Let's talk about our FLGS, Veeky Forums. The good, the bad

i just stepped into a game store for the first time today and i'm shocked that these stores haven't gone out of business. they're an anachronism and like arcades, they should have died out years ago.

i seriously think the store i visited has some secret deal with the person or group who owns the strip.

Why should they have died?

Mine's usually busy, whether it's kids playing Pokemon in the early day, high school wippersnappers playing magic in the afternoon, or grown ass men escaping their wives to play wamham at night

their entire inventory can be bought on amazon for 30% off. this means their biggest money makers are sodas and snacks. i don't know how you can pull a decent profit while paying off a monthly rent off the back of sodas and snacks.

If they have been around for a while, they just might, actually. Often times stores opened long ago lock in a certain rent/lease rate that they continue to pay well into the store's future, when that rent would be sky-high for anyone else in that space. So they can continue to do business. If they had to pay what the space was actually "worth", it'd be a different story. Plus a lot of stores have online presence now too, selling MtG cards or what-have-you. And yes, ill-kept ones are usually repugnant and should close down, except their sycophants keep them open with disposable NEETbux. Decent stores are run by decent people and keep their clientele decent.

The reason I know the rent stuff is I know a guy who ran a comic book shop he bought, lease and all, when the old owner died. They were paying $225/mo in rent for the space, which is pretty big, in 2010. That's 1980s rent.

good that it exists.

bad, it has only 3 tables. out of which 1 is almost always used for painting. So it is hard to get games, because everyone wants to play in the same 2-3 hours window.

>The Good
- Owners are great people, super nice and involved with customers, frequently involved in games.
- Really solid community, everyone gets along and are polite and welcoming to newcomers.
- You can go over there basically anytime to get games in.

>The Bad
- Anything that isn't Magic is basically irrelevant.
- Prices aren't great.
- Store owners don't know how to properly set up tournaments.

My stores great only issues are that no one plays malifaux round here anymore and that's my favourite game.
Also someone keeps pissing on the floor of the toilets

>get mad when stock is missing

The literal fucking worst.

Pray none of you work in retail

Local game store just opened in my small town. Owner is friendly. Like overly friendly. Always asking about your hobby and gets really invested in the conversation.

Other worker there is a chick that is pretty nerdy looking but knows nothing.

Really hope they stay in buisness. I have nowhere else to play mtg and warhammer.

Although it's not their fault, I always leave feeling disappointed, either with a game or without. I fear I will spend my life searching for The Ultimate Game. I like all the people that work there, even the smelly guy, and I always feel bad that I don't buy something every time to get them some commission. But I can't find anything in there that isn't garbage, and I can't justify spending cash on garbage when there are so many other financial priorities.

If you run a FLGS, please please please stock a RPG that I can play with my dumb wife that will keep her interested? I'll buy new crap every month, I don't care. It's all going to shoes now anyway.

>the good
Right next to my house. Price is good, has many many games available.
>the bad
Besides me, like three people show up on a regular basis, other than that, basically no one ever shows up for anything at all.

samefag here, i'm seriously curious as to how lgses make money. do they use their vendor license to buy high ev mtg boxes and open thousands of boxes to sell singles? most other niche shops tend to go out of business in months. i roll my eyes whenever i see japanese knick knack shops open at my local mall. they usually get a bunch of teenagers who never buy anything.

this probably makes the most sense i guess.

Mine stays in business by providing a place to play, as well as offering discounts

Mine's the worst I've ever heard of.
>ten years ago a dude got fired from there for stealing the panties of a preteen little sister of someone who let him game at their house
>blatant racism, blatant autism, blatant mental illness, blatant lack of hygine
>another dude who works there committed a felony B&E against the place
>that one guy that makes literal threats of violence if you so much as speak to his gf
>owner won't let you come in unless you're gonna buy something, no price checking, no browsing for potential gifts; in, buy something, and get out unless you're running a game
>that magic judge who lets the meth smoking "competitive" MTG players who will never pass a local tournament dictate the climate

I swear to god a mass shooting here would be an improvement.

What the fuck?

>Good
Really friendly, been going there for years, magic singles for 15 cents each (used to be 10 cents each), decent minis selection, they let me and my group play there despite there being other events going on that night. TONS of play space, well-lit, fairly low concentration of autists.
>Bad
Has a literal hygiene station in the bathroom with free deoderant and wipes. Made me WTF when I first went there. I have no idea what happened to prompt that shit.

