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.

So, how does a quantum retailer approach the issue of lockdown?

This is in many ways a typical quantum retail problem – the interplay between two competing forces, in this case the needs of the individual versus the needs of society.

It’s Kirk and Spock at the end of Wrath of Khan. Or Beyond Darkness if you prefer, which for many reasons I don’t.

The world of Trek has done away with money. The world of Vulcan has done away with emotion. This should be easy. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.

Or was that the needs of the money?

My business – many businesses in fact – need money. People need it, because we don’t live in Star Trek world. And we have rent to pay and debt to service and utilities and suppliers and staff. We could not be where we are today without all those people, and thus our debt is not just financial. It’s emotional. We aren’t vulcans.

If we prosper at the expense of others, is it truly prosperity? Retail is an accord, between customer and store, that the store will do the heavy lifting of obtaining goods and services that the customer needs, in return for a percentage of the worth of said item.

A margin.

Some people like the scales tipped. Deep discounting erodes that bond, not because it exists, but because it lies. It says ‘you can have all this for less, this person? They are ripping you off – making money off you. Only I am your friend’. Imagine it if you would in a Smeagol voice. I do. That was the cries of the Magic-mongers outside every GP, hawking their wares from car boots without any passing taxman seeing a portion of their margin, and this migrated online in the early days of the internet.

“Nobody will ever love you like discount-Smeagol loves you, my precious!”

Piling it high and selling it cheap has always been a tactic, ever since ‘King’ Kroger invented the supermarket, horrifying countless generations of merchants stretching back to the markets of Uruk. I mean, logic – vulcan logic – dictates that things have a cost, and delivering and providing goods and services has a cost. You might even feel differently about that cost if you saw the owner begging for change outside the metro station to afford the fare home, or sliding into the seat of a sports car.

Because we can estimate the value goods, but we also estimate the value of humans. But we do it inversely.

Who do we value right now? The billionaires asking us to return to work to buoy up the stock market, or the nurses and care workers at the front line, and the checkout staff at the supermarket risking their lives so we can eat? Wealth is not a signifier of the value of a human.

It’s what they do for you that counts.

Now, I’ve talked about the interplay between the transactional and the emotional before. How game stores sell happiness. But we currently do not live in that world. In a climate of fear, happiness is hard to comeby.

American deaths from COVID-19 have eclipsed all the deaths of US troops in Vietnam. As I write this, the virus did that in six weeks. In the UK we have our own disgracefully grim total – the second highest in the world. 75 years ago last week, the Nazis finally surrendered after six years of war with Britain. And we have already lost half as many people to COVID-19 as civilians who perished in night after night of constant blitz that burned our cities to the ground and turned them into rubble.

Half that total dead, from a virus.

Needs of the many. Needs of the one.

Every part of the economy needs revenue in order to survive. I’d love to live in the world of Star Trek, but what would I actually do? What would people do? Not everyone gets to be a starship captain – some of us are just fuck ups. And we’re stuck here in virus world.

As an individual I need to generate money to pay my suppliers, my landlord, my staff. Those are the many and I am the one.

As an individual I need to generate money to feed my family. They are the many and I am the one.

As an individual I need to provide a place of support and a service to my customers. Again, the many.

And lastly, I live in a society. AND MY SOCIETY NEEDS ME TO NOT DO THOSE THINGS. Or people might die. Many people.

From space, each many is an individual. One planet versus many planets. One species versus many species. One country versus many countries.

The belief that one country is inherently superior to another has many names. We might be kind and refer to it as exceptionalism – like the America of the 1950’s, or Victorian Britain. A country defined by its achievements. “So, what did your country do recently? We invented industry” said nineteenth century Britain.

But exceptionalism was built on unfettered access to resources, the labour of the many and ultimately it did so for the benefit of the few. One country – one business – leaps ahead while everyone else gets to play catch up.

Exceptionalism without being exceptional is Nationalism. That your country is just somehow better, despite all evidence to the contrary. Even now our politicians are spinning our tragically high COVID-19 death rate as a triumph, because we are accurately reporting more deaths than other countries. “See that country over there, busy re-opening its stores and restaurants? They just weren’t as accurate in their reporting as us?”

Is there a Star Trek race of arrogant wankers?

PLEASE DON’T SAY THE VULCANS! We’re so not the vulcans. Vulcans would have aced this with science in fifteen minutes. We did the exact opposite of that.

Logic.

Vulcans trade in logic. Ferengi trade in latinum. Kirk trades in his ability to teach alien women the meaning of love and Bones McCoy trades in “Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a miracle worker!”

Money itself of course is a logical solution to a real world problem, of how to accurately measure worth for trade. Logic dictates that the more you have the more resources you can buy. Little wonder the Ferengi crave it.

My store remains closed. Shuttered. Empty. My ability to generate revenue has dried to a trickle from a flow.

Somewhere along the timeline we reach a tipping point, where we trade human life for latinum. We make the logical call that the needs of the many is the needs of the economy, and the needs of the few are the dead.

That sucks if you are one of the few.

Many stores went into this crisis responsibly. They enacted rapid social distancing, curbside delivery, froze organised play space. But this solution is a temporary one, like lockdown.

Logic dictates that a restaurant which can only serve half the covers it used to can no longer charge what it used to. Costs didn’t go down. Ingredients, staff, rent, utilities. Few restaurants could handle a sixty percent drop in trade and not go to the wall. Margins were already tight.

The online Gollums didn’t have a pause. Self-exempted from lockdown. Essential. Trading as usual, only better. Anyone who could be exempt from lockdown seized upon it and tried their best to make lemonade.

As far as I know nobody is tracking sales assistant deaths from COVID-19. I took my friend ages to be recognised as a keyworker for her work delivering parcels for Hermes 24/7. To many people our work, what we do as retailers is ephemeral. “Sorry you lost everything, but I still got my games so it’s all good” says society.

That’s just more pressure on stores to reopen. To re-open quickly and to reopen hard. The needs of the money versus the needs of the few. Your president and our Prime Minister have spoken. “Holiday time is over” they say. “Your economy needs you to run into those little viral bullets, so we don’t have to run into post-viral ballots”.

And we need it too. Eventually. Because we don’t have a function in Star Trek world. And if I don’t get my store re-opened in some capacity, I’ll shortly not have a function in this one.

…and yet?

Our industry is resilient. It weathered the dot-com bust. Weathered the collapse of the comic bubble, the collapse of the d20 bubble, the collapse of the TCG bubble. Weathered the credit crunch. In many ways we are countercyclical. And unlike theatres and cinemas and bars and restaurants, we have stuff to sell. To people. To enjoy at home.

But our USP was our stores. Our physicality. That is currently our weakness. If we can weather this storm, it will be our strength again. You can’t rewire two hundred thousand years of human conditioning in eight weeks. The needs of the many? It’s ultimately to be in a room with the many.

We just have to sit tight and hope for that future right now, and decide how effectively we can operate with minimal risk.

Society needs our stores to survive. Our customers need our stores to survive. Our suppliers, our families, everyone needs our stores to survive. But we need to do it safely.

And logically.

Engage!

OK, so I’m closing today. For the forseeable future.

The science says that I’m probably closing for a minimum of twelve weeks and a potential maximum of eighteen months. There’s nothing I can do to change that. It is what it is. And that’s my first tip for retailers to survive the epidemic of COVID-19 and the rather exceptional public health crisis we are hoping to live through.

1) It is what it is.

Everyone knows that grief has five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Kubler-Ross added two more – shock to begin with and testing right before acceptance. Some people add in hope, and an upturn at the end.

Hey, we all watched Endgame.

We are nerds running nerd businesses. We know the score.

Everyone deals with grief personally, in their own way, in their own time. But right now that’s time we don’t have. Decisions will be made by governments on bailouts and furloughs and lockdowns.  And you cannot afford to find yourself trapped in reaction to the now.

You must plan.

Some businesses will not survive. If nothing is done to solve the economic contagion, well, there won’t be much of an economy left. So something will have to be done. The games industry is small, but we have the same supply chain issues as every other industry – no stores mean no distributors mean no publishers mean no manufacturers. And that’s writ large across many industries many orders of magnitude bigger than ours. You think that fashion outlet needs its summer collection now? What about the winter collection, ready to be made in factories in Bangladesh? Who is paying for these things, making these things, shipping these things, receiving these things?

It’s not just us.

Depression is solipsistic. It makes us think we are alone. But we aren’t.

2) Science doesn’t lie.

The data says twelve weeks to six months of non essential shutdown. I know you were told to shut for two weeks or a month, but it seems likely that this was just your government trying to get you TO close. No scientific study says a two week lockdown will help in the slightest. So we have to assume this will be longer.

