Hello, Veeky Forums

I'd like to see a shop with 3d printers you could rent by the hour or place larger model orders overnight

0. There must be a demand for what you sell, and you must have better supply than your competitors

1. Keep it clean

2. Either well stock an item or don't stock it at all (unless it mtg cards)

3. Save some money before hand for hard times

4. You'll always be in a hard time

5. Your employees can be the greatest thieves of them all

6. Be open to suggestions, and consider what the costumer wants to see before rejecting it

7. Be fair in your dealings

8. Make sure your employees are fair in their dealings

9. Be family friendly

10. Get some professional help as well. I'm just some dingus on the internet that may know some things, but not everything

11. Support your local marching band(s), sports team(s) and town in general

Anyway, I have to do some stuff. You chumps better bump this thread, because I'll be back with more advice.

Nearly all of your income will be from MTG, and to a lesser extent Pokemon. You should accept that now.

Right on, thank you.

What would you elegan/tg/entlemen like to see in an LGS, or perhaps even a bar/LGS?

How would you run it?

I'm speaking with my friend who's monitoring this thread. He wanted me to point out that it's a bar/game store. Perhaps that's a way to keep a higher maturity level among the customers, I dunno.

So... How would you run a bar/game store? There's one a couple of cities away from me called "8-bit" but I think they're more of some hipster bar that just happens to have DnD games hosted there.

I think that's what we'd be going for, to be honest, but I also think we'd sell things like MtG cards, DnD books, minis, dice, maybe a selection of comics, and board games, and then people would play them there and drink (ideally).

>I guess he's looking to diversify.
Well, if he's got business sense, he should be able to break into retail. Best of luck to you guys!

Also, the three things to sell are: Boardgames, Wargames, and Cardgames.

You're going to want M:tg presence, unless you've got a HUGE wargaming community that needs a store.

I mean, alcohol and games do go together, but I think it'd probably be prudent to have some kind of "limit" as to how drunk your patrons should get.

Getting shitfaced while playing games is all well and good, but not when you're in close proximity to other groups who are at varying levels of inebriation, and even those not there to drink at all.

>"limit"

Right on, I've thought about that. I was thinking a 4 drink "hard limit" every 2-3 hours.

Also, thank you for wishing us well in our endeavor!

It might be hard to limit drinks effectively.
I was thinking the tables close up at night and the arcade machines come out. After 8pm could be a more bar setting with a 21+ age limit

Be strict about hiring. I know you'll come off as a jerk but I've never worked a job that wasn't strict until my most recent job, and I've also never known an awful employee until this job.

>I was thinking the tables close up at night and the arcade machines come out. After 8pm could be a more bar setting with a 21+ age limit

Grognards tend to go late, dude; closing up tables that early is going to drive off a lot of wargaming anf TTRPG groups, not to mention magic nerds who aren't there to drink.

Honestly, I don't think you're going to be able to make it half bar, half game shop.
You either go full bar, full game shop, or a game shop that happens to serve alcohol.
A bar that happens to have games isn't going to draw much traffic; the normies that come there for booze are going to be driven off by grognards, and the grognards that come there for games are going to be driven off by normies.

Don't listen to this guy:

It's a pain in the ass to get a successful gaming store off the ground, let alone maintain it. It cannot be stressed enough that you need to have shit on the stuff that sells, and minimize wasted space on stuff that isn't. Decorations don't count. If you really want to have a personal love of yours in the sore somewhere, keep it under a table somewhere and tell people about it who are curious. Even than it's probably not worth it at the start.

In Chicago, third biggest city in the US, there's only a handful of game stores. I can name 4 that failed in the last 5 years, despite a pretty damn good location. You will be constantly fighting online sales, and this WILL ruin your business if you can't get enough people buying in-store. Good interior decoration, even if its pretty simple and minimalist, is essential.

Be very careful about who you want to hire. Or let hang around your store for that matter. Every asshat you see on Veeky Forums is a real person, and a lot of them would love to work at a store that sells board games so they can get discounted (ideally 100%) hobby stuff and access to an audience for their fuckery that can't kick them out.

Personal recommendation: Enforce hygiene standards. Strictly. Sweaty guy coming in off of a hot day to pick something up and leave, fine. Guy who 'just came from the gym', but smells like he was the center of the fart equivalent to a bukkake in the last 5 minutes, wants to sit down for Friday Night Magic? Hell no. Let it happen even once and you're almost certainly going to lose a customer who doesn't want to deal with that shit.

