There used to be a Friendly Local Game Store in my area up until about 10 years ago. Now the closest one is 40 miles away.<\/p>\n
The owner was a gamer who decided it would be cool to own a store. For a long time there was a dedicated group of gamers that met there often to play and patronize the store. Warhammer and 40K were the only miniatures games played in the store, and it only stocked GW games and miniatures. Privateer Press was in in its infancy, so no one was playing that yet, and Flames of War was the new kid on the block. There was a lot of CCG gaming too, mostly Magic and Pokemon (For the kids. Mostly. Don\u2019t ask\u2026there were some creepy people there.)<\/p>\n
It seemed to do well, but the place had its problems. Like the fact that the owner had no use for his regular customers once they had bought their armies and weren’t interested in buying more. And like the owner\u2019s wife. \u00a0Whenever she was around she was a rather vocal and annoying presence in the store, and she loathed gaming and gamers and didn\u2019t mind letting us all know it. Plus, she tried (unsuccessfully) to insert herself and her own choice of products into the workings of\u00a0the store\u2026for example, she famously insisted her husband\u00a0carry the Thomas the Tank Engine line of wooden train sets for toddlers. (When the store closed, I\u2019m pretty sure they still had every Thomas toy they ever stocked, and they had the whiole line. That stuff wasn’t cheap.) It was poor decisions like this (and like her habit of changing her toddler on the gaming tables) that ultimately led to people deciding not to play in the store as often. I don\u2019t know why the owner eventually closed up shop, as he seemed to still be doing a decent business when he did (and he was a millionaire through inheritance, besides) but I suspect it was more his wife\u2019s decision than his own. Time for him to \u201cgrow up\u201d and all that.<\/p>\n
So for about ten years there\u2019s been nowhere central to play in my area. Most of the regulars splintered off into little groups, and I have no idea where they play now or even if they still do. All my friends who played miniatures games from that time are now scattered, and I\u2019m pretty much left with a bunch of WFB and W40K armies and miniatures that never get used. So now I\u2019m considering opening my own game store.<\/p>\n
A bit about me: I am unmarried and have no children, so I don\u2019t have a family to support. I own my own business and I would be able to continue operating it while running the store on the side. I am not rich by any means, but I am fortunate enough that I don\u2019t have any problem paying my bills. In short, if I were to open a store, I would not have to rely on it to make a living. In fact, I would not have to draw a paycheck from it at all for as long as necessary.<\/p>\n
From what I gather just from browsing the forums, this is probably a good thing; as no one seems to be getting rich owning a game store nowadays (if they ever did).<\/p>\n
But my reasons for opening a game store are mostly selfish, and making money isn\u2019t really one of them. Of course, no one goes into business looking to lose money, and if I was hemorrhaging cash every month I would probably close up shop fast. But I could live with a store doing a little better than breaking even, if all my goals were met.<\/p>\n
That being said, here are my reasons:<\/p>\n
So it looks to me that my reasons for opening a game store can be summed up as follows: I want to open a game store as an extension of my hobby, so that I can play more games more often. Not exactly a great business model, right?<\/p>\n
My strategy to stay in business would be to stock merchandise from games that people play already (like Warhammer, War Machine, Heroclix and Magic: the Gathering), and slowly bring in other stuff that people may not know about (like A Call to Arms: Star Fleet, War Rocket and All Things Zombie). I\u2019d like to carry Reaper\u2019s stuff, including their paints; and Mantic’s games\u00a0in order to give people an alternative or supplement to GW\u2019s stuff. I\u2019d carry as much Fantasy Flight stuff as I could, and I\u2019d promote everything with in-store demos, workshops, game nights and tournaments. I would want the store to always have something going on, whether it’s a board game, miniatures game, card game or rpg.<\/p>\n
The obstacles to my success, as seen by me, include:<\/p>\n
I am now at the stage where I will be talking to business consultants about how best to proceed should I decide to take the plunge. I would greatly appreciate the input of brick and mortar game store owners and people in the business. Please offer your opinions and let me know what I haven\u2019t considered, what I have been woefully naive about, etc. Feel free to comment on this blog or email me at angrypiper@angrypiper.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There used to be a Friendly Local Game Store in my area up until about 10 years ago. Now the closest one is 40 miles away. The owner was a gamer who decided it would be cool to own a store. For a long time there was a dedicated group of gamers that met there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hobby-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":387,"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions\/387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/angrypiper.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}