I work at a FLGS, Ask me anything

Is theft common?

nahh ,i use neckbeard hair from fucks like you to form a makeshift cork.

small things like paint yes,but bigger stuff is harder to grab since we always have staff on the floor.

Ever caught someone at it or suspected it?

Three most popular games in the store?
Is there employee discount?
Where do you see yourself in five years?

caught kids stealing paints and vanguard packs before. We keep boosters behind the counter and the little fuckers were stupid enough to try and pocket them while i was putting them back after letting them look through the boxes.

Took them to the back and put the fear of god into them by calling my manager and pretending he was the police. they haven't been back since.

Have you seen any horrible That Guyism that you needed to step in and intervene for?

>Took them to the back and put the fear of god into them by calling my manager and pretending he was the police. they haven't been back since.

Gonna need some more juicy details senpai

X wing, magic and 40k.

yes, I got the start collecting mechanicus box for £38. it carries from range to range as some companies charge more wholesale.

If i'm staying in london to continue my education to an MA, then hopefully i'd stay on since it's an enjoyable job with good bosses and nice customers that i don't get stress nightmares about like when i worked for weatherpersons. Honestly it's not a job you'd raise a family on, but i'd feel pretty bummed to have to leave it. (think of homer a the bowlorama.)

do you mean fedora tipping? No luckily, but i think that might be more because of where we are based than anything.
We have a pretty mixed player base, some games are clearly more interesting to female players like magic ,x wing and D&D, whereas some are all male like 40k and vanguard.

So far nothing truley autistic has happened and i hope to keep it that way.

(one chap did leave his fedora behind and we were forced to dispose of it.)

What's the local "competition" like? Never been to London much less Europe so I wouldn't know how many stores you have or how common it is.

So there's this group of schoolkids.Come in every few days after school and ask to look at stuff from beind the counter,then proceed to play with their same vangaurd decks and take up tablespace.
Now i like having kids in the shop because i like encouraging young players since I used to love going and talking to the guys at my FLGS when i was a kid, But these kids are annoying as fuck.

This day i was showing them the vanguard boosters we have and as i turned back towards them i saw one of them stuffing his jacket pocket full of cards.

The little bastard saw that he'd been caught, moved for the door but i just walked round the counter and got him by the bag straps.
Marched him into the back while his mates stood around with one of the other guys who went on to get them to empty their pockets.

Anyway, i sat the little fucker down on a box in the back room and called my manager.Opened the convo with "hello police, I've caught someone stealing in my shop" ..
Manager is fucking laughing down the phone cus he knows this kid is gonna be shitting it.
After about 5 minutes of "uh huh...uh huh...."
I hang up, turn to this kid who looks like he's gonna cry and tell him he has to stand at the till and give the cards back in front of the whole shop, then leave and never come back.

Get my fellow staff to the till, make the kid give me the cards back and then kick him and his mates out forever.
As they left i heard his mates calling him a cunt.

Good times, gooood times.

Why do you work at a FLGS?

The pay is shit, the customers are shit and you don't have time to read all those books.

London is too expensive for small game stores.Our local competition consists of GW, One board game shop in covent garden and the forbidden planet in covent garden.

It's a shame since having FLGS around encourages a strong community, but it does us good as a business.

Wayland are our biggest online competitor.

>Any tips for how to get one of these jobs?
get some retail experience on your resume, hand in your resume to the store manager, follow up in a few days.

I'm a student, Every other student job is exploitative shit.
The pay is better than i was getting at the pub, it keeps me afloat since it's london living wage.

Maybe your store is just a bit shit?

Although you are right bout the not having time to read all the books, but I'm there to do a job not just indulge my hobby, i can read them in my downtime like everyone else. The difference is I get them first.

Toppest kek

Do you or the manager feel annoyed or peeved at all when people play at your store without buying stuff?

No , we basically treat the gaming space as separate from the shop. It builds community and it increases footfall in the store. It's rare that people play without then remembering something they wanna pick up or their eye caught by some new release, and even then as long as they pay their table fee all is good.

>table fee
That's smart. It sounds like you guys know what you're doing there.

What about food service? Especially if I do a good job and actually do work to help promote the place I work at?