3) The sooner you act – on anything – the more ahead of the curve you are

In the UK we are about ten days behind Lombardy and a week behind Spain and France. You are a week behind us in the US. Right now you have agency and so you should act.

4) Remove consumables from your store

Sure, chips and soda may not be your priority right now. But they won’t do you any good locked in your store. Remove your food, your toilet paper, your cleaning products – anything you can make use of at home. You can always bring them back.

Without restaurants and takeaways, rats in city centres will be starving. If you have food on your premises and they find a way in, you will have a potential infestation upon your return. Rats always find a way to survive.

5) Remove valuables from your store

I don’t carry a lot of high end comics or high end Magic cards. But I know that, should bad things happen, I would want them where I could personally secure them and keep them secure.

6) Remove your computers

I have all sorts of stuff on my store computers. Maybe I’ll need it, maybe I won’t. I would prefer to err on the side of caution, and have anything at hand that I might possibly need than to find I needed it and didn’t have it and couldn’t get it.

7) Close in an orderly fashion

You can wait for a lockdown order. But then you don’t know from day to day how much you might need to suddenly do. My country was suddenly ordered to close all pubs and restaurants at short notice – one day it was fine, the next OMG EVERYBODY PANIC.

The more you can make this process orderly, the less your community will panic. As the Titanic sank, the orchestra played. People need normality, structure, order. And our nerd communities look to us to provide it.  

8) Inform your distributors that you are no longer accepting orders

Ask them to freeze your pre-orders if possible, and cancel them if not. Money coming in is less important than money going out. Because it is likely that you will have no means of selling it. Non-essential lockdown also includes distribution in non-food industries.

That Magic set? It’s not coming. And if it is, none of us are in a position to run it – even if any of us by then are in a position to sell it (which I strongly doubt). But a far worse case is you are in lockdown with no incoming revenue and $40K of Magic sat on a pallet outside a store you can’t get to.

9) All outgoings will damage your survivability as a business

Talk to your suppliers. Seriously, THEY KNOW THE SCORE. They watch the news. Talk to your landlord. Who is going to rent your unit if they evict you? Nobody – the economy won’t recover for a decade or more.

This. Sucks. But it sucks equally for everyone. I’m a straight shooter and I pay my suppliers – mostly on time, often quicker if I get better terms. But if it’s a choice between that or paying my staff? It’s no contest at all.

There are obviously exceptions to this.

10) Not every business will survive

At the moment? Without a economy rescue package like the UK or Denmark or France? None do. But even with a rescue package some won’t. I’m sorry if that is you. I hope it is not.

Our publishing partners are probably in a worse position than us. The market was due for a correction, and this is probably going to be it. People who are massively over extended, with large print runs and nowhere to sell them are going to find it hard.

On the plus side, the global population of the world just realised how awesome boardgames are. On the minus side, six months of quarantine might mean they never want to play another one, once this is over.

11) Board up your store

After a month of isolation, folks will be pretty desperate. Most people understand the need to isolate for the wellbeing of others, but if criminals thought of the wellbeing of others they wouldn’t be criminals in the first place. Addicts need their drugs, even in a lockdown.

Isolation affects people in different ways. We cannot predict them, but we can mitigate against them. Our countries are not used to having their freedoms curtailed, and in mine – when that happens – as it has several times in the past, we riot. We loot.

We cannot expect that not to happen because it is already happening. There are not enough police to secure the entire population – this isn’t China.

Board up your store. Secure anything that you cannot afford to lose. The rest of it is only stuff.  

12) Safeguard your staff

Those you have left. If you are a small family operation you have it lucky. It might not feel like it right now. Your staff are blameless. But they know the score. My government put a grant in place so that staff I needed to furlough would get 80% of their incomes paid by the government as a form of inverse taxation.

Safeguarding means protecting them as best I can from the virus – both my staff and my customers. But it also means safeguarding them psychologically. Even existing in a time like this causes stress – and the more stress we cause, the more damage we cause.  That’s not why I am in business.

I’m in the fun and happiness business.

I’ve given my staff permission to loot the store of stuff they might need. Boardgames, miniatures, paints – anything they can use during our lockdown. It’s sure as hell not doing me any good.  In return they are going to be handling engagement on social media, because my store is my community and I need to serve and protect that community as best I can.

In a worst case scenario? That stock was looted. Burned. Flooded. Repossessed by my creditors. It does me no good right now, and unless there are some pretty amazing economy rescue packages in place, it’s not doing me any good in the long term future I envisage. So lets make it work in the short term.  

13) Safeguard your community

My store is a community store. An Organised Play store. I prosper when my community is healthy and happy, and right now it is neither.

How can I make my community happy when I can’t sell stuff to them or host events? Well, I can still host events for one thing – I can host discord servers, and Arena, and Roll 20. I can post happy and uplifting videos, game reviews, miniatures painting tips, DMing tips – working on that one personally.

I can fill the world with light and laughter, like I filled my physical store.

And you can too.

14) You are not an organised play store any more.

The effects of social distancing for a year or more probably destroy this as a viable model. Until we get the all clear, which may be eighteen months out. Even after then, the psychological pressure of quarantine may linger long after the virus has gone.

You are an organised play virtual world.

A lighthouse

It’s time to lean in, games industry. We cannot change the now. It is what it is. We have to step up to the plate for the common weal. Do the things society needs us to do, because we have nothing else that we can do.

But if not us, who?

Plan for the worst. Hope for the best. One foot in front of the other. It is what it is.

Until it isn’t.

15) Your mental health is important

This? This will hopefully be the worst thing you ever endure. It’s impossible to understate the psychological trauma of losing a thing you have poured your heart and soul into. That grief you feel is real. That shock, that anger, that depression.

Sometimes helping others helps. Exercise. Good diet. Talking to others. Depression by its nature is solipsistic, self isolating. It wants you to shut down, to shut out, to spiral. And you’ll want to too.

We set up a Roll Through It discord server. We know that social spaces and social gaming help boost oxytocin levels, that doing boosts dopamine levels, that exercise and sunlight boosts seratonin and that everything is boosted by good diet. Guess what? Nobody is getting any of that.

Try and keep active. Try and keep connected. Try and keep well fed and watered. Drink tea. You crazy people are the best people in the world. Together we built a network of third spaces that made the world a happier place. Nobody had ever built anything like that before. But they will again.

We will again. Premium store or clubhouse, you mattered. And you still do. Your customers need you like my customers and my staff need me. The world was better with each and every one of you in it.

Lets try and keep it that way.

Until we meet again.

My name is Dave Salisbury, and I have been the Quantum Retailer.

I’m closing Tuesday whatever the government decide to do.

I BELIEVE that retail is important. That games are important. That saying goodbye to our friends is important. I stayed open in order for people to do that, obeyed slightly more than the letter the government set out for me, hoping that they would take the scientific approach and seize the initiative.

People. Need. Normality.

And anxious people need it more.

I am anxious. I know what that feels like, to suddenly find your options closing off faster than you can make decisions. It’s paralyzing.

My staff and I made a choice.

An orderly shutdown.

A week ago we implemented social distancing by reducing our capacity. We cancelled bookings and cleared the decks of events. On Friday we closed our Organised Play space. At each point we signposted what we were doing, so it gave folks time to adjust. So people do not feel trapped.

They are going to feel trapped enough, when they are locked down for twelve weeks.

This Friday, whether mandated to or not by government, we close our retail operation and mothball the store. This week we are cashless, running a home delivery service and doing curbside pickup.

Before I opened a game store, I used to work in a bar. There’s a reason bars call last orders, and it’s because the bar has to shut. As a drinker, you know when it is. That it is coming.

Inescapable.

Last Orders is the orderly farewell, the chance to say goodbye. It won’t be forever – for most of us, hopefully.

My government has put in a generous furlough so I can retain all my staff on their salary.

When the lockdown happens, having read the Imperial College research? I don’t expect to reopen for the forseeable future. Three months? Six months? Twelve? Nobody really knows and it’s become economics poison to be HONEST.

Honesty is the purview of science now. And the science is saying last orders.

I don’t know whether our industry can handle six months of lockdown. Despite what I think about games and hobbies being essential to our mental wellbeing, and third spaces being vital to our mental wellbeing, and our primal need for human companionship. Existing in a shared physical space with others? Our industry is not food or medicine. We aren’t frontline care workers.

Some people think that they will lose out to sales from publishers and deep distributors. From competitors. But none of these folk are essential either. An Italian or Swiss style lockdown closes us all down, prince and pauper alike.