Selling soda and/or water is good too. $1 a can is a generally accepted price, but I'm only one opinion on that. Remember, a lot of business decisions you will have to make will seem like dick moves, but this is your livelihood. Business is about maximizing income.

Location would be paramount

Okay, so, everyone else is getting into the fun parts of this. Like, what to sell, your policies, whatever. Let's take a step back to some of the less fun, foundational things you're gonna need long before any of this:

First, to start a business costs money. For the rent of a location, for build-out, for product, for furniture, for POS systems, for advertisement, for employees, and for months and months of extra money to run the place in case it doesn't make money right away.

What is the source of this money? How much do you have for it? Where can you get more? What kind of loans can you get? What's your credit score?

Second, as a partnership, what do both of you bring to the table? Why does your partner want you, why do you want your partner? Have you ever worked together on a project before? Are you just pals? Have you ever been roommates? How good are you at conflict resolution between yourselves? Have you ever fought?

Who gets paid what? How much ownership of the place does each of you receive? Who is responsible for which aspect of the business? Why do you think you're capable of running a store? Why does he?

Third, if you really want this place to be a bar, do you know the rules and regulations of a bar in your city, state and country? Is there anything that can prevent you from opening one? Also, do game stores, or even arcade games, come against any city gaming ordinances? Seriously, that can be a problem, because the law sometimes doesn't distinguish properly. Also, what are the rules and regulations for starting a business in your location? What do you need to get a business license? You're gonna need to know ALL OF THIS, and also know which things may make things more difficult.

After all, gaming stores often have kids, doing stuff like card games. What must you do to keep kids from being barred from your establishment?

Chicago, huh? Personally I go to Dice Dojo these days. Although its RPG section is atrocious.

This bar/gaming store idea is cringy as fuck. These are the two businesses people start and think it will be fun because they like drinking or gaming, but rule #1 is it's a business not a hobby.

T H I S
H
I
S

You're not going to be able to compete with online retailers; they have pretty much everything in stock, 20%+ discounts on MSRP, and generally good shipping.

You have a limited inventory, limited shelf space, and can't give out discounts like candy; 15% is pushing it.

What YOU are selling, is a fun environment to game and hang out. Make the place look like, make it inviting. Kick smelly grognards and autists to the curb, and DON'T let them in. The same goes for prepubescent squeakers; don't let their moms use you like a day care.

If you can generate customer good will, they will be more than happy for paying more for products for the sake of supporting you and keeping your store (and their gaming place) open.

Right? Personally for me it's a video arcade. Then I actually did business research, and found out it was a terrible idea, and shelved the fuck out of that.

Haven't video arcades been dead for decades now?

Eh, the beer thing works for the FFG around here but that's not exactly a mom-and-pop store

You need to look towards the future. Weed will most likely be legalized 5 years from now so maybe a dispensary/game shop?

The two guys I play MTG with toke up a shit ton cuz it gets them into the zone so it could be a really good retail synergy.

Some still exist. One even opened recently in the market I was looking at. However it had some serious troubles and got fucked over because of gaming laws.

But yeah, they're effectively dead. Hence why I didn't do it.

Thats actually a really good Idea! I have another idea! you could name the weed strains off of nerdy dnd stuff!

...

>a dispensary/game shop?
If you get rid of the kids you're going to kill a huge chunk of your business.

It might work if you host a weekly how to pick up chicks class.

Also, not reading the whole thread but, you need to be able to convince someone to purchase from you a product that you yourself despise. Think of the weakest, lamest popular game you can imagine. Now get your friend to buy it in the next 10 minutes.

Now do that five times a day for thirty years.

>DUDE
>WEED
>LMAO
Fuck off

Dude check out the Rook and Pawn, a bar/LGS in Athens, GA. Their website doesn't even show the half of it, place rocks.

Which is one of the biggest points. They're the only place I know of in a city of 2.5 MILLION people (ish.) that's been open for more than a few years, growing larger by absorbing customers from other stores that did fail (or in one case, the owner died of cancer, but I only heard the story. He died before I got into this stuff).

Despite this, even they made some bad decisions and had to downsize a bit. For a little while they had a storefront space dedicated to warhammer gaming tables. Not anymore. They tried to open a sister location on the south side for people who didn't want to commute as far. That one failed after a year or so.