>>Yu-Gi-Oh
>70% of the players are rowdy black kids,
I've noticed this too, why is Yu-gi-oh so black?
(OP)
My old store (Now closed)
>Staff
Owner was cool, then he had a mild heart attack and thought it would be best to reduce stress and closed the store.
The other co-owner was a cunt, but the kind of cunt you like, always greeted you with your full name. If he knew your middle one, good chance he was using it too. Really good magic player too, but he never seemed to know when to turn off the sarcasm.
>Playerbase
I've heard of the problem players, but besides the guy who basically got memed out of the shop for being a cocky tryhard who net-decked every single time there was a tournament and still went 1-X nearly every week, i never interacted with any of them. My only interaction with him was when we both went X-1 at FNM and his breakers just broke me out of prizes so i asked him if he wanted a friendly game with the phrase "fite me" and he started making a thing about it like "this kid here said he wants to fight me haha, i mean really?". And everyone ignored him basically.
Everyone else is chill, they'll lend you cards for pretty much anything if they have them spare. Even lent ad nauseam for 3 months straight of the guy while i put together the money to buy it off of him before he decided to sell it off to someone else for a little more.
Nobody plays anything other than MtG because we were from a shithole and no-one played in my town besides the 20-30 who played modern. Except warhammer, who from a friend who used to play is really small, 4 or something people.

Who here is from Orlando? Where is a non-sperg shop to game in?

>why is Yu-gi-oh so black?
>Why is the game based explicitly on an african country so popular with black people?

it's not even that, the game has jack shit to do with egypt anymore.

it's a game that is recognizable because of the cartoons and unlike MTG it's a little cheaper to get into and it's easier to find cards in places like wal-mart/target/wherever.

>Good
It’s well located, has a good community.
>Bad
The owner is a member of a biker gang. He is often injured either from falling or from getting into fights. He once broke an arm from hitting some guy who tried to rob the store.
The store is also tiny and hot as hell.

>>Bad
>The owner is a member of a biker gang
How's that bad? That sounds sick.

>I have no idea what happened to prompt that shit.
Yeah, I really wonder what prompted that shit.

It's generally well known that gamers have extremely poor hygiene. It's fucking horrendous. They need to be hosed with deordorant. Fucking autists.

Yeah but how does that make it majority black when that would just make it be more popular in general?

Sure is, except when he parks his bike in the middle of the store taking up half the space of an already tiny store.
At least he is a bro about the store, when the rest of the gang came to fetch him during a FNM he just said friday nights were out of question.

Yeah but it's been like that for years. Someone must have crossed a line, to get that policy implemented. Kinda like the "no political discussion" notice they had on the door a few months back. You ever seen those "don't use electric appliance while in the bathtub" stickers? Those are on there because someone electrocuted themselves. There is a story behind every warning label. I want to find out what the story is here but I don't want to bother the store employees on what is probably an unpleasant memory.

Black people born after 85 or so love anime. My friend's dealer was a giant naruto weeb, and that dude went to prison for multiple felonies

Cheap 4kids anime (naruto, yugioh, pokemon, bleach, etc.) was the only kids show you could watch without cable, back in the rabbit ears days.

same
xwing fags are just as bad in my opinion

>I've noticed this too, why is Yu-gi-oh so black?
Black dudes love shonen anime dude

>The Good
Good Prices
Staff while not experts on everything know enough about most "nerd" things to point you in the right direction
Plenty of play space for everything other than Warhammer
One of my friends works there
Staff keep the store clean despite the fact that it is in a dank basement

>The Bad
Not enough space for Warhammer :c
No cute girls at the store ever :C

>only kids show you could watch without cable, back in the rabbit ears days.

>Mask
>HeMan
>Transformers
>SheRa
>Carebears
>Johnny Quest
Etc.

Hell, most of the shows you name didn't even exist back then. "Japanimation" was limited to shit like Voltron and Speed Racer.

He did say "born after '85"

Board games are usually loss leaders. Regulars to the store will often use the store to order whatever they want, so there's not a lot of movement of stuff already on the shelves except from the occasional rando or a regular picking something up on a whim. Also, a lot of stores already are on Amazon Marketplace or ebay or whatever.

Source: used to work at an LGS.

Yeah, “2 people with autism screaming about politics” truly sounds like an interesting tale user. Go get the full story you Sped.

6 employees? Is whale man supporting all that?

interesting. have any of them tried to adopt the barcade model that most "arcades" are using these days? eg. serving alcohol or cooked meals or letting users rent out board games/pauper cubes for an hourly fee etc.

How come store owners never sell deodorant by the register?

Capitan Centalla in spanish, Robotech, and Captain Harlock were also extent in the 80's.