Your store? You may fight it. Game Stop and Barnes and Noble. Waterstones. I get their point, and I suspect, like me, they aren’t entirely motivated by greed. Or desperation. Six months is a long time to go without computer games or books.

Last Orders is always the busiest time for any bar. But when you call it, you have to stop. And if your government is too afraid to call it, you have to be the responsible publican and call it for yourself. Even if you think you can somehow get another round in.

Especially if you think you can somehow get another round in.

My government dithers, fearful of backlash. Fearful of a loss of popularity. They actively want folks to curtail their own freedoms, and react petulantly when they don’t. Boris Johnson just wants to be loved.

Don’t we all.

Nobody wants to call last orders. There’s always somebody in the loo who misses a drink, who wants a cheeky pint. The publican wants to serve it, the punter wants to drink it, the brewery wants to sell more barrels, the government wants more tax revenue. But secretly, everyone is glad to get home. To leave the warmth and walk back in the cold, full of good cheer. There’s always tomorrow, even if it is six months away.

One of my favourite movies growing up was Masque of the Red Death with Vincent Price. Don’t be Prince Prospero. Make the hard call your government won’t.

Back at Essen I met some very nice people.

Where I grew up in Bristol there was this trade show celebrating wine. It was the World Wine Fair. It was held annually – every wine producing country would take a stand, every wine distributor – wine, wine, wine. Everywhere.

The consulates would be involved. Everyone wanted to show off their wine. To highlight it, in friendly competition.

Nobody brought very much. Everyone would sell out, pretty much. All those countries that could have been bombing each other forty years ago, coming together, to celebrate how one grape ferments slightly differently to another.

That’s my Essen.

And that’s my game industry.

Of course, we are encouraged to play fight at choosing sides. Pathfinder or D&D? Pokemon or Yugioh? But at its heart that we know enough veterans who have worked in multiple camps for multiple companies that its more like the WWE than WW2.

At Essen I met a group of Iranian game designers. Did you know there are boardgamers just like you in Tehran?

They couldn’t ship their goods out of course. There’s a global embargo on goods from Iran. Because Iranians just want war and terror. They don’t sit in boardgame cafes like mine, drinking tea and coffee and arguing about the hit points of kobolds. Only that’s exactly what they do.

It often surprises me when folks in our industry express racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic views. We can be anything anywhere, at any point in human history. Heck, I can play Pugmire and be a dog. I can manage the power output of the lower Ruhr valley. No. Not as a dog – that would be stupid.

Games bring people together like wine did. They are a lubricant. You enter a game store as an individual, and you leave with friends. And those friends? They are people who accepted you, for all your faults and stupidity. Because they have faults too.

Essen truly is the World Wine Fair of games. Sworn enemy states tasked with the destruction of each other discussing meeples and chits and mechanics.

That’s my industry. My world is both smaller and wider because of it.

But not everyone got the memo.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft died in 1937. Robert E Howard in 1936. They were writers of their time, and both struggled with severe mental illness. I don’t think if they lived today they’d be those people. But they didn’t have a choice.

We do.

Now, you might look at the world and think ‘but Dave, Trump is in the White house and Boris ‘piccaninny watermelon smile’ Johnson is in Downing Street. Racism is cool, right?’

Fear does not make for better grapes, any more than wrath does. And history will judge all of us, as it does Lovecraft and Howard.

You see, we can accept that our countries don’t like each other. We can accept that. And we can still sit down and game and drink wine as individuals bound together by a higher purpose. Those individuals have different genders, different skin colours, different religions, different sexualities but the same love. For games. And that last part is how we define who is in our team and at our table.

And if you don’t understand that, maybe you should stop posting on social media. Because we aren’t the film industry – set on rehabilitating Mel Gibson or planning Harvey Weinstein’s comeback party.

Hey, you are clever. If you could learn the rules for Advanced Squad Leader you could learn how not to be a dick on social media. Plenty of folks come into the industry afraid of people who don’t look like them or love like them or worship like them. And we play together. And we laugh together. And we work together.

If you are a long standing industry professional who gave many happy memories to adolescent D&D players, and you’ve recently posted anti-semitic shit on your wall, you might want to think about that.

Everything I learned about running a game store, I learned playing Dungeons and Dragons.

“No Bob, you can’t buy potions for the same price you SELL them for – how would store owners make any money?”

Seriously though, my store shares a lot of traits with a D&D character. And yours does too.

Let’s start building a store as a D&D character. Both have a series of defining features with quite a lot of similarities. We’re going to start with the race of our character. In Dungeons and Dragons, your D&D character’s race is a product of where they were born, which is to say, where in the game world they came from. Your store is no different. But instead of your game world being the Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk, your game world is your geographic area.

Your city.

(Or lack of city, if you are rural).

All cities share certain characteristics. They will have transition zones, working class districts, industrial districts, upper class districts, cultural districts and shopping districts. You can break them down on a map if you like – City Hall already has. They zoned it. Though it might surprise you to know that our ancestors were already zoning cities in prehistory. Birds of a feather flock together and so do businesses.

Before Fan Boy Three opened in Manchester’s Northern Quarter it had been the garment district. Manchester was big in the clothing trade – the piece work from Halifax, the woollens from the mill towns, everything passed through Manchester during the Industrial Revolution. And it got stupid rich. But by the turn of the millennium, most of the fashion houses had moved on. The Northern Quarter was a shell of its former self – all boarded up buildings and alleys full of crack dealers.

Basically, we lucked in. The area was ripe for gentrification, and the hipsters moved in after us.

You can break any city down into zones like this. And each zone becomes a recognisable fantasy race.

Dwarf zones are industrial. Dwarf customers grind their hobby like they grind their job – game stores in Dwarf areas are often monoculture stores where everyone plays Magic or Warhammer or whatever. (Seriously, who am I kidding. There’s no whatever – the only brands big enough to support monoculture stores are Magic and Warahammer!)

Elf zones are cultural. Elf customers like to browse, they like all wood pieces and a light airy environment. You’ll find Elf stores near theatres, art galleries and museums. Minimum clutter, maximum aesthetic. What can I say? Elves are fussy.

Halfling stores are likely in the restaurant district. These are the boardgame cafes known for their food and conviviality. Their clientele like a good time and a party atmosphere. Alcohol may flow freely. Bare feet are optional.

Gnome stores are experiential. You’ll find gnome stores in the hipster district – what they sell is almost incidental compared with the experience they offer, in terms of service, selection and events. As a case in point, Fan Boy Three is most certainly a gnome store – people ask me all the time why I invest so heavily in Kickstarters when I could be curating a tightly pruned list of evergreens. Because I’m a gnome store not an elf store.

Half Elf stores are hybrid stores. These marry boardgames and cardgames with videogames, or with second hand games, or with books or e-cigs or phone repairs. Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile two natures, but hey – multi-classing was sweet in first edition (even if you ended up a level behind). that level behind in retail is money tied up doing the other string to your bow. Ironically, because half-elves often = archers.

Human stores are traditional game stores. The places that didn’t change. What even ARE these new fangled stores? the owners say. And that’s a perfectly valid choice. And if you are in a rural setting, chances are YOU are a human store too. Stuff on shelves. Bums on seats. Zero pretensions.

Lastly, if you chose to open in the cheapest area of town you are a Half Orc. My buddy Captain Sci Fi opened a store in Bristol in what seemed like a nice enough area. By day, when he viewed it. It turned out to be the Red Light District at night. There are people who are prepared to step over that couple having sex in your doorway or are prepared to risk their car being broken into on your lot every week, but I pretty much guarantee they aren’t bringing their kids to play Pokemon in you.

Now, you can build any type of store anywhere. You don’t have to stick to your natural demographic. It just makes it slightly harder. What you are instead building is a destination store. People are prepared to travel to Games n Stuff or Sentry Box because they have a reputation, and they would have that reputation wherever they were. But most of the time if you’ve aligned with the natural demographic in your area, you’ll get better catchment, more customers and more customer satisfaction. Quicker.

In Basic D&D, your race was also your class. But in all other versions, the two are separate. Which is the model we are following – Mystara be damned! Before we determine our class, we need to look at our six attributes. Yes, your store has Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence and Charisma, just like a D&D character. We just don’t get to roll them.

Your strength is your sales. At the end of the day, how hard you hit is how much stuff you shift. We’ll take human average here as 10, and we’ll equate that with being able to generate enough sales to pay for a full time staff member. Yup, setting that average pretty low. On the top end, Cool Stuff do $25 million a year just on boardgames. Most of us will probably be in the middle. $1 million in turnover is a target a lot of stores aim for – that’s chickenfeed for most industries, but let’s slot that in as Strength 16. Something that gives us punch, but gives us space below and above to work a scale out of.

