Trading Card + Board Game Shops

I've been planning opening a tcg and board game shop for the past year. I'm still in the midst of planning but I want to get this right.

What things do you think current card/gaming shops lack? What do they do wrong consistantly? What do you YOU want them to have?

I already have a good idea based on how card shops in my city have failed but it's always good to get multiple opinions, especially on a global scale.

Why the fuck are you asking Veeky Forums as opposed to other successful games stores?

Customer is fucking wrong all the time. It's important to determine what advice from the customers you need to ignore in order to not fuck yourself nor alienate other segments of your customers - and the only way to figure that out is to ask other owners.

The customer is fucking retarded and is constantly looking for handouts and free shit at the detriment of you.

As somebody who owns one I can honestly say you are a fucking retard if you do.

The fact you are asking these questions instead of finding them online shows that you do not have the ability to solve the problem yourself. Not only will you be on your own with a store of your own but other store owners have an active resistance to helping out competition in their area.

You will not have employees for years and be working DAILY 14 hour days.

I hope they find your corpse hanging in the backroom of your leased strip mall space when the repo men come to take away the folding tables you bought on loan because you spent the entirety of your opening budget on singles.

I've worked retail for years, I know the customer is never right.

I'm more asking what sort of facilities, products and services you guys think are cool and wish there were more of. My city only has one card shop that is constantly setting up and falling down in the same building under different names. I know I can succeed because the people who run this store are fucking retarded and make the same mistakes over and over again.

There is certainly not a market for it if they are failing.

Even the most incompetently run business will have customers if there are people willing to pay for the service.

Also, your middling retail experience means fuck all. Like, literally. Let me prove this to you:

Without looking it up, answer the following things to yourself:

>Which city office do you request a licence to display a permanent sign above a certain size and how much is the fee?
>Do you have to pay for both the sign mounted on the building and the street sign?
>Is this fee provided by the landlord when you sign your lease for the strip mall you are looking at?
>How is your rent determined in a strip mall (what is your payment rated at)?
>How often is rent paid traditionally in this setting?

If you cannot answer any of these, you are at LEAST 5 years away from owning your store.

Look, let me tell you what I look for in a game store.

I want people to play with. With semi-comfortable chairs, tables that can be cleaned quickly, and a washroom that isn't regularly foul. These are things you can accomplish.

What you can't accomplish is that Wizards of the Coast is a fucking shit company that is making every effort to fuck you out of sales by shipping product to Walmart and forcing you to host events and giving customers no fucking incentive to play their game on account of how goddamn expensive cards have become.

And board game companies are also fucking you by also constantly telling you shit is out of stock because they are taking money out of your pocket by also selling to Walmart.

Not to mention you are competing against the Internet.

It's a shit proposition man. Not to be discouraging, but nerds have no money and are also the best equipped to subvert your higher retail costs.

So if I just google one of these I can shave 5 years off my planning time? Thanks user.

Get a food license and sell some actual good food to people if you won't be situated near a better source of food. Lord knows I'd buy a good sandwich during draft.

The idea is that there is a lot of stuff you have to know about the basic act of getting a store in the first place, and you need to plan ALL of that shit out in advance. Your wageslave experience of retail don't exactly give you knowledge of stuff like that.

Own property in a growing area if you can. Rent is virtually impossible to meet inside a booming/developed city, but low rent areas can often lack the necessary customer base.

Have space for tables and/or operate as a gaming cafe or gaming bar if you can. Of those stores that have succeeded in my high rent city, one did so by buying property in the nineties, which cuts costs. The rest did so by using food to pay rent.

Have dedicated game nights if you can. Especially Magic. The downside of the bought property store in my area is that it has no room to play, and as such can only run Heroclix every other week. For those locations that can run draft and shit, it's a good bit of money.

If you like RPGs and want to build a player base, consider charging a little from all the players (like 5$), but giving the DM that money in store credit. You might get more and better DMs. And since all the money is converted to store credit you might also be able to move more product.

Back before Crunchyroll and shit, owned-property-store made decent money off anime and foreign DVD rentals. DVDs are a dying market, but a well executed rental system with the right product is another thing that might be cool. The current crop of hardbacked adventures that are popular in RPGs might be a good candidate. Boardgames, while popular, maybe not so much. They'll almost certainly lose pieces and become worthless in no time.

Also, as the more asinine user in this thread points out, your ability to do a bunch of complicated bullshit gruntwork is going to matter as much as or more than the specific products and services you offer. Just setting up a proper computerized inventory system will save you so much fucking labor and paper for instance.

The concept of the FLGS seems mostly obsolete by now. Sure, there are some great stores that hang around, but the environment seems mostly like shit. The big companies are mostly out to fuck you over, you are directly competing against web discounters and you somehow also need to provide services for free to lure people in.