Look at their schedule too. Magic, magic, pokemon, magic. 2 days a week dedicated to kids magic leagues (they have a separate room for that now too). One day for rpgs (And there's usually people in there playing magic), one day for xwing, malifaux, warmachine, and also magic. One day for flames of war and heroclix (And magic). Classic Friday Night Magic, and then Wednesday Board Game night. The only time not dominated by magic.

None of these days exlude other events, and there's other groups that independently organize things in there. (wargames in the basement and the tables a bit further back, the odd board game, magic tables, the kids room which is also good for board games that require a bit less residual noise etc.) But they are obviously relying a lot on magic to pay the bills.

Also, note the gimmick Wednesday Board Game Night. When they say a wall of board games, they mean a wall of board games, and it only works because they have a community that picks up after themselves, so none of the games (to my knowledge) are missing essential pieces. Also a lot of guys who are very enthusiastic about the games they play and very inclusive to new people. They even have a half-decent female presence that night.

I actually went to the South Side store first, because it was a little closer. It was a nice little location, but I was out of town for a few months, which so happened to be when it fell apart.

I'll definitely agree the board game wall is pretty fucking incredible.

The biggest thing I would like to see is a non bar lgs, but because your friend does deal in wine and can build stuff, I would recommend to have the bar and the game store separate (so when kids that have money to burn want to go to the game store, the parents don't think that as the bar.), but every once and a while you can allow drinks to be brought into the game store and have an "adult swim" feel to it.

Most of the advice came from my experience with a failed lgs that was in my small town. Their carpets had dirty splotches of some crap that was spilt and was never cleaned up, there was always some man child there that was on the computer and distracting the clerk from the customer, every fnm was crowded and there was heavy metal music going on, and they had boxes upon boxes of this game called "killer bunnies..." but everybody in the town wanted to buy settlers if catan.

Anyway, just make sure that you can get the most amount of people into your store, as more people usually equals more money.

Location is essential. Absolutely essential. Magic players don't have too much trouble hauling their things around, but any other game you need nearby parking. And even ignoring non-card games, you need some way for people to get to you easily.

One bit of advice I once heard: If you can't describe the directions in less than 20 words, you need a better location. Again using Dice Dojo as the example: Across the street west of the Bryn Mawr redline stop. Or, by driving: On Broadway 2 streets north of Foster. Or: A little south of the North entrance to Lake Shore Drive, on Broadway . Or: just south of the corner of Broadway and Bryn Mawr.

Location won't do it alone though. One of the places that failed was 'Just south of the Western Brown Line Stop' or 'the corner of Western and Wilson'.
Another was 'about a 10 minute walk west of the Belmont train stop, just before the hardware store'.

Keep in mind too that the Red line is the train that goes pretty much all the way north to pretty much all the way south. Past BOTH baseball stadiums in Chicago. Belmont is where a couple of lines meet (brown, red, and purple), and western was smack dab in the middle of a very middle-class neighborhood, so they have money to burn on cards and plastic. Lots of traffic, and lots of potential customers. You need to give them a good reason to stop.

Thread TLDR: If you didn't have the dedication to read through it all and take notes, you're probably going to fail. For a niche market like this, there's no shortcut to making it work. Shit's hard.

Yeah, it's a thing of beauty. There's so much on there I still haven't tried. I'm not in chicago most of the year because of Uni. Gonna try to hit it up once or twice this winter break.

Look at other combi-game stores. There's at least one place I know of in Cleveland that's a Board Game Cafe, but I have no idea how well they're doing. Might give you some insight.

If you're going for beer and pretzels gaming in a more literal sense, focus on the beer and pretzels. Sell some cards (and have PLENTY of card covers on hand at all times for people to buy), maybe sell some board games without too many pieces to make a mess of things, and/or aren't very complex. Imagine what kinds of things you would do AFTER you've had a couple of drinks, and don't even stock games more complex than that unless you plan on being open all day so people under 21 can come in earlier. That's probably not a good idea either if you have any competition at all on the board game side.

Wouldn't recommend RPGs. At least not institutionalized. Imagine every RPG argument you've ever had, and then imagine them all while everyone involved was tipsy or drunk. Might be a funny story, might wind up with a ruined rulebook and a big mess to be cleaned up. By you, the store owner. Who also has to break up the fight.

It's a risk for any board game you host. I only single out RPGs because it's usually longer sessions, which means more time to get more drunk.