Constitution is your stock levels. Most stores aim to turn stock pretty often – because turning stock generates turnover and hopefully profit. If you have a month’s worth of sales on your shelves, you have a CON of 10. For each extra month, add a point of CON.

Most of the time, Dexterity is the opposite of Constitution. This is your flexibility, your cash reserves. With 10 – human average – you can pay your next months’ bills. The more cash on hand you have, the higher your Dexterity. The more flexible you are. Suddenly Transformers is huge, and you need stock, and you have this pool of cash another store doesn’t. You can pivot. For each month you have cash in hand, you can add a point of DEX.   

Intelligence is your product knowledge. So this is more about what you don’t know. Start with 20 and knock a point off for every question you feel you don’t know the answer to in a day.

Wisdom is your outreach. How you interact with others and bring in customers. Customers rarely generate themselves, rarely wake up struck with a divine spark to realise they should dedicate their lives to Dungeons and Dragons and knowing the name of your store. How many new faces do you see in store? That’s the benchmark here. One or two, you are WIS 10. If you answered ‘New faces?’ Wisdom is probably your dump stat.

Charisma is a function of your Organised Play portfolio. Yup, we are talking events. The gilding on your game store lily. If you just run Magic? You’re a 10 – unless you make some extra special effort. Basic game store average. The more diverse you are in your events – types, formats, game systems – the more diverse you will be in terms of clientele. Because honestly, D&D players and magic players are not identical. Yugioh and Pokemon are not interchangeable. Fallout, Dust: 1947, Warmachine, Warhammer, HeroClix, Infinity, Kill Team, Warcry, Necromunda, Bloodbowl, Marvel Champions, X-Wing, Armada, Legion – all of them, marginally different demographics.

And that’s just miniatures.

There’s a reason Dwarves – and by extension Dwarf stores – traditionally have low Charisma. If you don’t play the monoculture game the Dwarf store supports, they’ll just stare blinking at you. Like the bar in Blues Brothers where they like both types of music – country AND western.

Now you have a race and you have a stat. And you have a gender. Your gender is not yours. Though if you have decorated your store in red and black and all your staff have neckbeards I think we can safely write male in here. It’s possible to make your store less gendered, or more gender friendly through decor and hiring choices, but ultimately you don’t really get to decide who your clientele are or how they interact with you. But you’ll know.

And so it’s time to choose our class.

Class is the single biggest defining thing about your character in D&D. But did you realise that it’s not about your strengths? No, your D&D class is about choosing your weakness, and your class features are how your character compensates for not being able to do everything well.

Barbarian. You are all about the Strength and the sales. You need Con to capitalise on those sales. A sales driven strategy probably focuses you along one particular product path, so your Dex may be low. Along with your Int, Wis and Charisma. Who needs those, right? Social stats are for losers.

A Barbarian store’s weakness is that rage. If it’s all about the sales its harder sometimes to work with others. Until their rage runs out in a room full of angry goblins because they oversold. 

Cleric. Outreach is Wisdom. Your tireless devotion to the gods of gaming attracts new converts all the time. But sometimes it is hard to see your neophytes shopping with the Fighter or the Wizard, only for them to come back and tell you all their problems.  

Druid. Look, I know the counter culture store owner is a stereotype, but the bong is often mightier than the sword. Druids don’t have to be about drugs – Druids are more about lifestyle, where games and gaming are part of that lifestyle. And remember, the Druid is a pet class too – and likely to come with a whole coterie of lifestyle followers.

Fighter. You are all about the Con. You specialise in depth of stock, because depth of stock is like retail armour class and hit points rolled into one. But all that armour makes you slow and cumbersome. Every party needs a good solid Fighter, who can take the lumps and still deliver because they still had stock when everyone else ran out. But let’s face it, Fighters are boring. Keep telling yourself you are cool because you fight with a glaive guisarme rather than a longsword.  

Monk is the most agile and ineffective of all the classes. You don’t even need a store – just a backpack and a trade account. This is how many monks start and almost all monks stay that way. Andrew Zorowitz is their Grand Master of Flowers – nobody does more shows with a larger team than Andrew, proving that it’s not just a Zen thing. It can be big money too.

Paladin is a social justice warrior class. Fusing Charisma, Wisdom and Strength together to stand up and be counted for what is right and just and good and decent. I mean, diverse, inclusive stores full of women and minorities. But there are anti-paladin stores too. And sometimes, as the culture wars rage outside with the intensity of the Blood War from Planescape, you can find yourself boycotted from both sides.

(Anti paladins are wankers though).

Ranger. The Ranger is the Dexterity class. Two weapon fighting is literally focussing on Warhammer and Magic at the same time. This may make things a bit tricky unless you have very deep pockets or a bear as a pet.

Sorcerer. The Charisma based Wizard is able to summon Organised Play events out of the aether. Most sorcerers specialise in illusion spells. Having a shop full of people is great, but having a shop full of paying customers is like hitting with a real elephant rather than an illusionary one. Much, much more satisfying.

Thief. I know that its politically correct to call these people rogues now, but let’s be honest. In the real world, the Thief is less useful. There are no traps to detect, no locks to pick. A Thief store – a rogue store – compensates for that by stealing your sales and your customers. That’s the thing they are good at. They will deep discount and take your sales, or undercut your events and take your players. Thief store doesn’t care

Wizard. Knowledge is power. Whether it is every Magic card ever printed or the entire contents of Boardgame Geek, you are a walking encyclopaedia of information. Wizards are often poor at sales – STR is traditionally their dump stat. They don’t always like to part with their knowledge to those they deem unworthy. But the Wizards actual weakness is a habit of training hundreds of apprentices and then hiring them all because they also play Runequest.

Warlock has the backing of a powerful supernatural entity. Most often a parent or a trust fund. They are unpredictable. They have plenty of money they can burn on powerful spells and then suddenly the ground opens up to swallow them whole like they never existed. Warlocks are much, much better as an ally than as an enemy. Did I mention they were unpredictable? Wildly, wildly unpredictable.

Me, I’m a Bard store. I run groups dedicated to teaching other stores how to be better. How to bring Kickstarter companies and retailers together for mutual profit. I run national level Organised Play programs. For me it’s all about the connections, the friendships, the contacts, the networks. In store I want to make sure everyone is having a good time, like the maitre d’ in a fine restaurant.

Now, here’s the thing.

Since every store is different and every store has a weakness and some strengths, it’s natural that stores can and should work together. If you have a Dwarf Fighter store and an Elf Wizard store in the same city, I guarantee you they do not share the same clientele. I mean, it’s possible not even two Dwarf stores share the same clientele – one could run Warhammer and the other Magic and never the twain mix.

But you can literally build a party out of stores with non-overlapping USP’s for mutual support and profit. It’s pointless me advertising to your Dwarves, as they will not leave town. But we can support each other. Thief stores? Barbarian stores? Warlock stores? just like in an actual D&D party, if these are your local competitors, now you know why you need to keep them at arm’s length. I had a good working relationship with one UK Warlock store – until they scheduled a series of Magic events in the venue I used when they were my singles dealer and froze out my involvement. That’s the kind of dick move a Warlock store does, because they think business is acting like Donald Trump and not an interconnected web of interbusiness relationships based on mutual trust and support.

They would sacrifice you to their elder god in a heartbeat.

Lastly, you have a level. Your level is based on the number of full time employees your store has. Each level – each employee – allows you to multiclass. You can buy in expertise and gain a level in another class, or double down on folks like you. You can hire a Cleric for your outreach, a Sorcerer to work on your Organised Play portfolio, or another Wizard. Traditionally Wizard stores hire more Wizards – apprentice Wizards – until they have this huge magical college thing going on. We’ve all been in stores like that. You can play to your strengths or bolster your weaknesses.

Or you can work with others.

You have a race, a class, a gender, a level and six attributes. Maybe those attributes no longer suit the class you are playing. Maybe you’d be better opening that Gnome Bard store in a better part of town. Maybe there are three Gnome Bard stores already. Our industry tends to think of all game stores as THE SAME. The lowest common denominator of store. Some dingy clubhouse in podunksville. Others think we should all aspire to be Mox Boarding House. That the only thing that separates us from achieving our goals is our professionalism. But when most folks do this exercise, every store comes out different.

And like Dungeons and Dragons, that’s our strength.

Now let’s grab some dice and roll for initiative!

Once upon a time there were two types of cricketers.

The first were Gentlemen. A Gentleman played cricket because he loved cricket. Independently wealthy, the Gentleman could play when he wanted, or not as the mood took him. The second were the Players. They played cricket because they had a natural aptitude for playing cricket, but their class meant that they could only play cricket professionally if they were paid.

