As previously mentioned, I was living in southeast Washington, a.k.a. “God’s Armpit,” home of everyone’s favorite aggie college, Washington State. Honestly, if you took all ten Pac-10 schools and played “One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other,” it would be easy to pick out the one that doesn’t belong.
Yes, I’m a little bitter. I just find it astounding that, considering that there are four fairly large cities within a thirty mile radius, including two (*cough*) major universities, encompassing over 100,000 people – there is not a single decent game store. Well, there’s one that used to sell sex toys (don’t ask), and the other one, for some unholy, ungodly, unfathomable reason, holds maybe one Magic tournament every six months and considers that “supporting the Magic community.”
It’s enough to make me pull out what’s left of my hair. I’ve even offered to run events for them and they’re response has been, in not so many words, “we don’t really care.”
I really shouldn’t name names; I really need to mind my “S’s” and “P’s” when it comes to “Hobbies,” if you catch my drift.
The only other option, ‘twould seem, would be to open my own game store up here. Why not? I’ve done it before. Other Magic players have too, such as Alex Shvartsman.
Let me crank up the Wayback Machine to about eight years ago. I had just been laid off from my job as a computer game designer after putting in about a year of crunch time on a failed project (this, sadly, would become a theme of my time in the game biz, but that’s neither here nor there).
Coincidentally, friend and fellow Magic player (and future States champion) Brad Irwin, who was managing the game portion of the local Book & Game store, had also been laid off (both Brad and I suffer from the same malady; we’re horrible at playing the Ass Kissing game with management) and decided now was the time to follow through with his dream of opening his own game store and was looking for partners. Was I interested?
It was quite a quandary. On the one hand, I had several job offers to move elsewhere to other game companies (working in the computer game business is like being a professional left-handed pitcher – as long as you’re still breathing, you’ll have a job somewhere), but I was reluctant to jump back into a business where I got kicked in the jimmy on a regular basis. Still, a paycheck’s a paycheck, and it was apparent that our business venture would be running on a shoestring basis for quite some time.
In the end, Magic won the day and I went into business with Brad and a few other friends and Gambit Games – central Oregon’s first (and only) game store – was founded, October 31st, 1996.
Now, if you happen to be reading this, and have had the idea that you’d like to open your own game store; after all, you have caboodles of Magic cards and other supplies and some free cash, let me offer a few tidbits advice:
1) Have lots of capital:
Between the several Gambit partners, we scrounged up $11,000, which functioned as our initial bankroll. Dear Lord, how we made it through the first year, I’ll never know. While we didn’t have to take out any loans, our inability to purchase inventory really hurt us in the early going. We cut corners in other ways and managed to survive until we were able to improve our cash flow problem.
I’d recommend that you have at least $25,000 to start a game store with, double that if you live in a high-density area. If you have to take out loans, so be it, but be aware that bankruptcy laws have been really tightened up recently (Thanks, Republican Congress!), so it’s harder to get out of debt should you go under. Just something to consider.
2) Have a business plan:
I cannot stress this enough! Go to the library and read all the books you can on starting a small business. You will need to know things like whether or not you’ll want to be an S corporation, for example, and should you need to go to the bank for a loan, the more comprehensive a plan you have, the better the chance of getting the cash. The more details you have, the better; remember, failure to plan is planning to fail.
You will also want to have a good accountant and probably a lawyer on your Rolodex. You may never need a lawyer but you’d be surprised how often you may need legal services.
3) Evolve or die:
Just about everyone involved with the store couldn’t stand Yu-Gi-Oh. We all thought it was a pretty bad game. Crummy artwork, difficult rules, and why oh why did they make the cards a unique size so normal sleeves wouldn’t work with them? However, little kids kept coming in and asking for it. So we started carrying it. Then we ran an occasional tournament.
Now it’s one of our top moneymakers, and we run a big weekly tournament for Yu-Gi-Oh!
You’ll need to be aware of what games are trendy (and which are not) and adjust accordingly. Until the poker craze hit, for example, we sold maybe three sets of chips a year. Now we do that in a week.
4) Enjoy long hours and weird conversations:
You want a 40-hour week? Forget it. You’ll be lucky if you get a day off, since odds are, you will be able to hire few if any employees. Vacations? Ha! Maybe in a few years.
And let’s be honest: you will be the bartender for the geek world. Guy wants to give you an hour-long treatise on why the Tau are the best Warhammer 40,000 faction? You’ll hear it. The sob story about how your favorite D&D character died in combat? Yep, you’ll hear that too. Be prepared to either have a lot of patience or convenience excuses.
Aside:
I would be remiss if, at some point, I didn’t mention Loafy. I shudder at the memory. When we first got going, we shared a store with a sports cards store. The owner had what I think was a cocker spaniel. I think because the animal was so grossly, morbidly obese you couldn’t tell what it might have been. It could take maybe ten steps before it would sit down and pant for about five minutes trying to catch its breath. And we won’t even go into what “walkies” entailed. And that dog stank. To high heaven. And the vomiting…all day, we would send telepathic messages at the dog, begging it to keel over. No luck. Loafy was still driving customers out of the store long after we moved out to our own digs.
End Aside
On the plus side, though, you will have an army of minions at your disposal. The young’uns tend to look upon the staff of the store as gods (well, demigods, perhaps) and are more than happy to do your bidding. They’ll run get you food if you need lunch or will be more than happy to go spy on your competitor to see what he’s got those singles priced at. And, when they get older, you have partially-trained staff ready to hire.
5) Never go into business with friends:
The biggest problem we ran into in the early years of Gambit was that different people had different ideas of what they wanted from the store and what they expected to get out of it. Since we were all friends going in, this got glossed over in the early months, but problems started popping up at the six-month point until things boiled over into an ugly mess. There were a lot of strained friendships that have recovered, as much as they are going to, in the later years, but it looked like the business might be torn apart by this.
You’d have thought I’d learn from this, but no. Years later, I went into business with a few other good friends, trying to found a start-up game studio. I put a year of “sweat equity” in, working part-time for free, only to be thrown out when the company that wanted to fund us insisted that putting in their own designer was part of the deal.
Suffice it to say, they aren’t good friends anymore. And they never got funding, either (remember, karma’s a b*tch, and it’ll come back and bite you more often than not – remember that when trading with eight-year-olds).
It’s just not worth it. If you value a friendship, don’t go into business together. If you do, make sure you go in with eyes open and all parties are on the same wavelength.
I’m happy to say that we celebrated our eighth anniversary at Gambit last year and we’re doing better than ever. No, we’re not getting rich off of it, but my investment has doubled in value and I take great pleasure in basically being the “Norm” of the store.
Another unexpected ancillary of this silly little card game.