Stick it in there. Any job has transferable skills. My CV consists of NHS admin worker, masseuse, barman, but i still got this job.

Yeah, we do have free gaming time but generally tables are prebooked and cost a couple of quid per player. Not to much, jus enough to ensure people don't waste a table all day by sitting around doing nothing.

Please stereotype the groups of people that play each game that you sell. IE what does the average xwing player look and act like, etc.

Also please rate each gaming community from most tolerable, to least tolerable.

That's smart. My FLGS does it free but I always buy a couple drinks so they are at least making some money. And we go in during the day when it's dead anyway.

You don't want unexplained gaps in employment on your resume. Even if it wasn't a glamorous job, put it on there. Especially if it will provide a glowing reference.

Pretty hard to do desu. X wing has such a varied player base and most players dip in and out of several other games. The malifuax players for example have picked up frostgrave.

40k is your standard male player base, normally guys in their late 20's/early 30's since these are the guys who can afford to play it.

Magic has the worst player base in my opinion, but even then to say they're bad is harsh since they're mostly just very passionate about a game i myself am not massively into. they don't really pick up that you aren't a magic player and so they just keep talking, and during game days they do get in the way and forget we're a shop, not their front room.

I love the D&D players, again massively varied but mostly their all pretty chill and they share their food.

I think since we're a central london store we get players from all sections of the community coming to visit so we avoid the problem of having toxic groups of players dominating one game.

Staff play free aswell, so today i went into work and played SoBaH.

And yeah, most players are pretty happy to pay £1 to have a space to play for a night with scenery and drinks on hand.

Have you had to ban any regulars?

Accidental Desu.

That makes sense. I applied to one and got an interview but acted kidnda quiet and retarded.

Ive applied four times since but nothing. Maybe now that I have a job they might consider me. Probably not though. I'll have to apply at another store. Plus they downsized, and last time I applied the woman who interviewed me personally signed the email. Dunno if that was a message to piss off, because she probably didn't expect me to remember her name but I did. Plus I'm in their store rewards list so they also know my name from that.

while i've been working there, no.

We have had to shoot magic players with a nerf gun from our sniping position in the back room if they call judge too much.

What do you think about your new mayor?

I forgot to register to vote in the mayoral election since i'm not from london, but he was my choice.

>see FLGS working thread
>expect OP to be working at a place as boring, shitty, and soul-crushing as me
>his store actually sounds good and fun

I got hired to run Magic events and sell cool games. Now, 3 years later, the salesfloor is all but ignored and I sit in a warehouse selling shit on Amazon. We get maybe one customer every few weeks then they see how bad the place is and never come back.

Sorry to hear that man.
I can totally understand how that would happen. If we weren't based where we are i can see it happening.
Perhaps you need something to encourage in store sales? I often think ho much i'd love to have a display case of vintage citadel/ral partha in the store.Something like that could bring customers in regularly to check your new stock and build an oldhammer community.

Ask game companies to come down and show off their games, invite painters and modelers to do workshops or something.

Nah, this place is pretty much just dead. As far as I can tell this is just part of a long trend downward that started a few years before I was hired. My boss is less interested in actually running a store than he was 20 years ago and has been shifting more and more to online sales of random media and comic backissues and reselling Chinese toys and knockoffs at comic cons. His almost complete apathy towards the store affects me as well and I just have no motivation to try to improve things when I know he won't back me. Mostly I just shit around on the internet for 8 dollars an hour and reind myself I should be looking for a real job.

Didn't mean to bring down your thread though. Guess after a few years of telling people "it's not as great as it sounds" I forgot that it actually could be.

Worth saying tho, there is no consistency between stores, they're all run by different people with different attitudes towards running their shop.

>but he was my choice

How often do you have to shill for shit products and pretend better alternatives don't exist?
How often do you have to deal with >that guy?

Never. If we don't have what someone wants, we tell them where to get it. There's no point really since the customers are just as knowledgeable as us most of the time, so we just have to talk openly about the products we have .
Besdies, most the time the products people would imagine we shill (new GW for example) are the products that sell themselves. (I'm looking at you knight renegade you heavy unwieldy bastard!)

Not very often, we have a pretty good crowd.