Off the pitch the Player was just a guy like you or me, with a family to support, making ends meet as best he could. And if a Player didn’t play? Couldn’t play? Then it was the poorhouse.

Gentlemen did not have to worry about that. They led glamorous lifestyles and the papers and the radio loved them.

Dilletante is not just an occupation in Call of Cthulhu. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth there were plenty of folks that didn’t work for a living. Marx wrote quite a bit about them. A whole class of people whose property and stocks and family and estates did the hard graft so they didn’t have to. This way of life didn’t really survive two World Wars and a stock market crash.

Except it did, in our consciousness.

In Britain there are still two types of Rugby. Union and League. One is for folks who play for sport, the other for money. There’s something terribly grubby about money isn’t there. When I put it like that – sport versus money – you naturally assume that the sport guys have some degree of moral superiority, and that’s the legacy of Gentlemen versus Players.

We see this in our industry too.

Who loves games the most? The folk that open stores that sell them? Or the blogger who reviews them? The dungeon masters and Magic judges? Look at how liberating it is to be freed from money, from filthy lucre, from having to graft day in day out in the game mines. Stacking shelves and cleaning toilets for a living.

For money.

Emotional responses are deemed better than transactional ones, because emotion simply is, whereas transactional can be judged and weighed up against other transactions. How much did this sportsball player get paid, and were they worth it? How much is that game on Amazon?

I’m a parent. I’m a carer. I’m on the PTA. There are lots of things I do for not-money. Things I do that are emotional and not transactional. Some Players probably – almost certainly – loved the game more than some Gentlemen. But at the point where they had a transactional relationship with it, they were judged. And judged by other criteria.

Sometimes I wonder what would life look like in Star Trek? What would I do in that world? In a world of basic income and replicators? For a while in the Eighties I drew benefits and ran D&D full time, and I have to say that was pretty amazing. Emotional. But now I see folks charging $20 an hour for DMing services in some US cities. Transactional.

Sometimes I wish that my proven track record on events mattered. But there is always some club or some vanity store who can prove they love the game more. And Organised Play Coordinators are like cigarette card traders in 1910. They seem to despise the fact that ‘the game’ is all about money, despite themselves drawing a salary from it.

Every store in the world has lost players to a clubhouse that only opened for the lols. That’s ‘by the players for the players’, when really they mean ‘by gentlemen for gentlemen’. The clubs became clubhouses. As stores we bemoan this, because those stores buy at cost and sell at cost, but how could they do any different? A hundred and fifty years of cricket has led them inexorably to this point.

It’s hardwired into the consciousness. Its binary. A Gentleman who takes money is a Player. And once a Player always a Player.

Behind the scenes of course, those Victorian and Edwardian Gentlemen were in fact supported by money, the exploitation of money and the money of exploitation. They were born of empires geographical and mercantile. But we chose to pretend otherwise and so did they.

We call that hypocrisy. It’s pretty common.

But we can pretend to. It’s one of our skillsets. If I can pretend to be a dragon or a bad ass elven monk, I can pretend that my existence is not predicated on my ability to turn a profit.

Here’s the thing. In retail I don’t approach any decision I make transactionally. I tell my staff and my work experience kids that as an experiential retailer, the thing I sell is happiness. It just comes in boosters and boxes. You cannot win a transactional fight. But you can be an emotional zone that people respond to with their hearts. People buy off people they like. And they like larger than life characters, a collectable cigarette card version of you, with your batting average proudly displayed.

Never, ever tell folks how desperate you are for cash. Never. It reminds them you are a Player. Randomly give stuff away for free all the time. Promo cards are great for this. Never use the argument that Amazon or Cool Stuff is cheaper. Your customers know. Make an emotional argument. Build a place of fun and smiles and eat cold baked beans out of a can if you have to. Nobody respects your economic argument for why they should support your store, even if they then buy out of guilt. Knock them a fiver off ‘because they look like nice people’.

Nobody trained you for retail. Nobody trained you for a war against an implacable foe who will do anything to make this fight transactional. To win. Because one day Jeff Bezos is going to want you to have an emotional relationship with your delivery drone; the sinister smiling tick face of their corporate logo, to forget about the human drone pissing in bottles back at the depot.

And that, as we say, is just not cricket.

Today we are talking about gatekeeping.

Whether I intended to be or not, I grew up to be a gatekeeper.

No, literally. I have a literal gate. Well, it’s more of a door really. People are always asking me, how do I get more folks into the store and, well, the answer is throw that door wide open. As wide as wide can be.

Both literally and literally literally.

What does your ideal customer look like? Everyone can do this – imagine what your typical customer looks like and then imagine what your ideal customer would look like. Tall? Well dressed? Carrying a mono red deck in a shoulder holster? Honestly, if you answered anything other than ‘it really doesn’t matter who comes in my store, so long as their eyes light up with wonderment’ maybe retail isn’t the best thing for you.

Everyone and anyone can be your customer. Don’t get hung up on the package they come in.

Years ago I worked for a well known chain of comic and game stores across the North of England. We had this one store in Derby at the height of the Pokemon craze. One day this kid comes in – about ten, scruffy looking, slightly grubby. It’s a school day. He’s playing truant. You have this mental picture already, right? Anyway, this kid asks to see the new Fossil booster boxes.

Look, it’s a quiet day. And I am half humouring him, because I am making a value judgement – which, from the benefit of twenty years of retail I would no longer ever make. But I was younger then. Timewaster. He asks the price.

And then STARTS PEELING OFF TWENTIES. Pulls out a wad of notes and starts counting them out on the counter.

He buys FOUR ENTIRE BOXES.

Turns out the kid was selling Pokemon commons at 50p each at the school gates and making more money a week than I was. If you cannot tell who your best customer of the day is going to be, you probably shouldn’t go around making assumptions as to who it MIGHT be. Do you want to live in a world where everyone is sizing up YOUR wallet to see if you are worth talking to? No. I guarantee you do not.

(You run a game store, so the answer is probably ‘not very big!’)

Everybody has value. Every single person you meet in a day, they are all heroes of their own story. They all crave validation, and you can give them validation by treating them all as if they – and their needs – were the single most important thing you needed to do that day.

This post is all about engagement. You already know that customers like to feel greeted when they come in a store – notice I said ‘feel greeted’ rather than ‘be greeted’ – that whole Games Workshop thing? It’s a bit creepy. A bit counterproductive. Like when McDonalds opened in Bristol and the staff all had to say ‘have a nice day’ – which, believe me, is not quite so effective a slogan when delivered in a monotone with a side order of world weary contempt. ‘ Have a NICE day…’

Used to be a store in Sheffield where the owner called everyone ‘sir’. With a lip curling snear.

Engagement is about being engaging. And so that’s the first important takeaway: Tone matters.

Open ended questions are better than closed questions. “Can I help you with anything today?” “No” Closed question. I bet that person is kicking themselves five minutes later, because you COULD help them but now they feel embarrassed even asking. Jeff Bezos never embarrasses you with personal interaction – net even when buying a gallon of lube and two hundred and fifty condoms.

Running a game shop can be surprisingly like running an adult entertainment store. Some people are embarrassed about what they know and like. Others are embarrassed by what they don’t know, but might like. And some folks are just there to gawp.

Thanks to Jeff, our customers don’t need us to vend goods and services to them. And they are often surprisingly keen to point that out. They need us to engage with them, to entertain them. Our stores are retail as entertainment, our competition is Netflix and Disney Plus. That Magic Prerelease is a tentpole event like Avengers is a tentpole movie. And why do we call them tentpoles? Because they support the whole damn circus.

The golden age of circus teaches us a lot about the act of engagement. Circuses would travel from city to city on specially built trains, flyering a destination for weeks before, erecting a city of greasepaint and canvas and sawdust overnight, putting on a show and leaving on the night train. They had a whole team of people to do engagement – advance teams, barkers, ringmasters, shills. An army of entertainers that weren’t wearing leotards that primed the audience to have a great time and part with their hard earned money.

The circus was an army that ran on cash in hand. The Greatest show on Earth

Which Hugh Jackman do you want to be? That’s your choice. “I’m the best at what I do,” glowering in the corner Wolverine Hugh Jackman, or “The Greatest Showman!” Hugh Jackman. Because one of those Hugh Jack…men? is going to make you less miserable in the long term.

PT Barnum was a gatekeeper par excellence. Can you believe there are eleven songs in The Greatest Showman? As a homage, here are my eleven top tips to a happier engagement.

