Every retailer is a futurologist.
The future is coming whether you want it to or not – the big question is, can you surf it? Most of the time that is comparatively easy – we do preorders with distributors for the latest Magic set, or we back that Kickstarter, because future Dave is going to need that stock at future Fan Boy Three. Our preorders are a prognostication – a prediction of where our community will be, what people will want six months out or a year.
We are the prophets of profit.
Fortune telling isn’t magic. It is a science.
Every future is based on the building blocks of the past – it’s not like somebody has hit you with a stun gun and wiped your long term memory – you can look back at how many Pokemon you sold, how quickly you sold out, how much more do you need on top of your previous order and you’ll still be allocated down.
If you don’t embrace futurology you’ll be trapped in the present, a prisoner of the timestream. This is where you find most modern politicians – constantly reactive to the events happening around them, often in poorly thought out crowd pleasing ways. It’s easy to tell people what they want to hear – the fortune tellers of old were good at that.
That’s not futurology, sadly.
So what have we learned these past few years? What can we use to enrich ourselves? Can we ride the tsunami that is heading our way for fun and profit?
Can we at least survive it?
Futurology isn’t just about prediction. Futurologists are the norns, snipping away at the timeline, steering humanity to the best possible outcome. Knowing what that looks like will help you.
Most people assume that humans are, as a species, lazy venal and stupid. Few people Have lost money assuming this. Lots of people have lost money publicly saying it though. 99p is still a valid price point strategy, even though our rational brains are screaming at us that this is just a trick. Our lizard brain doesn’t care. It just wants that shiny penny. Lizard brain Dave will happily buy more stuff TO SAVE MONEY. Three for two? Five for six? Lizard brain Dave puts them all in his online basket and forgets about tax and shipping. Lizard brain Dave lives in a world of impulse and plenty.
Lazy.
Venal.
Stupid.
He basks on a rock, eats to excess, makes poor lifestyle choices. And most businesses are designed to capitalise on that.
It’s a poor strategy for a hobby business.
Almost twenty years ago I was instrumental in creating the earliest dedicated organised play stores in the UK. Other people had done OP before, but it was a table here, a table there. Or it was in a space with little retail attached. My theory was that if people played a game, and then they saw a copy of that game they would potentially buy it. Its why I dislike pure boardgame cafes as a model – oh no, you can’t BUY the game here – you do that online from a deep discounter. We just charged you $5 to play it.
To me there was a logical through channel – the more people played the more people would buy.
There are four pillars in the industry – miniatures, boardgames, roleplaying and cardgames. Each of these has need purchases and covet purchases. Dice, paints, players handbooks, sleeves – these are all needs. It turns out if you have evenets peoples spending on needs goes through the roof, because they are suddenly actively playing. But their covet actually decreases.
You see, as a hobbyist we want to demonstratably engage with our hobby. It’s how we know we are still alive, how we know we are still us. The price of admission to our hobby is the price we will pay, and by doing it we can call ourselves hobbyists.
Sorry. Gatekeeping is baked in to every hobby. You can’t be an angler without a rod. Without a rod you are just fish adjacent. But even though gatekeeping is baked in, you don’t have to pull on your waders and stand in the lake telling newcomers to fuck the hell off.
When I opened Fan Boy Three my covet spend went down. People who were passive hobbyists were now active hobbyists. Roleplayers who were actively roleplaying could spend £2 a week on table fees, rather than buying new books for new systems they would never play. That’s how it had been in my previous store. High covet spend.
Now, cardgamers? They spent big. Actually playing Magic every week meant they needed to buy boosters every week.
And they did.
In my previous job I’d never sold many booster boxes. I was shocked when my ex-boss bought in fifty displays of Pokemon, but suddenly I was buying that in for every cardgame – and more. This is the reason organised play stores gravitate towards cardgames. That table over there playing through Wild Beyond the Witchlight? They’ll have bought one $50 book in six months.
When things happen that cause spending habits to change – like a global pandemic – they affect retailers. And the better we can parse the events of history, the more prepared we will be. Future Dave loves it when I plan for the future, just as much as Lizard brain Dave loves it when I feed him cake and let him sleep.
During the pandemic four things happened.
One, people weren’t playing. So their need purchases dropped and their covet purchases rose.
Two, people weren’t commuting, so they had more disposable income and nothing to spend it on.
Three, people were anxious. At a low level of anxiety humans seek out comfort – comfort food, comfort reading and entertainment.
We call these things nostalgia brands.
It’s a human impulse to infantilise ourselves, to return ourselves to a state of non-responsibility. To a time when the thing that mattered most was whether we pulled a Charizard in a Pokemon pack or not. That our parents bought us. Nostalgia is always an attractive safe haven, tucked up in our duvet, safe in the knowledge that mummy and daddy will know what to do in the event of a crisis.
Infinitely better than actually being mummy and daddy and running around trying not to scream fuck at the top of our voices..
In retrospect it was a bad time to release a reimagining of Masters of the Universe. Wow, the online hate that got. It surprised even me. And I’m a fucking futurologist.
As a business what you needed in a pandemic – it turns out – was a robust website, a bottomless reserve of stock and a friend in the government who could bung you a PPE contract. Obviously there would be a shipping crisis. Obviously there would be a resource crisis.
My friend runs a restaurant/bar. You can’t simply turn off the taps. Beer goes off. You can’t simply turn on the taps. Beer has to be fermented. Stock bought in. All these crises compound each other.
During the pandemic you needed cash reserves. You had outgoings to pay, and potentially reduced means of paying them. In the UK most of the deep discounters made huge profits – only they were all continuing to sell at trade, so not really – while the rest of us existed on pity purchases. Most of my regular customers who used to buy in store decided that I wouldn’t really notice if they bought online. Only I am friends with them and they post all their purchases online on their Facebook feeds.
So yes, you needed mental health reserves too.
People handle trauma in different ways. My dad went into France on a glider on D-day. That scene in band of Brothers? Wrong army but sure, that was him. He always told me that people react differently under fire, that nothing can really train you for that moment or what you will do. Those that survived their first firefight? Some would believe in their own immortality and run to the sound of the guns while others cowered in a foxhole. Others turned off their emotion. PTSD affects everyone differently.
We have gone through a traumatic global event and it affects everyone differently. We all have PTSD now.
Oh look, another global traumatic event.
And another.
Having money doesn’t matter during a shipping crisis. Because if you can’t buy stock it’s worthless. No amount of money can get you a flight out of a warzone if there are no planes. If there is no paper or cardboard or wood you can’t manufacture games. The things we sell exist in a world of other things – they are right there, on the shelf, next to your product. No man is an island wrote John Donne, and no product is either.
If your game is twice the price of everyone else’s game, you won’t sell it. Unless you are Splotter. You can slice your margin, but you can’t slice my margin because I can always not stock you.
During the shipping crisis people said ‘manufacture games in country’. Oh, yes, right. Why didn’t we think of that? Because wait – two decades of globalisation destroyed manufacturing industry anywhere but the cheapest places.
Turns out for Boohoo that included Leicester. But only if they ignored minimum wage and COVID restrictions.
Shocked, I tell you, like Captain Renault in Casablanca.
The Quantum Retailer 