Skipping out on the store part and just selling what people can't buy on the internet always seemed smarter to me. People can order miniatures, boosters and boardgames online, but they can't really order a space to meet up. Considering how many people frequent a store because of the gaming space in the first place, why not make it a bar with gaming space and sell that? It's not like you'd be competing with other bars as a hangout space for nerds.

Lot of newer stores do that, but restaurants are pretty risky too. And you need to be really careful about picking the right neighborhood to get the balance between rent and customer base right, same as always.

>the year of our Lord 2017
"Set up Japanimation rental service!"
Good Lord

The problem with bars is that depending on the locality you can either serve alcohol or allow people under 18/21 in and without the young crowd iys hard to turn a profit.

sell alcohol

Also you need to be open to everyone in order to have wotcahs sanctioning if that's what you want.

>depending on the locality you can either serve alcohol or allow people under 18/21 in

That is a thing? Local culture and laws figure heavily into this, since in my part of Europe, you don't have to worry about that.
It's really fucking difficult to get a license for anything, though. You need a full god damn education as waiter, cook and clerk to get the licenses you need for opening your own restaurant or bar.

Post specifically says not to do that, user. You could try reading it.

MANDATORY HYGIENE POLICY!

NO EXCEPTIONS

You don't want to run a store that smells like feet.

>What do they do wrong consistantly?
The sad fact is that it's just not a profitable venture. You need a big store, only minimally filled with stock that doesn't have a huge profit margin. Your customers require environmental control, will buy a lot of their stuff online and will require long opening times to play. My LGS barely makes a living profit and it relies on volunteers.

Reminder that every time we have this thread Veeky Forums turns out to be horrible businessmen and owning a game store is more trouble than it's worth.

First off, running a Game Store is a business before anything else. You've got to make a profit or already be rich so you can sink money into it. You're not going to get paid to do your hobby, you're barely going to have a hobby anymore, and you'll probably come to hate certain aspects of it.

That's because most tabletop gamers are poorfags who don't support their local communites and then wonder why they don't have anywhere to play.

The worst are the ones who buy counterfeit, they can all fuck right off.

Kind of, the other issue is that most gamers don't need an infinite supply of toys but do need a play room, therefore you end up paying to heat rooms for 'customers' who haven't actually bought anything off you in months.

>You're not going to get paid to do your hobby, you're barely going to have a hobby anymore, and you'll probably come to hate certain aspects of it

This exact thing happened to me with computers. Loved computers, got into IT, now would rather cook than fiddle with graphics cards.

meant

Yeah, attorney here - I have all the money to buy my minis and paints and tools but the irony is I don't have any time to paint or play. So too with a small business owner, the daily grind of trying to make rent and expenses will consume you.

People get into the idea of "I can make money doing what I love! I can have my hobby and play games all day!"

Those people are delusional fools. The business must always come first.
Loving the hobby won't translate into being a successful businessman.

The only thing a game store can do in this age of internet ordering and delivery is to offer a service that the internet cannot offer.
Offer a superior gaming experience, offer a social gathering. You'd probably have to rent out tables for $X per hour and offer booze.

I'm in Austin, Texas and luckily we have Dragon's Lair which is open 7 days a week until midnight every night but most stores cannot do that.

Three other stores all shut down last year, couldn't pay the bills. This is partially the internet's fault and Dragon's Lair's fault for being a superior destination.
I would often go visit those other stores and they wouldn't have a product but they'd always tell me "we can special order it for you!" great, the only reason I am here is to get it now, I can fucking order it on my phone if I wanted to do that.

Nerdshit is low profit margin and moves slowly. Having it burning shelf space is not good business, so many stores do the "we can order it for you" deal.

Depends on the store and the shoppers. If there's one thing that feels really wrong about how the store I work at operates, it's how much old stock is held onto.

Stuff keeps getting dumped into a warehouse somewhere and as far as I can tell it just sits there forever. It's a waste of space and labor (we do still do a lot of manual filing without the aid of a computer inventory system), and I think we'd be better off selling that shit at a loss to buy things that might move.

'Course, the store seems to do okay even so. So maybe I'm failing to understand something.

Something for everyone. The Veeky Forums playerbase is surprisingly diverse and each type of game, aside from TCGs, have very small audiences so it's critically important to appeal to every type of gamer. I have a local game store that manages to exhibit steady growth because it appeals to the general public instead of just hobbyists. It carries 40k and anime TCGs an aisle over from Monopoly and Settlers of Cataan. It sells boosters for card games popular and obscure. It sells singles for MtG and YGO. It has regulation game tables for wargames and a large area for TCG tournaments. It's a place hobbyists go to pick up flocking and where parents go to pick up birthday presents for their kids.

Appeal to everyone or you'll attract no one. You have to check all of the Veeky Forums boxes, not just the ones you personally enjoy.

>I've been planning opening a tcg and board game shop for the past year. I'm still in the midst of planning but I want to get this right.


Why don't you just take your money cut into small pieces and flush it down the toilet.

That is what you are pretty much doing, just save time.