Recently I watched Pistol by Danny Boyle, and it reminded me about life in the Seventies. Britain was pretty run down, like we’d woken up from the Swinging Sixties with one hell of a hangover.
Pistol charts the history of the Sex Pistols. But to me the absolute stand out performance is by Thomas Brodie Sangster as impresario on the make Malcolm Maclaren. Together with Vivienne Westwood, Maclaren ran Sex – later Sedition, earlier Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, Let it Rock and Paradise Garage. But whatever it was called, Sex was the throbbing beating gristle at the heart of the UK Punk movement.
Every movement needs some throbbing gristle.
The fact is, for every pair of bondage trousers out the front, there was a stack of Pistols merch in the back. While preaching riot and sedition, everyone was getting on with the business of making money.
Sex was the first anti-shop.
Look, we all know what a shop looks like. What it feels like. Around the corner from Sex was a branch of Burtons menswear, everyone dressed in suits selling off the peg in a clean, tidy space. Burtons was what conformity looked like. And it was everything that the people at Sex were rebelling against.
From the moment James Dean replied with “what have you got?” every youth movement has been about rebelling. Even our own. We didn’t burn our books when Jack Chick came for us – we embraced being edgy.
My own anti-shop was Forever People on Park Street, Bristol, where games jostled for space alongside drug paraphernalia, long boxes of silver age comics and occult books. That was the reality for many of us. The weirdness was, Chick wasn’t precisely… wrong. Many of us drawn to the world of Dungeons and Dragons were also drawn away from mainstream religion into our own subculture, and we became proselytisers for our own new lifestyle.
By the end of ’83 half the school was playing Dungeons and Dragons.
Forever People did pretty well – well enough that owner Colin could retire with his collection of modern art worth a small fortune. There’s a certain knack to being a futurist, a zeitgeist surfer on the currents of the now.
Or… you could be Burtons menswear. The smart look for a junior clerk who seeks to conform.
I am an antishop.
I am an anarchist
Don’t know what I want
But I know how to get it
Why be an anti-shop? Why not be that Burtons menswear branch you always aspired to be? Why can’t games be clean and respectable and professional?
Seriously? When did any youth movement aspire to that?
My kids are at school. I mean like, right now – because I’m writing this in the middle of the day. Their friends don’t want to tune in and conform – their life is a mood board of gender identities, sexualities and hair colours. Thousands of different musical subcultures.
And they want their Forever People too.
They want their Sex, their Sedition. They want places that they can inhabit as the current cost of living crisis warps time and space and takes us back to the Seventies.
And that space is us.
That D&D group is a found family. Your found family is made up of folks from all walks of life, who are thrown together and can only prosper by working together.
By supporting each other.
And that sounds like most of the LGBTQ+ kidss I know right now, right?
The more corporate we are? The more ‘professional’ along a limited axis of ‘professional’? The more of a turnoff we risk becoming. Nobody mourns when a chainstore goes out of business. You don’t remember your first visit to a Burtons Menswear, but I bet everyone who ever visited Sex remembered the experience and longed to be a part of it.
Heroes, just for one day.
So, how do we embrace the creed of the anti-shop? How do we embrace the chaos without letting it consume us?
The anti-shop is retail as theatre. Your shop is your stage. You are ‘on’ from the moment your doors are open. When you are not selling goods you are selling yourself, selling your staff, selling the overall ‘experience’ of your store. Professional, clean – these are things too – but the biggest thing you are selling is fun, happiness, engagement.
You forgot this during the pandemic.
Organised play stores were never about places for people to play. They were places where you could sell, and what you were selling was community and lifestyle, for a minimal buy in price. You might not be able to afford a Vivienne Westwood, but you could buy a Sex Pistols t-shirt. And it would shock middle aged folk on the bus just as effectively.
You curate your space.
Bring the customers you want to see front and centre. Bring the staff you want to see front and centre. Nobody in the history of advertising has responded well to corporate. All advertising and promotion in history is based on a desperate desire to not look like Burtons Menswear. Functional, corporate, clean – these are the words nobody wants to read on a tombstone.
And make no mistake. A cost of living crisis leaves tombstones in its wake.
This is where chainstores crumble and retail empires turn to dust. Look at all the mall ghosts, the burned out Blockbusters. Corporate professionalism did not save them. That quirky one or two person store can pivot quicker than the multi-branch monolith. The customer base we have sought – urban, professional, minted – is the market a crisis is disposable income most hits.
Be a store where it is not a financial choice where somebody shops. You are a lifestyle store now. Embrace your chaos. Do things that feel right or on brand. But on brand for you.
