As a quantum retailer my job breaks down into four main areas:

1) keeping people happy

My staff, my suppliers, my judges, my product champions, my customers.

My staff are relatively easy. They want regular hours, a decent salary, a safe and mostly pleasant working environment. I can give them perks like staff discount, have enough of them so nobody has to work too long or awkward a shift, have holidays when they need them, have responsibility, have fun. Get to play games.

My suppliers want me to pay for their stock on time, and they want me to sell their stock in large quantities.

My judges want what my staff want – a fair rate of recompense. They want events to run with lots of players, because that’s where a judge makes a difference. They want to feel valued. Validated.

My product champions want their product front and centre, with lots of players again. They want to feel that they have invested their time, their money, their emotional energy wisely. They don’t want to be the one person in the room who cares.

My customers want stock, and lots of it. They want events. They want fun. They want people to play against. They want decent prices. They increasingly want decent food as well.

2) filling my shelves

In order to bring shoppers into my store I need to fill my shelves. With things they might want to buy. You can never have everything, never be everything to everyone.

The first and most important tier are evergreens. Imagine if you had never been into a game shop before? All this wonder, all this fun… where do you start? With Catan, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne… With Pokemon – instantly recognisable to every child on the planet. This is your first tier – satisfied first time shopper, who might only ever buy one game.

That’s not a great market. I mean, sure – it’s the biggest. but it’s an infrequent market and you are competing with big box. But you have to have it.

Why? Because the second tier of customer expects to see it. Back when we put books into Travelling Man we learned it wasn’t good enough to just sell the latest Harry Potter. Folks didn’t want to shop from you for the latest unless you had all the others on your shelf, too. The more you had, the more you sold of the latest.

Yes, this is wasteful. Yes, this is counterintuitive. You have a thousand boardgames to sell ten. But you sell a lot of those ten.

All those evergreens are set dressing to appeal to the hobbyist. They want to see games they already own, because those games justify their own purchases. It reinforces their choice of hobby. Validates them.

Validation is very important, to all of us. When you tell a staff member they have done a good job, they are validated. Dopamine. Oxytocin. When you tear them off a strip, devalidation. And we’ll be coming back to that in a moment.

Hobbyists are the biggest tier in terms of consumer spend, but they require the most stock. And they are fickle, because they are more sensitive on price. That need to have loads of stock on your shelves is met – by the internet. Which can claim to have everything somewhere.

But sometimes finding it takes knowledge.

The top tier are what we call the cogniscenti – the ‘ones who know’. You essentially lost these folks to Kickstarter the moment it appeared. Plenty of money, plenty of desire to buy, but they know who published it, when, and how much it is worth. You get these in all hobbies. This is also the smallest category, the uber-hobbyist, the gaming 1%. To attract them you need the Kickstarter exclusives, the first printing, the unobtainium.

I probably get asked once or twice a week for sealed boxes of Pokemon Base Set. In order to have still had base set, at a rate of one or two boxes a week I would have had to stockpile about 2000 displays. So being the go to store for cogniscenti is pretty hard. It’s like selling gold plated superyachts for nerds.

None of us have infinite shelf space, infinite warehouse space and infinite money. So it’s a curated choice and selection.

3) filling my store

Here the thing. Once I have filled my store with stock I need to fill my store with events. It makes me happy, because I know my turnover will be up, my customers happy, my staff happy, my suppliers happy. Everyone is happy when my store is jumping. And like the best restaurant in town, I can always squeeze in ‘one more table’ – to make that random drop in couple happy.

Nobody wants to eat alone in a dead restaurant.

I schedule a lot of events. I schedule most of them in discussion with my community a month or so out. Bigger events go on the docket six months out. My goal is capacity, so I’m quadranting the store into big event, two smaller events, four little events, eight boardgaming/RPG tables. Bigger events eat more quadrants. The biggest events eat every available space.

A quadrant itself is actually pretty flexible. My capacity is around 160, so essentially its 40 but because of store layout not every quadrant is equal in size. One zone is 48, another is 24. And the tables are flexible enough to move between game types and zones.

At Fan Boy Three we run over 40 events a week. We try and cover 90% of most Organised Play game lines, and throw in boardgame demo events, roleplaying, and Learn2play and paint activities regularly.

Sometimes our events don’t fire. This can be pretty devastating. We can run one event with twenty players, then run the same event the next month with three. On a date the community chose. There’s no real accounting for it.

If forty stores within an hour are scheduling events, nobody needs to travel to play. If there’s an app version, nobody even needs to get out of bed to play. You could schedule an event that previously filled two quadrants and get a table. You could have hired a judge. Printed posters and fliers. The expense is not just the cost of the tournament – it’s the cost to you of not being full with another event. And there’s a long term reputational cost, as people stop coming because that event didn’t fire.

Your snowball effect is melting

And so we dance this dance, knowing that any misstep costs us. The community will always be keen to tell you ‘where you went wrong’. It’s usually ‘make it cheaper’, ‘give more or better prizes’, ‘advertise it better’. But these all have a cost, which they do not have to pay. And that cost isn’t just financial.

4) managing

As a game store owner you have to manage people, you have to manage customer expectations, you have to manage suppliers and you have to manage money. Without money you die. Bleed out. You can do that for a while, in extremis, but too much of that and you will be gone.

