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.