’t travel as much anymore. Watching my frequent flyer miles stack up into six figures, I decided it was time to switch things around.

Deal Breakers

Let’s talk about interrupting my flow—something I absolutely despise.

Take PG&E, for example. They’re the only bill (aside from taxes) that can’t be auto-paid. Every bill must be manually scheduled. It’s a failure point and a needless interruption.

The same logic applies to suppliers. If I can’t schedule a payment, my workflow is disrupted. Fortunately, most suppliers allow either scheduled payments or checks.

However, GTS Distribution is a headache. Paying by check often leads to delays, forcing many to make manual payments—something I consider unacceptable. Yet, I still use them, send my checks, and just hope they open their mail so the spice can flow.