So, why didn’t I sell, online until now?
Well, I did. Back in the early years of the Internet I ran the online arm of Travelling Man. Back then the world’s two biggest stores were Sentry Box in Canada and Leisure games in London. The things that mattered most was service, reliability and actually having the thing.
Sometimes even I bought from Sentry Box. The shipping was high, but for US exclusive stuff it was the only way I could obtain it – and the only people I would trust to ship it. What is thirty days wait for an unobtainable thing, like a run of the Star Wars RPG magazine Wizards published alongside Dragon?
At Travelling Man we pioneered a few ideas that would go on to become commonplace. The first was free shipping. By which I mean, we soaked the shipping costs. My THEORY was that our six? stores couldn’t really support the entire country with in store sales, and it wasn’t your fault if you didn’t live close enough to one to pop in on release day.
But then a big D&D launch happened. And I sat there in store, expecting to see all my regulars, have a chat about the new book, get the community excited. But nobody came. You see, they could save the bus fare or the parking. I’d created an economic nudge towards inaction.
This was an important lesson. Let’s call it lesson one.
These of course were the days before Organised Play stores. But we already knew that in store activity – a throng of people, browsing and buying and playing – was am economic stimulant. A few years earlier when we had opened Travelling Man Nottingham we had seen grown men weep at the sight of so many games in one place. Because their previous local store had stocked virtually nothing – two racks of books alongside the comics and the merchandise and the drug paraphernalia.
Anyone could list five hundred lines of code as stock. It was the physicality that made it real and emotional.
I leant into that with Organised Play, opening the first dedicated Organised Play Store with premium event seating capacity in the UK in 2004.
I enjoyed the physicality too. Lesson two.
Some people like money, and the ease of drop-shipping – and I get that. But that’s not why I gave up my career to work in the games industry. I like the selling, the act of talking games with customers, the act of talking business with fellow stores and publishers. I hired people who also liked that. Brown cardboard incoming, brown cardboard outgoing – that’s no life. You cease to have an emotional relationship with your stock and begin to think of it as an equation. Money out, money in. The speed of the transaction makes you more money. The volume. How little you can pay your staff or your rent. WE have a word for that now: Amazonification.
The reason the games industry survived the Amazonification of every other industry was that our physicality – our stores’ physicality – was a virtue. Bookshops reinvented themselves along the model we had pioneered – as experiential third spaces.
Every quantum problem has two competing poles. Service, ambiance, location, community, physical stock, in store activity and friendliness becomes one. Friendly. Local. Game. Store. This is set against an online store where speed, price, depth of stock and efficiency are the benchmarks. Box A to Location B as fast and as cheap and as reliably as you can, and faster, cheaper, and more reliably that store C. In project management, this is the iron triangle. You cannot have everything simultaneously… or can you?
In Britain we have hundreds of them. Having done the math, I can’t see how many of them are viable. But the ones run by millionaires with outside resources can afford to run at a staggering loss while they play whack a mole with their competitors.
In Manchester’s Northern Quarter there are four stores within one minute of each other. We share the market. We co-operate. Lesson three.
Ever since I set up Fan Boy Three in 2004 I’ve done my best to help other stores grow, prosper and survive. This was purely selfish – the way Organised Play was supposed to work was that we all grew our local communities then co-operated on bigger events. We had skin in the game, in its physicality. But from the first I was warned that there would be guys who would trade out of their car boots and garages, who would undercut us at every turn simply to make the sale.
This led to a natural skittishness among retailers, eyeing up whether mutual co-operation was worth the candle, or whether it was simply a trick. These people imagined that my drive towards encouraging Organised Play was simply a ruse to capture the market and steal their customers. To ensure them that this was not the case, I promised them that I would not sell online.
They had good cause to worry.
The internet was now the province of those car boot and garage sellers, selling tax free on eBay. But a new threat was emerging – the internet deep discounter that also did Organised Play. The first big one was based in the Midlands, and the game they scythed through was Warmachine. We were one of the biggest stores for WM – but they sold at 30% off and ran the Nationals. Hard to compete with that combo of hearts and minds AND unmatchable discount. Within a few months we were selling nothing. Zero. People demanded we price match, and we simply couldn’t. They would do post free next day delivery, delivered to Australia and America for pennies. Gutted the game globally like a fish dinner. They even outsold Games Workshop’s own mail order department on Warhammer.
Nobody in the industry could understand how they could do it… until they were done twice for tax evasion. And did a flit in the night owing almost a million pounds to their main supplier, leaving thousands of customers hanging on orders they had paid for.
Lesson four.
As soon as a tax cheat enters the system, it bleeds out. On a level playing field you can compete, but with 20% tax, two businesses can both be discounting 20%, one making no money and the other making 20%. Then that second business drops to 40%, takes the hit and prices the other out. Until they are caught, and then they flit.
And then somebody replaces them.
Amazon was never about selling. It was about owning the ability to sell. The platform. The platform is designed to drive the price low and keep its third party sellers filling up those warehouses with boxes. And if you aren’t paying staff or warehousing, you can pay Amazon to do it all, and sit sipping sangria on your yacht. Somebody else is packing those boxes, dreaming of the yacht they can never afford, pissing in a bottle. Catching Coronavirus so folk can buy your cheap boardgames. And with every new tweak to the algorithm, YOUR ability to diminishes too.
Once you have stock in system you have to play the game. You owe money. We buy stock for money and we sell it for more money, to generate a margin. If that margin decreases below what we paid for it, we still have to play. Because we have stock that we owe money on.