The anti-shop calls no brand master. Even itself.
Here are some of the organised chaos we have embraced at Fan Boy Three in the past:
Wear a hat win a mat. One sneak peek for Yugioh I awarded a prize to a player because he wore a nice hat. The next event a dozen people came wearing hats. We ran this as a promotion for a year, each time was different – once we had all the players vote for the hat, another time they had to be hand made – one guy built a crown using only discarded Yugioh commons stapled together and after that we dropped the promotion, since that was pretty unbeatable.
We gave away prereleases. I still do – whether it’s for winning events, league attendance, doing something special for the community or simply not being able to afford to play. You think people fight to protect a store that maximises every potential take? To be an anti-store you have to learn when to let that punk band borrow your best bondage trousers.
Safe spaces and corporate spaces rarely mix. Every school is serious about ending bullying and yet every school is full of bullies.
“Can I help you with anything?” is a challenge. To a customer who may feel they do not belong it reinforces the idea that they do not in fact belong. That’s what they would have said to nerdy Dave in his school uniform had I stumbled into Sex. Half the time what you are saying is ‘get out, you don’t belong’. I’m pretty certain that’s not the message you intend to give.
“Can I help you with anything?” is what a fancy French restaurant says to me in my shorts and t-shirt. They aren’t asking me to sample the escargot.
We all have our own way of greeting folks non-confrontationally. I have like a dozen I got through, but most often it’s a variation on implied belonging. Like: “If you are here for the Magic prerelease it starts at seven”
Now THEY know there’s a Magic prerelease that starts at seven. They think that I think that they belong enough that I am imparting information rather than challenging them on whether they belong or not. In a best case scenario they say “what is Magic?” You think they would ask that WITHOUT what we call an ‘in’?
No, people don’t routinely do that.
You build in conversational ‘in’s into your customer responses. Ask someone who their favourite Pokemon is, and they’ll give you a response, but ask if you can help them with anything? Nine times out of ten they will brush you off.
Just because our primary goal as an anti-store is to sell experience and belonging doesn’t mean we don’t also sell a lot of stuff. Malcolm Maclaren sold more t-shirts than Vivienne Westwood sold bondage trousers. You can afford to sacrifice profit for publicity, but only if that publicity helps build YOUR brand.
Here’s the thing.
Often as stores we sacrifice our own brand identity in the pursuit of a common goal. And I’m not sure it’s always worth the trade off. Every GW store is now a sad little one person operation that lacks the vibrancy of a store like ours which is cross brand.
Pokemon has the strongest brand identity of all the hobby lines.
Magic has the strongest brand identity for each individual set. You can theme your store, do fancy dress, make on brand drinks menus. But I’m honesty not convinced that most of the players care that much. I’ve dressed my store, dressed my staff, spent money making my own event merch… but at the end of the day nothing I did significantly shifted the needle.
For Magic… but that doesn’t mean dressing up doesn’t shift the needle for me, peroanlly.
What even does the Magic lifestyle look like anymore? Well, it looks like Tuesdays at Ply, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays in store. It looks like a whole room of players playing Commander or Pioneer. It looks like a community, and that community sells Magic more than any store ever could. More than a decent display, or a theme, or fancy dress.
Because the games industry perfected the anti-store. And we did it years ago. Because the people who bought into our lifestyle got to inhabit our space and make it their own.
The Organised Play store was the pinnacle of retail evolution (which is why Apple copied it!)
What we failed to do was understand what we had, and to capitalise on it. Space costs money and people who want to inhabit that space need to pay, either through purchases or engagement. Sure, Maclaren and Westwood had hangers on, but they put them to work either in the shop or in the band.
Manchester’s Northern Quarter is quirky and full of cafes and restaurants with mismatched tables and chairs. This is a look that screams anti-shop – or anti-cafe. You could eat at Starbucks or you could eat at Nibble. One is a corporate entity and another a women’s collective. One serves conformity, the other non-conformity. Or a different type of conformity if you want to get pedantic! Manchester is a big university city, and each year more young people away from home for the first time in their lives discover me. In the next three years they will forge their own identity.
And stores like myself and Nibble? We want to be part of that. And in turn those people want to be part of us.
There is another path that’s not the path to Premium. There always was. My engagement numbers prove it. My new player acquisition numbers prove it. You can reject corporatisation and still be effective at business. You can be Malcolm Maclaren too. And during the onrushing cost of living crisis, your livelihood might just depend on it.
Lean in to the chaos.
For this is the age of the anti-shop
The Quantum Retailer 