It's shit

>we have a whale in the store with a collection in the £300k+ range
How is that even possible? Does the whale work as a narco-submarine for a cartell?

>Could do a case study on you people.

...

Can someone explain to me all these mentions of people with bad hygiene?
I get that people can be fat and even poorly groomed but how the fuck can individuals of a reasonably normal intellect go about their daily life without taking a shower and using deoderant? Showering or bathing is pleasant as fuck and using a deoderant stick is about the easiest thing you can do.

> TFW you realize you're in a room full of potential pedos and small children.

Virtually every X-Wing player is an ex-40k player still mad about 40k to this day.

Surprised to see Armada lumped in though, while I'm admittedly biased as an Armada player myself it seems like a much more laid back community on the whole, compared to games I've played in the past.

95% card games, 3% 40k, 1% X-Wing. The rest of us number a few dozen in total.

We've got 4-5 stores in the general area but it's tough to get a playgroup together for anything other than card games or 40k because everybody's so spread out. The store to player ratio is misleadingly high, due to all the TCG and board game dollars I guess; and you get "support where you play" fatigue among other issues.

Playerbase is pretty average, not remarkably better nor worse than what you'd expect.

All the owners / employees across all stores seem pretty chill, although 2 of the stores have the "nose in phone, knows nothing about 99% of their products, doesn't seem to care about your purchase" type of employee. The one that's closest to me also has the best staff of the bunch, though. The owner knows almost every product and their current stock levels like the back of his hand despite it being a gargantuan store that makes the others look like closets.

Every store has a very healthy number of tables, but they all also have a pretty sickly amount of shop terrain, and one has none.

I used to think these stores were complete bullshit. A buddy of mine warned me repeatedly before we went to Gen Con Indy some years ago to be prepared for as he put it "Gamer Funk". Unfortunately the only way to have been prepared would have been to have carried a gas-mask. Some fucker had been in the line for the games auction and they REEKED! It was literally gag-reflex inducing levels of stench. It smelled like someone had found week old road-kill that had been rotting and festering in the heat and they smeared themselves with it.

And whoever it was, they could NOT have been ignorant of their own odor. Not with people literally gagging in reaction. There are some seriously fucked-up people out there user.

This is why the micro-circuit sidequests in Yakuza hit me so hard.

>And whoever it was, they could NOT have been ignorant of their own odor. Not with people literally gagging in reaction. There are some seriously fucked-up people out there user.
This is what I can't fathom. It goes way beyond them not giving a shit. Do they get some sort of sadistic sexual thrill from it and even then, is that really worth the social consequenses?
The only alternative explanation I have for it is severe depression but that doesn't seem likely as they would probably not be able to get out of bed at that level of melancholy.
Is there any stinky user here who could provide an explanation for this mind boggling mystery?

People get used to their own odor and it actually smells normal to them. Personally I spray myself with enough Axe so I can't smell anything.

It's definatley a mental health thing.

Imagagine a ham planet standing up and the crease in his shirt doesn’t go away.

>it actually smells normal to them.
That can't be the explaination as it doesn't account for them not washing themselves. As such it can at best serve as a rationalisation.
Besides, it's kindergarten-grade knowledge that you should shower once a day.

I don't get what you're implying.

But in what way? It's not like regular showering isn't heavily socialised into every individual from an early age in the western world.

The "Sega does what Nintendon't" kind of people always piss me off. They'll spend time going into other hobby spaces and shit on them while claiming theirs is far better.

>and don't seem too interested in anyone else
No shit they are focused on a game. I'm actually glad to hear they basically tell you to fuck off since the typical nerd/gamer just quietly lets this happen

Protip: you are already known as 'that awkward faggot who stares at people for an hour before shuffling off'

I really like the guy that owns the local games workshop, after warhammer fails will he be screwed?

I think it's the same train of thought that drives people on here to advocate actively alienating people from the hobby

>fucking normies bathe and shit
>I can't stand fucking normies
>so fuck bathing
>smell that, normies

when i was really depressed i could go weeks without showering. i never felt like i smelled although i knew i did since im not retarded.

these people are retarded.

I shower 2 to 3 times a week and get laid nearly everyday. Smell this nerds.

People with fedoras should be shot at sight and furries too.

We have a guy at my store who wears a furry costume every magic prerelease. I want to murder him so badly.

I am not talking a cheap indie and head. This dude sold a $2300 modern deck tonhsve this thing custom made to his exact specifications. Rainbow hair and everything. Think lion meets Unicron meets dragon with a giant dash of faggot.

Did you get his number?

If I had it I would have burned my phone.