1) Treat kids like adults. Kids love stuff, and they rarely get validated for loving stuff. Back ‘in the day’ we were the only store where we all went home and watched new episodes of Pokemon every night. We all had our favourites – mine was Psyduck. You are literally the only place some kids will ever go where they are treated like everyone else and not just as ‘kids’, so lean in to this.

While you are at it, treat adults like kids. Enthusiasm is infectious. Be enthusiastic. Believe in your products. Play them. Enthuse about them. Share the love, and share in the love others have for the things you sell.

This was a takeaway from my first ever game store, that let a fourteen year old come talk D&D to them every day.

2) The Infonugget Icebreaker technique. “The new D&D manual is going to be in Thursday!” I don’t really care what the customer wants to know or does know. I share snippets of what *I* know. Imagine yourself as a gardener spreading seeds. Who knows which ones will take root or not? But imparting information in this way – succinctly – is a great way to engage and prompt any potential follow up conversation. “I’ve never played D&D” is an invite to ask what game they do play, or to tell them about your Beginners D&D sessions every third Sunday, perfect for new players… see what I did there?

Instead of the Games Workshop fallback of “what army do you play?”, you are flipping it to “the new Space Wolves Codex is out Thursday. Maybe they care. Maybe they don’t. You engaged. But the ball is now in their court however they want to follow it up.

3) Demo demo demo demo demo demo demo demo… Batman! Passive demo tables set up a game and wait for the customer to touch it, then pounce on them to offer to teach them the basics. You think Hugh does that? The end credits would be rolling before Keala Settle belted out This is Me at that rate. Active demos solicit participation. The reason three card monte works is that you get engaged by remotely glancing in the direction. You’re not active demoing Gloomhaven, but there are plenty of games you can set up on your till and teach a one minute overview of.

4) Never assume anything. Or anyone. I always make a point of engaging with the folks who I least suspect to be gamers. Bored looking teenagers. Parents. Long suffering girlfriends and boyfriends. Young kids. Dogs. Every other store is going to engage with the obvious customer, but the secret to kids is the parents, the secret to partners with non gaming significant others is the significant other. And the dogs are just cute. What can I say? I’m a sucker for cute dogs.

If the worst part of engagement is somebody telling you they don’t understand anything you sell, it’s their kid/partner/owner that’s into it, you immediately became target number one on the Christmas present acquisition list. Engagement is about making connections, and you make those connections in the weirdest of ways. I am often the only game store that a customer’s partner has ever been in that talked to them. Ever.

“I just don’t understand how you play these games” is an invite to demo that one minute game you set out on your till. It’s an invite to “Beginners D&D every third Sunday!” And we sell tea and coffee, so worst case scenario it’s a beverage sale!

5) First taste is free! Decipher used to make a cardgame called Boycrazy. You collected pictures of hunky boys. It was awesome. I never sold a single booster but I gave a load of packs away as joke icebreaker gifts to bored teens dragged around town by their families. Now I have Magic Intro decks.

Those. Things. Are. Amazing.

We’ve given away Heroclix commons, Pokemon cards, thousands of intro decks, puzzles, stickers, sweets, biscuits, tea and coffee upon occasion. Things that cost us nothing but generate us goodwill. I’d give young kids Pokemon commons when they were in with their parents so the parents could browse the shelves in peace. Minimal expense, but as a parent myself? Priceless benefit!

6) Who would win in a race? Superman or the Flash? Asking a question can bring people into a conversation. Whenever I am having a conversation – with a regular, say – and I see somebody hovering on the periphery I bring them in. Our stores are non-exclusionary spaces, and that means always bringing more and more folks in. Throw the gates open! And this is where that starts. As a store owner – or worker – if I ask a customer what they have come in for today, it’s a closed question. but if two customers are talking to each other it’s the beginning of a friendship circle.

And it frees me up to work!

In the carnival, your regulars are your shills. They are the folks who are advertising your store because it’s the sort of store they play in. Nobody wants to eat in an empty restaurant, so make sure your space is full of shiny happy people who look like they are having a great time, but reserve the best seats in the house for the customer you don’t even know yet.

7) Always room for a small one. Look, my staff and I disagree on this. I always want to squeeze in an extra table, for that nice couple who just found the store and want to play boardgames for an hour. It’s not about the money for table hire – lord knows we give you that back in store credit. It’s about that feeling of being made to feel welcome in a space, to make that space your own in some way. Everyone has had that experience – that restaurant that made them feel especially welcome, that reopened the kitchen even though it was late. “We’re pretty busy but I’m sure we can sort things around and get you a table if you wanted to play” is much better than “Sorry, we’re fully booked”.

Always.

Again, it’s what we call ‘an in’. You are engaging with them in a way in which you are encouraging them to engage with you. To invest emotionally in their own experience of you. Turning a customer – a shopper – into a participant.

This used to be the holy grail of Organised Play store models. Participation was engagement, and engagement meant more sales for a store and more sales for a brand. Many stores now see Organised Play as its own thing, rather than an exercise in sales and marketing. Kind of reminds me of advertising agencies making commercials to win industry awards rather than sell product.

8) racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia have no place in your game store. We can be anything, anywhere, anywhen. We can play three gendered Shirren in Starfinder, or manage the power output of the Lower Ruhr valley in Powergrid, and one day the rest of the world will catch up. Your game store is a shining lighthouse of tolerance from your Bronies to your Yugimons. Here’s the thing though.

Not everyone is quite on the same page.

Most folks don’t set out to be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic. And you have every right to challenge that behaviour in your store. You should. As a game store you are a safe space, and folks will expect you to police that. But like I said, most people don’t set out to be bigots.

I prefer a technique where I take folks outside and ask them if anything is wrong? If everything is OK? Because, you know, some folks could… misconstrue words, attitudes, things people say, or post, or wear. As meaning somebody held views that – obviously – that person doesn’t really hold. I mean, who could think less of another human being because of their genitals or their religion when all we really care about is whether they love games as much as we do.

Your mileage may vary, but I’ve found it a compelling argument. I get it – I’m a straight white CIS het male and tolerance is my privilege. But everyone deserves the chance to change. Most people do.

9) Autism is a thing. Social anxiety is a thing. Depression is a thing. We are not always our best selves. We are not always mindful of others. We should cut others the slack we expect them to cut us. “You should go home – you’re not in a good place. But I’ll look forwards to seeing you tomorrow”. I’ve learned the hard way when to leave the shop. Too much stress. Too much anxiety. Parents are always “But my son is autistic and I’d be embarrassed if he had a meltdown” and we are like “hey, at Fan Boy Three we call that Tuesday”.

There’s a frequently made lazy correlation between extreme hobby engagement and autism. Nerds aren’t antisocial – they just don’t see the need for that watercooler conversation about last night’s TV – unless it’s a complex theory about Mandalorian politics during the Fall of the Republic. And they are totally down for that.

The more extreme hobby engagement is, the more gatekeepery it becomes. Unless you deal with folks with Aspergers on a regular basis, it can be intimidatingly (and unintentionally) pass-agg. Here’s the thing though – your store may be the only meaningful human interaction some people get. It’s tough caring about Dungeons and Dragons in a world that only cares about football. And growing up, my game store was there for me. For my friends. And I vowed that when I built my own store, I wasn’t going to pick cool kids like it was team sports all over again.

But you do need ground rules. Like team sports, all over again. This means sure, telling folks when they are being a bit too much. Reminding them how important being inclusive is, in a non-pejorative, non confrontational, non exclusionary way. Are they OK?

Is everything OK?

10) Is everything OK? You might have spotted by now that this is my default response to almost every social crisis in my polis. Nobody WANTS to be ostracised. Everybody wants to be welcome. Everyone wants their friendly local game store to be Cheers, with boosters instead of drinks. Witty one liners, a live studio audience, a recurring cast of colourful characters all worthy of their own spinoff. And it’s good to talk. To engage, long term – not just carnival barker to rube.

To talk and have somebody listen. Friend to friend.

11) Because People BUY off people they LIKE. That’s the secret. They say they shop on price and value, but if that was true no cafe or restaurant in the world would turn a profit. Shoppers engage emotionally before they engage financially. Everybody is a customer. Everybody is different. It’s like a giant puzzle box – the folks who want to be on the inside, the folks who want to share their knowledge, the folks who want to share your knowledge, the folks who came to be entertained. The folks who thought they were too cool to be taken in by the sights and sounds of the midway.

Happily playing the coconut shy and eating candyfloss.

So roll up, roll up gentle reader. Step this way into a place of wonder and amazement, where games of skill and chance await, games to test your dexterity and your intellect. Games with dice, games with cards, games with miniatures. All of time and space are yours to explore within these walls, where you enter as strangers and leave as friends.

And the only thing missing? The one thing that would make our lives – and yours – complete?

