Reply To: Retail decisions

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Stock is the No1 issue for FLGS. Not enough and the place looks bare, too much and you risk being stuck with obsolete stock. If you go broad with stock, you can’t afford to go deep. Guaranteed the day you go broad someone want 3 copies of something you have 1 of, and the day you go deep that line dies when replaced by the new shiney ‘thing’.

FoW screwed the pooch here with the new edition. They didn’t handle the community well and it cost us/them big time. The new approach is good but we no longer have a dedicated, thriving FOW scene. It was, for a brief time up to 20% of my sales and the biggest tournament game in Australia. The other thing for both FoW and BA is that they have 6 years worth of warfare and armies to produce. There’s lots of variety but no everyone wants the obscure stuff and most people tap out with 2-3 armies at most.

I wouldn’t recommend stocking MTG unless you already do. It’s a big outlay and every 6 weeks there’s a big release, every quarter a major one. Also, MTG is becoming increasingly cut-throat. Hasbro has favoured big sellers (Amazon, Target, Walmart, etc) at the expense of FLGS and online trade is of course a given.

My store has considerable play space and we’ve toyed with the idea of ‘pay to play’ for ages. As I sure you can all appreciate, we pay rent on the floorspace, we write off stock to provide terrain (although compnaies like GW do help to their credit) and we lose many staff hours building tables and painting miniatures and scenery. It’s a subject that can sour customers in a heartbeat. I previously shut another store purely because I could see players buying stock elsewhere but coming to the store to play.

The issue with no play space is that you provide no atmosphere without it. No community. If you have no community then why even have a bricks and mortar store?

How much effort do you give any game system? As I said I could pour tons of effort into Infinity. Get store armies painted, have a few tables worth of terrain and a small but dedicated community of regular players. Or do the same with 40K and have heaps of players. Or the same with Ancients (my personal area of interest) and have a group that spend next to nothing (as the tend to spend years collecting and painting one army) and who meet every three months.

The other question is how much you guide the community? It’s one of the things about BoW/OTT that I’ve watched with great interest. You nearly have the hobby porn perfected. If you push the community towards something new and shiney and it ultimately fails or sucks, then what? Rune Wars for example. I cut a brake with that game in that the local distributor under oredered and I only ended up with a dozen copies. I sold 10, kept one for myself and the other sits in the discount area to this day. I didn’t push it with the fantasy community at the time and as a result we not only saved some money but standing in the community.

Finally, is there something your FLGS does that really seems to make it stand out? For good or ill.