Just ask any dairy farmer how this works.
The fifth reason why I never had a webstore is that we are a destination store. A destination store without products is a circus without acts. We back a lot of Kickstarters. Have a lot of rare and collectable games. Much as I appreciate your desire to want to own them – like my desire to own those Star Wars Gaming mags I bought off Gordon back in the day – listing them online means the quickest click wins. We sit and we talk about how horrible it is that we have to sit around at midnight waiting for GenCon housing to go live, and then we replicate it. Having a Friendly LOCAL Game store should mean something – and it doesn’t it Rudy bought all your magic stock because he wants to monopolise it.
Lesson five.
We’ve all had that experience of being in that store, finding that thing that we craved. Denuded of that, a destination store is no longer a destination, and pretty soon it’s no longer a store. A destination store requires that it be reachable, attainable, desirable to visit. You build differently, you plan differently, you hire differently – all driven by the need for experiential retail to be an experience rather than the same identikit experience.
This was the flaw in the Asmodee Top 20. It’s the flaw in Premium too. It was the flaw in Wizards own chain of stores, long since bankrupt. Experience requires difference. Happiness is predicated on non-conformity. If you can buy the same games in every store, play the same games in every store – why play with you?
This is the opposite of what we attempt to do. We sell happiness, and in order to sell that happiness I need to see it. I do not sell THINGS. I do not sell BOXES. I am not a conveyor belt or an assembly line. Happiness is not a competition – I can be happy in many places. My staff were hired because that is what we do as a store. Create a welcoming, friendly space in which people can be happy.
And different.
And included.
Offline we are all of us in a competition with ourselves, to be the best store experiences we can be. And there can be multiple ones, each one with a different flavour like Escape Rooms. Online we are in a competition on which we are judged against all the things we did not prioritise.
I did not think of this as a weakness until eight weeks ago. On the last flight out of Vegas before our countries shut their borders.
At first I believed that our governments would lockdown all business. To reduce the pressure on the postal service and delivery drivers. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
But no.
Then distribution shut down.
Then distribution reopened. A tsumani of games, backed up in warehousing, in shipping containers. Origins releases. GenCon releases. Greatest depression in history and out industry already buckling under the strain of too many releases and not enough disposable income.
I had made an accord, based on those five lessons. Built my store according to the principles I had championed for twenty years. In store play, inter store co-operation, destination, ambiance, locality. All these are now touted as weaknesses.
I’ve spent two solid weeks living in a box, pulling fourteen hour days. As part of that I’ve spent a considerable amount of time online. There are hundreds of webstores, all of them listing tens of thousands of product lines. Each cheaper than the last. Some have free shipping on their already down to the knuckle pricing. Their ads haunt me long after I have left their pages, jostling for my attention like hawkers in a street market. Cheap cheap cheap. Buy buy buy. Don’t look at my competitors wares, only I love you enough to cut my throat for this pie.
No wonder there is no stock. No wonder there is massive allocation. Fucking hundreds of them. I KNOW their buy price. I buy from the same place, often in the same quantity at the same price. Buy buy buy! I know the cost of labour – I’m still paying all my wonderful staff, whose jobs hang in the balance because of circumstances beyond their control. I have some idea of the cost of warehousing. The cost of utilities. The cost of borrowing money – even if it is at a historic low. The cost of shipping. The cost of building a webstore. Of paying for the ads that allow them to track me down the alleyways of the internet, fighting for priority. Cheap cheap cheap.
I can’t sell a box of Magic for £90 including shipping. Maybe in a world where you instantly sold your entire stock with a click of a mouse and didn’t need to pack it or ship it. But you do have to do those things. And you chased me half way across Ankh Morpork, trailing money all the way. Your margin has to cover rent, utilities, the cost of borrowing, the cost of labour, of packaging, margin of error, credit card processing, paypal fees, shipping… and advertising.
That Warmachine store? It’s goal was that every Warmachine player bought everything from them and played only with them. A monopoly.
The mistletoe looks pretty on the oak tree. The oak tree does not need the mistletoe to survive or thrive. But the mistletoe needs the oak tree. Once the oak tree is all mistletoe, the oak tree dies, and so does the mistletoe – screaming I won – hahaha take that sucker!
Once that store was a monopoly for Warmachine, they can exert pressure on the distributor. Bypass them, for more profit to get more monopoly. Then they can exert pressure on their suppliers. We see this today in our industry, on top products. We see the big discounters flexing their muscles, angling for advantage. And once they have it, that oak tree is dead. What happens when Bed Bath and Beyond doesn’t want Wingspan – or any other game?
Too late, tree dead, much sad.
Tesco’s can live on 1% margin because they do fifty two BILLION pounds turnover a year. Bulk purchase, big discounts, zero margin – there’s a reason why we call it a margin of error – because when you have a storm it’s hard to weather it.
And this is the biggest economic storm in history.
I refuse to believe that my model is dead. I refuse to believe that two months of isolation has rewired humanity. My parents fought in World War Two, and six years of that did not rewire people. People will need destination stores and social spaces in the future. But until then, you can find us at least partially online. Hopefully with the same quirky vibe that our physical store has. Who knows how long this pandemic will last.
But I know this. You have to fight for what you believe in. For the future you believe in. For the friends you miss and the spaces you want to meet them in once all this is a chapter in the history books as yet unwritten. Fight for your staff, for your customers, for your suppliers. Fight for the brands and the people you care about.
But fight wearing a mask. Because you are a nerd, you are an adult and you understand science and you respect the autonomy of others.
The Quantum Retailer 