Is it SHOW TUNES?

No… It’s YOU!

And maybe Hugh Jackman.

I order biblically.

It was the Jews of Alexandria who first translated the Old Testament into Greek in the 3rd century BC. Alexander the Great had conquered most of the Ancient World and invented ice cream by then, and Koine Greek had become to lingua franca of its day.

This version – the Septuagint – became the standard disseminated text throughout Europe, until the theologian Jerome translated the Bible into Vulgate Latin around 400AD. It then took a thousand years of monks and gospels and psalters before anyone had a definitive English language version – John Wycliffe, in the 14th Century.

When you translate a text errors creep in. Before Miles Coverdale’s version of 1535 they were hand copies. Coverdale wasn’t the first translator to use William Caxton’s invention of the printing press to – ahem – mass produce – that would be William Tyndale in 1526. At every stage bits were left out, bits were put in, words and the meaning of words were changed. Numbers in particular.

The number 40 appears 146 times in all. 40 days. 40 nights. 40 spies. 40 years. To our ancestors 40 was a short hand way of meaning ‘many’. A long time. A big amount.

One. Few. Many. That’s how I order.

Last week I spent forty hours wandering the halls of Essen Spiele, looking for the many. I sell a lot of games, but I don’t sell them evenly. The more complex a game, the more niche a game, the more expensive a game the fewer I will probably sell. Remember crisp theory from my earlier blog post? Sometimes it helps to look at what we sell and how we sell it and who we sell it to as something those Hebrew tribes who wrote down the first Bible were intimately familiar with in the years before Moses and Exodus.

Three pyramids.

The first is our customer pyramid. Not all customers are created equal. At the base of the pyramid are casual players. Normal folks to whom playing games is a thing that they do – a pastime. They have heard that games are fun and they like the idea of fun. These people want a game buying experience that is as close to the buying experience of every other store they visit – clean, well designed, tidy, bright, happy friendly staff. These are not ‘destination store’ folks – they are main street folks.  

From the 8 billion people on the planet, these are the 20 million people who own Catan. The 12 million who own Ticket to Ride. The 275 million who own Monopoly.

A casual boardgamer might buy a game or two a year. In Germany, where boardgaming first broke through into mass public consciousness, that number is far higher. It’s much more common an activity – a pastime – that people just do as an entertainment option of an evening alongside the cinema or Netflix or a meal out.

Above the casual pastime tier is the hobbyist tier. The hobbyist buys more. Often a lot more. Now the problem becomes price sensitivity. If you are buying one boardgame a year – and it is Wingspan – you don’t care that you could save $20 online. If you buy one monthly, that soon adds up. Weekly? That’s a thousand dollars a year.

There used to be an adage that as soon as your casual magic players discovered competitive play, you lost them as a customer. You lost them to the online guys, the folks selling boxes out of car boots outside any Grand Prix, because they needed to be incentivised to shop with you.

Many retailers think this is unfair. We still provide the same degree of goods and/or services. Folks should pay a fair price. MSRP is that fair price determined by the manufacturer. But the hobbyist feels that they have invested time, emotion and money in their hobby. They are skilled. They spend more. And that this loyalty – to the hobby, and potentially to your store – should have a worth.

And they are right.

Many stores discount Magic but not boardgames. People say ‘but it’s a $150 purchase – I need to discount it’ but many boardgame hobbyists spend far more than that far more regularly. None of us can compete with price against online. I know there are online deep discounter folks in the UK who cheat tax. I know there are online deep discounter folks in the UK who are multi millionaires who run their businesses at a loss because they get off on crushing their enemies.

I don’t like that, but I have to deal with it.

At Fan Boy Three we do 10% if you buy three or more boardgames or expansions. We’ve also knocked a bit off the more expensive items – usually around 10%. It’s not a deep discount level of deep discounting, but it’s an agreement to meet our most engaged customers half way, without them needing to worry about stock availability and shipping.

Many people consider that the hobbyist is the top tier. But that is reserved for the cogniscenti – ‘those who know’. These are the alpha gamers – not enough for them to buy games, they have to buy games first. They have to fly into Essen and get the hotlist. They are the Kickstarter superbackers, the day one pledgers. These are the players who know all the designers personally, who have top range gaming tables that you could row across the Atlantic in and games rooms with library shelving.

These are probably not your customers. They go to source, not because they can’t pay but because they have to be first. They are validated through their hobby, through their knowledge and through their hobby knowledge.

I back lots of Kickstarters, because the cogniscenti don’t always call it right, and the id wants what the id wants. These are the apex of the pyramid, the capstone, the 1%. But if you run a top flight game store, these are the people most like you. And like Professor Slughorn, if you woo them they’ll often happily share their knowledge.

The issue is that the knowledge is often cogniscenti flavoured. Gloomhaven might be the number one game on BGG but I can’t sell it to granny at Christmas. And granny isn’t subscribing to Jamey Stegmeier’s industry blog.

I’m sadly going to have to do some actual work.

One. Few. Many. The customer pyramid roughly maps on to the stock pyramid.

At the base of the pyramid is the many. These games share common characteristics – they are fun to play, easy to demo, often reasonably cheap. Very few ‘many’ games break £50 – that’s a sacrosanct price point. Your brain is doing price point calculation subconsciously – we know that 99p is a fallacy – a way of tricking the brain into believing that a product is cheaper than it really is, because that penny doesn’t really have meaning individually. But your brain does the math anyway.

If a game goes over £50 it probably halves its sales. I typically drop the prices to £50 if I can. Below £50 it is ‘less than £50’ and most customers aren’t that price sensitive. Below £50 my price points are usually £15, £20 & £35. Those price points are also value points – if it looks like great value in terms of box size at that price point, it will sell. If it doesn’t, it won’t – because its sat on a shelf next to a stack of games that have a more attractive price to component to fun ratio.

Demos sell games. When I spend my time trawling Essen for unknown gems I can sell many of I am looking for games that are eminently demoable. Fun. Elevator pitch games. I’ll be thinking ‘which of my staff will get a kick out of demoing this game?’ Can we demo quickly? Does it have table presence if we leave it set up? Does the box make it look fun? Is it actually fun?

These are the many.

Most games at Essen are hobbyist games. They are great, and I’d probably get a kick out of playing them. Some fill a niche. 18xx games fill a niche. Splotter games fill a niche. Rarely are these games a ‘many’ purchase, because my stock rooms are not infinite spaces.

If you wandered the halls of Essen you would think that these games WERE the many. Logically if my stock pyramid mapped on to my customer pyramid these would be the few.

But they are ‘the one’.

In previous years I would have taken a case of pretty much anything that made the hotlist. But we are all seeing too many games in this market at too high a price point. Traditionally we would remainder such titles in a sale, but over the summer we had a large sale which failed to shift some of our overstock, even at half price. The price point in the mid tier is now simply too high to remainder and it still not be too high for a casual sale table punt. I am literally paying people to take last year’s hotlist games away.

And these games are excellent. I wouldn’t buy them in case if they weren’t – in fact I wouldn’t buy them at all if they weren’t. And some are by my friends. But I can’t demo them and I can’t remainder them and often in the case of Kickstarter games they arrived a year after the buzz died down, late, after the game had hit distro and been deep discounted by online weasels.

Tough sell.

For me, cogniscenti games are the few. For me, cogniscenti games are like fine wine. I lay them down and wait. The bigger the customer pyramid grows, the more hobbyists it can support. The more hobbyists, the more will become cogniscenti. And then they want Too Many Bones. And then they want Kingdom Death Monster.

And I have them.

Because the market grows, constantly. This is the third pyramid – the ephemeral pyramid of public perception and market penetration tangentially linked sales and stock levels. Three pyramids intimately connected, like the three pyramids of Giza. Khafre, Khufu, Menkaure.

The gaming industry is pyramid selling.

Nobody buys a game which nobody plays. The more people play, the more infrastructure the hobby can support. Stores like us. Deep discounters. Boardgame cafes. Podcasts and influencers. The more companies. Once ‘the games industry’ was Parker Brothers and Avalon Hill. Once there were fifty game stores in the whole of the UK, and most also sold comics. Once there was only Snakes and Lattes.

As a quantum retailer I dislike extremes. A pure cafe model allows you to play but not buy. Even at capacity every night of the week with different people I could only service 1% of the population of Manchester. On the other extreme, deep discounter Cool Stuff Inc sells $25 million of games annually. While that sounds like a large number it only represents about 2.5% of the total US market. Don’t get me wrong – that’s big. But if the entire industry was reduced to CSI there would be immediate and catastrophic failure globally. Because nobody can lose 97.5% of their sales and nobody can grow fast enough to mitigate against that.

