I sell happiness.
My therapist often used to ask me what made me happy. And selling happiness is what does it for me. I’ve thought long and hard about it. I am happiest when my store is full of people enjoying themselves, when the tills are ringing, when the staff are busy. My therapist thinks this is bad. That I should derive my happiness from something healthier, like petting bunnies or long walks in the country.
I asked her if she would still feel I should still do the thing that makes me happy if it made somebody else unhappy. What if my unhappiness made twenty people happy? At what point is happiness governed by morality? Freud’s superego. Freud wasn’t much concerned (it seems) about happiness per se. His id is our base desires, his ego our rationality.
I am a quantum retailer. The idea that we have two competing desires that we have to reconcile is not unknown to me. In fact, it’s my day job.
The happier people are, the more they buy. The happier my staff are, the more they sell. Happy customers come back. Unhappy customers leave bad reviews on Trip Advisor and shop online in future. So my happiness – short term and long term is directly linked to the happiness of others.
But what is happiness? And knowing, can we tap into that knowledge to become better retailers? Happier retailers?
(Cut to the chase, the answer is yes).
Three hormones regulate your happiness level. The first of these is pretty well known – its Dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that triggers when we experience rewards for actions. And it helps us achieve them, to focus, to learn positive behaviour. It’s also the high when you get when you open a booster. Shopping is the number one leisure activity in the west for a reason. See the thing, want the thing, buy the thing = Dopamine!
Uh oh folks, here comes Freud’s ego.
In a study in 2007, neuroscientists discovered that while contemplating purchases the pleasure centres of the brain – the nucleus accumbens – were stimulated. But when shown the price, the prefrontal cortex kicked in. As did the insula, the part of the brain that deals with processing pain. People with more active insulas were less likely to buy.
This pain/pleasure/prefrontal cortex interaction presented a challenge. So at Fan Boy Three we have a variety of purchase option points. From an individual booster at £4 to 4 for £15 and 6 for £20. The option is not ‘buy a booster’ or buy a box – we understand that some folks are on limited budgets and some folks want to treat themselves without breaking the bank. We’re helping your prefrontal cortex to agree with your nucleus accumbens that this is the most rational and pleasurable course of action.
Even your insula is down with it.
The problem with dopamine is that it’s also the hormone most closely connected with addiction. the more you repeat your behaviour to get a reward, the less that reward will mean. The less dopamine gets released. But the more you want it. People with low dopamine frequently chase that dopamine high to no avail. Nothing is as good as your first taste of ice cream. Or heroin.
Among gamblers there is something called ‘the drop’ – the time separation between placing a bet and knowing the result. A healthy Dopamine hit is a function of time x action / reward. But a Fixed Odds Betting Terminal takes the arcanery of placing a bet with a bookie and watching the 6:15 at Haydock Park and turns it into a button press. On average, each of the 33,600 FPBT machines installed in British bookies made £53,000. One gambler lost £13,777.90 in seven hours.
The drop between buying a booster and ripping it open is quite short. Like a good bartender, I try to restrict folks from buying too many packs at once – we don’t advertise multi-box buy offers like some stores. But fortunately Dopamine isn’t the only hormonal happiness high I ‘sell’.
Enter Oxytocin, the cuddle chemical, the hormone released when we find somebody attractive – among other things, fortunately! Oxytocin bonds partners to their mates, parents to their children and D&D players to their gaming groups. You see we crave the social acceptance of others on a chemical level. We want to be part of a group, to have companionship on many different levels. Among other things, Oxytocin governs our empathy. There’s a suggestion that low Oxytocin causes depression, anxiety and a potential biomarker for autism.
Dopamine is easy to generate. Play Magic, open a booster = Dopamine! If only there was some way to naturally stimulate Oxytocin…
What do you know, you run one!
By bringing people together for play you decrease social isolation. Organised Play may have started as a sales and marketing tool, but it has evolved. The game stores that sprang up to fill the needs of Wizards of the Coast to sell Magic boosters instead sold community. They sold belonging. Belonging stimulates your Oxytocin production. Not as much as having sex, but hey – I run a game shop not a knocking shop.
Stores like ours are the universal panacea for an increasingly isolated and lonely population. This is why D&D is so strong everywhere right now – it’s giving us that Oxytocin hit we crave. Its filling our spaces with shiny happy people at the exact same moment Wizards have decided that what Magic players really want is to sit at home alone in their underpants, mainlining Dopamine through Arena.
To maximise your Oxytocin engine, you are going to need to make your store welcoming, inclusive and diverse. To maximise the – relatively minimal – ability to enhance the third happiness hormone – Seratonin – you are going to need to make your store open, light and airy.
We get Seratonin when we exercise and from natural light. It’s going to be a hard one to pull off, but when finding a location for the all new Fan Boy Three we knew that we wanted a location with large windows and natural light. The gaming space in the old store had a back ‘games room’ that had no windows. Part of the problem with being in a heart of major European city is that the affordable spaces are often quirky and you can’t make changes to them because they are historical in some way. That’s certain the case in Manchester’s historic Northern Quarter – so historic it was used for street scenes in Captain America and Morbius. So historic, I’m not allowed to make changes to the external fabric of the store.
Fortunately we found a great unit with a split mezzanine, with these massive windows that let in plenty of light. And you can couple that with daylight bulbs and a massive ventilation system. Manchester’s weavers needed natural light in Victorian times, and so do we now.
While being on a major thoroughfare in Manchester’s party district is great for footfall and sales, it comes at the cost of not having on site parking. Wherever you park, you’ll have to walk a few minutes or take the train, the tram, fly in by jet or travel by coach or bus. We have all those transport links no more than ten minutes walk away. Suddenly that begins to look like a benefit.
The Board Game Trading and Chat UK Facebook Group recently ran a poll to find the Uk’s favourite game store. Fan Boy Three won, with 50% more votes than any other store. Jeff Bezos? Kickstarter? They have ONE happiness hormone. Dopamine. They made it easy like a fixed odds betting terminal. But happiness is more than that. More than how quickly you can get a product or how cheaply.
So what lessons can we learn from neuroscience?
Well, make your stores clean and bright and open. Make your offering attractive enough that it overrides a consumer’s insula. None of us can compete on price against a deep discounting tax weasel who sells for cheaper than we buy at. But we can compete on experience. We can compete on community. We do. A great store offers a buying experience that IS an experience – I often say that Organised Play Stores are not in competition with each other so much as they are in competition with ‘Netflix and chill’. And it turns out I was right because = science.
How do I do this? Stay tuned for part two
My name is Dave Salisbury and I have been the quantum retailer.
The Quantum Retailer 