The Good:
>Owner is a bro.
>Actually has experience in running a business.
>Anything you want, he'll order. Even a couple packs of sleeves that differ from the brand he carries.
>Has various sales and promotions when possible.
>Doesn't price gouge.
>Actively working to fix up the place.

The Bad:
>Location is kinda shitty. Its downtown but it is attached to a poorly-maintained rental property.
>Currently pretty cold due to large front windows and poor heating
>The fucking smell. Dude has a glade plugin in nearly every free outlet and it still isnt enough to deal with the goddamn smell. You know, THAT smell. The smell of days bygone without showering. The smell of sweatpants worn for nearly 2 weeks straight. The smell of several individuals who shit themselves just a little bit and dismissed it as a fart. THAT fucking smell.

I'm going to join the chorus of not understanding the lack of hygiene thing. It also seems weird given the Venn diagram of Veeky Forums userbase, autism, and everyone here having an issue with it.

take a picture

all the mtg kids are identical

Nobody thinks that they smell.

All the smelly people just think "that's not me", so you only hear from the not-smelly people.

And if the stinkers don't go outside, there's nobody to scream at them to take a fucking shower.

More like you only hear it from one of the smelly people who thinks "that's not me".

So, the one I have to frequent now for weekly L5R tournys has a god damn MISSION STATEMENT. It is as laden with empty corporate buzzwords as you would expect a mission statment to be. It's up on the motherfucking wall before God and everybody.

The whole place just REEKS of flannel and undercuts.

Sounds hot. I'd probably hit it.

The Good
>Frequent 20% off sales.
>Free $10 for every $100 spent. Includes times when there are sales.
>Cool staff who've run the place for the last 20 years.
>Only soyboy employee quit long ago to be a barista at a local vegan café. (not even shitting)
>No stinky fucks
>No food other than the snacks and drinks they sell.

The Bad
>Really old tables for wargaming need to be updated and disinfected.
>location recently moved to a shitty part of town.
>half the store is dedicated to Comics and the comic fans are on the same level of autism as the CCG fans.
>semi-regular MtG tournies attract the worst shitters.
>no food allowed except for store food. (also a bonus)

My FLGS is mostly card games and wargames. They have tabletop nights but it's just shitty board games I don't know why they don't do RPGs. The shop part itself is half board games for some reason and half wargames with a tiny shelf which has some 5e and pathfinder books on.

Why they sell so many boardgames is beyond me when most people are there for Warhammer or MTG/yugioh/Vanguard.

I've been to Vanguard and Buddyfight games there used to go regularly, need to get a deck sorted for both. The people are mostly alright actually, mostly in their 20s, the occasional really autistic fucking weird person but that's to be expected.

>Good
Owner is nice, people playing mtg almost every single day, cardmarket prices on singles

>Neutral
Most people playing are turbospikes. Great place to grow up from kitchen table, but can be a little bit frustrating

>Bad
A little clique-ish, small, small tables
A little too much casual racism. It doesnt bother anyone here, might just be cultural differences, but worth mentioning anyway

It's been months since my last time there. I hate working on weekends

Good
Not too many stinky people
Decent amount of play space
A couple of the traps are pretty cute

Bad
Often too busy to get a game
Most of the people who've jumped on the trap bandwagon are low effort but or biters are still kissing their asses and buying them stuff
Like half the people who were or biters have started to trap up

Their biggest moneymaker by far is TCGs, sure you can buy cards on Amazon but there's not much you can do with them if you don't have friends who play.

Bikers are the biggest faggots in the world.

When you're rich you can afford to spend a lot of money on shit.

>Think lion meets Unicron meets dragon with a giant dash of faggot.
>Unicron
Does he have a vore fetish or something?

>Good
We get to keep our tables and terrain in the back room
We get to stay late, our club officers can lock up the store
>Bad
Some smelly clientele
We got bumped off our own day to make room for more Magic players, so we have to share table space with the X-wing players (fortunately there's a good amount of space)
It's pretty far from where I live
Warhammer is sold at MSRP and never goes on sale

>good
It has everything in stock and owner is nice
>bad
It's an hour away
>bad things out of stores control
I can't get down there regularly and on the days they do 40k.
I have gotten the reputation there as the Nid guy on the mountain. Once in awhile I come down for supplies. I pay cash but the owner likes to see pictures of my progress. He knows that if I get a new job I can come down more regularly and play. Until that happens I buy paints and figures and retreat up the mountain

>good
Decent folks.

>bad
Terrible selection of magic singles.
Only upload event results 1/3 of the time.

Is your shop my shop?