Increasingly we all lose market share to Amazon. Our distributors, our publishers – desperate to prostrate themselves on Jeff Bezos’ altar. But Amazon can’t recommend titles. It can’t demo games. It can’t be that bright, welcoming, inclusive space. That point of infection. Nobody browses Amazon and suddenly thinks ‘Oh that’s right, I have decided to play boardgames today for no reason’ – they shop for expediency, not experience.

Our stores are the base of the pyramid. The foundation stones for market growth. The foundation stones for market penetration. When somebody buys a game from us they play it with others. Gaming is a virus, like playing Pandemic. “Like Monopoly?” people say, because 275 million copies. Exposed, some of them look for places to buy. Places like us. We are the growth vector because we sell the growth vector.

Wizards had the right idea with Premium. Make your store light, bright and welcoming. Fill your shelves for the many, with the many. Scatter the few. Pinpoint the one. Getting it wrong and remaindering a $20 game to $10 is never as bad as having to remainder a $100 game to $50. Pick your publishers according to the ones that most align with your own in store ethos. The ones who can drive those customers to you to convert likes into sales, potential retail energy into kinetic.

The pyramids of Egypt have stood for almost five thousand years. It’s a pretty stable structure. But there are so many companies colonising the mid, hobbyist tier that the market is beginning to look more like a tower.  And we all know what happened to Babel.

The needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few. The needs of the few always outweigh the needs of the one. Every pyramid begins by laying one single stone, but it’s never the capstone. There is no shame in being the base of the Pyramid.

That’s where the Pharaoh hid their treasure!

I wandered the Essen halls for forty hours to bring you this blog post. My name is Dave Salisbury and I’ve been the quantum retailer.

The first city states sprang up along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Eridu. Uruk. Ur. The history of cities is the history of trade, because it is impossible to centralise all those amenities and bureaucracy in one place without centralising goods and/or services.

Without trade everyone starves.

We merchants serve a function. The Jamey Stegmeier of throwing spears might make the best throwing spears in the world. But if he divides his time between making throwing spears and selling throwing spears… he makes less throwing spears. As a publisher you give up a portion of your profit – a margin – to people who can increase the reach and market penetration of your product. Heck, if you think you can go it alone be my guest. Plenty of people do on Kickstarter.

The biggest game on Kickstarter was Exploding Kittens. No, not the most funded. The most backers. They had the advantage of the Oatmeal, so global reach before they launched. And they sold 219,000 copies. I mean, that’s pretty amazing. We’d all be happy with that, right?

Settlers of Catan has sold 20 million.

Now, they have had a twenty year head start, I’ll give them that. But there’s a difference of magnitude between the sales of Catan and Kittens. Kittens on Kickstarter was 1% of the Catan sales. And that’s the biggest Kickstarter EVER in terms market penetration.

That’s what merchants do. They sell your throwing spears in Uruk as well as Eridu. In Lagash and Umma. In Kish. And if you make the very best throwing spears, your name spreads. And you can demand a higher price for your better quality. People will seek them out.

The first recorded boardgame comes from Ur. We know the rules because a Babylonian scribe called Itti-Marduk-balāṭu transcribed them a thousand years later. Copies were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun, and as far away as Crete and Sri Lanka.

The earliest cities were city states. They fought amongst each other for resources. Before the Lydians invented money in 600BC, trade was by tally and token. By barter. The early civilisations often used representative clay tokens instead that are instantly recognisable to any boardgamer. Literally they traded wood for sheep.  

Some say that money is the root of all evil, but to me it is democratising. If you own five hundred bushels of grain you cannot travel with it. Your options are limited. With money your options are limitless. Trade wasn’t just bringing goods, it was bringing something else.

It was bringing lifestyle. 

In 2004 the critical theorist Homi K Bhaba invented third space theory. Third spaces are what the modern game stores are – places where people come together, between work and education and home, to forge their own cultural identities. Before the city states of Ancient Greece, your society was top down or it was toppled down. It was all god kings and smiting.

And then suddenly it was philosophy.

The Greek City State was known as a polis. But more importantly, this is also the word used to describe a body of citizens. The Greeks were no longer thinking of the citizens of inhabitants of a city; they were thinking of the city as a physical manifestation of the citizens. Up until then history, society, culture – everything had been built by winners. Now it could be built by thinkers.

When Plato wrote his Republic he laid out the template for the ideal polis, one ruled by wisdom, courage, moderation and justice. Socrates took it one stage further by suggesting that human choice was motivated by the desire for happiness.

Your store is a third space. And by extension, your store is also a polis. A place with its own laws, its own codes, its own citizens. And you are its platonic ideal – the enlightened philosopher monarch.

When you transgressed in an ancient Greek City State, the citizens would get together and vote on your expulsion. They would cast ostakon – tiny clay chips – into bowls. In secret. This wasn’t about your guilt or innocence – it was about whether or not you were a dick. More ayes than nays, and you were out. Ostracised. Banished from the City State for ten years to think about maybe not being a dick.

As an enlightened philosopher monarch, you understand that the things that hurt your citizens hurt you. You ARE your citizens. You are your store and your customers are your store. If it wasn’t a partnership before, it is now – they can buy everything cheaper from a tax avoiding weasel online and both of you know it.

If your customers have a problem, you have a problem. Transgression is not about burden of proof, it’s about burden of perception.

In D&D perception (and insight – social perception) is based off Wisdom, the first platonic ideal.

The second is courage. Look, that dick player may be the biggest whale in your community. You would honestly be surprised how often that is, in fact, the case. having money gives you options, and one of those options is to intimidate others through your buying power.

There’s a famous story about Kerry Packer the Australian aviation magnate. He was once playing cards in a casino, and a very loud American on the next table to him was disturbing his game. So he asked the guy to maybe moderate his behaviour. And this guy turns to him and says “I’m a millionaire, buddy. I can do anything I want” so Kerry Packer says:

“Flip you for it?”

Players will come to you if they think you are going to act. If you have the courage to step in.

Here’s the thing. Stepping in doesn’t mean escalation. There’s a lot of reasons that people are dicks, and escalating isn’t usually a way of stopping people being dicks. Believe it or not I used to work security for a while. I’d be working a shift with all these big guys who would talk a good fight about how they hoped something would kick off so they could use their Krav Maga or whatever, and when something looked like it would kick off I’d be there buying both parties a drink. There’s a lot of “you spilled my pint” shit in British pubs, and neither side wants to back down.

But both sides like a free pint.

This is where the third platonic ideal comes in. Moderation.

If there is a problem in my polis I want to know why. Not who. Why is often a function of who. Once I have identified who, we need to talk. There are lots of reasons why people are dicks. We are social spaces where people go to unwind, and sometimes they are facing shit in their lives that they can’t process. So they punch down or they punch out. Adult mental health support is minimal. Depression can make you self harm in more ways than just the obvious physical ones.

You shop has worth. It has a value beyond the goods you sell. Our customers – our citizens – have a value above and beyond the amount they spend. I owe it to everyone to give anyone the chance to take stock, to learn that their behaviour may be antithetical to the other members of the polis and that they are on a path to ostracision. And then I will listen to whatever shit has gone down that they cannot process.

And then comes justice. Some people are too far gone. When you steal of others you betray the trust of the entire polis. I once had this friend. I had popped around to his house and he had these huge stacks of books everywhere. “You must be an avid reader!” I said, admiring his eclectic taste. “nah, professional shoplifter. Any book you want, half price!” Turns out he would steal to order, but it was easier to take an entire shelf to get one book that he’d sell at half price. To order.

I did not buy any books from him. One day he was admiring my new TV, and asking if I was insured.

NO. THIS IS NOT THE SOCIETY I WANT.

Some Yugioh players think it is OK to steal because they themselves have had stuff stolen. NO. NOT THE SOCIETY YOU WANT. 

Justice can be heading that off. Drawing a line. It’s not about what you want, what makes you feel better. It’s about what your society needs. We are store owners. We do not need burden of proof. The management ALWAYS reserves the right of admission. That’s a given policy in every store, in every third space. Policy comes from polis, as does police force.

Everyone likes a good banning. As a total liberal I ban very few people, but sometimes you’ve done things that leave me no choice. And sometimes – occasionally – you haven’t, and I still have to ban you. The Greeks understood that sometimes you needed to be told to go to get your shit together. Outside the city walls there was no protection, no companionship, no comfort. I’ve seen Les Mis. You aren’t a prisoner of your past. You can change at any point. Redefine yourself. Dedicate yourself not to total selfish dickery but to increasing the sum total of human happiness.

Maybe you’ll even open your own game store.