My operating margin is about 20%. My trade margin about 35%. Wastage and shelving also has a cost. There’s plenty of things I have to discount below operating margin to sell. This makes my actual profit low, but my turnover high. If I don’t mess it up, I stay in business. I make enough money to pay myself a salary. I make enough money to reinvest in stock and improvements.

When an event fails and costs me money, that’s real money. Mess up on monetising a big event and that’s my salary for the month. It’s hard to monetise Organised Play to have a functional operating margin (unless it’s a big event). The bigger the event the bigger the risk. And risk equates to stress.

So you have to manage your stress.

Running an Organised Play store is a rollercoaster ride of emotion. The expectation that you are ‘always on’, because your shop is your stage and you are the Greatest Showman. Being magnanimous in loss is something you have to learn to manage. And it’s hard. I’ve lost thousands of pounds on a single event, just as surely as if I’d gambled the staff payroll on black. Bad date, bad Facebook algorithm, event clash, one Yugioh event my head judge stole three top tier decks while deck checking them and I had to pay the players £1000 in compensation. Your players can be salty about their losses, but woe betide you if you ever are.

And I don’t always manage it as well as I would like.

Which brings us back to Schroedinger.

I like to teach my work experience kids something I call Schroedingers Boss. We will all have had a bad boss who devalidates us and increases our stress. That’s often why many of us work for ourselves now.

You will often not be responsible for your boss’ bad mood. There’s a lot of stress, and some of that is probably how they can pay you, how they can hit the targets imposed by their bosses, and keep their own job. Maybe somebody took their parking space this morning, or a pigeon crapped on their new coat, or they have a parent with dementia. And they come in the office and they punch down, because they can’t punch up.

And it makes you feel like shit.

So I would take the work experience kids out for a walk around Manchester and I would give them the choice. We could go back into the store and say “Bob, I know I don’t often say this, but you’ve done a great job lately. I know I’ve been under a lot of stress but I just wanted to let you know how much I appreciate you being my employee”

Or we can storm in and say “Bob, you useless waste of space. Look at this counter. Look at this mess. Why haven’t you done all those jobs I asked you to do. Hiring you was the worst decision I ever made”.

Bob is like the cat. His state is currently indeterminate. One boss will sap his energy, his spark, devalidate him. And the other will give him a boost of Oxytocin.

And we have all been bad, cat-killing Schroedinger.

Last week I did a two day Mental Health First Aid course. And my big take away from that is that we should all think about the stress we inflict on others.

If you are reading this as a store owner, this is why we have those Facebook groups. To decompress. To let the stress out among the only people who can understand the immense pressures we are under.

If you are a player reading this, please try and understand. The stresses we face in business are huge. They take an immense personal toll. There is not a store owner in the world who does not think your game, your enjoyment, your happiness is not worth putting themselves through the wringer to facilitate. We do that daily. Weekly. Monthly. Yearly. Back to the well time and time again.

Maybe we should all try thanking each other a bit more. I like my players. I follow their lives, cheer their victories, commiserate with their defeats. I’ve seen them grow, find jobs, get married, have kids. I can’t help but feel invested in their lives. Because the world is full of bad, cat killing Schroedingers. And these places we built together out of dreams and cards and tiny plastic guys? They are a special kind of something. A triumph of hope and community over experience.

Is it worth it?

I only know my own answer: hell yes.

I’ve been the quantum retailer. Maybe I’ll see some of you in Essen – I’ll be the guy at The Atlantic bar with the suspicious purring box

Today I want to talk about existential threats.

Every big beast of a game is a rollercoaster. New players enter. Old players leave. Every new edition is a jumping on point, but it is also a jumping off point. You look at all those books or unpainted miniatures, and instead of happiness you feel shame.

Obviously I’m forty years shame free here, but still. One bad bill, one bad breakup? Who knows. Take stock, Marie Kondo style. People do it so often that the cable TV industry coined a phrase for it.

Churn.

If more subscribers jump ON than jump OFF, everything is rosy. If the opposite occurs, then a whole floor of TV execs are marched to the guillotine.

Technology is a strange bedfellow for the game store. I mean we are nerds, doing nerdy things. Avengers made everyone a nerd doing nerdy things. For the reasons we covered in the two part Selling Happiness series, face to face interaction will always be more inherent satisfying to our brain chemistry than the blinking red light of the modem.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry.

The world’s biggest game has an online competitor. A huge relaunch a few years earlier took everyone by surprise. Suddenly everyone wanted to play. Suddenly every store wanted to stock it. Shelves filled to bursting with stock, and expansion followed expansion followed expansion. Playing was expensive – if you wanted to be ‘competitive’ – but more importantly you needed other people. Due to the magic of the internet these people could be anywhere, everywhere, anywhen. Whenever you logged on.

The year was 2004. The world’s biggest game was Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition. Its online competitor was World of Warcraft. We had opened Fan Boy Three six months earlier.

As part of our opening, we had made outreach to the local RPG club. Roleplaying was to be the centrepiece of our new store. I wanted to take Organised Play and expand it, in new areas. Few stores in the UK did anything in store – most activities were clubs, in pub function rooms and scout huts. But we had visibility. We had street presence. We had footfall.

Within a month we had ten tables of roleplayers on a Tuesday night. If your group had women in it, you played in the window. Representation matters. Visibility matters.

Six months later we were struggling to fill two. People would cancel to go raiding. Warcraft required no friends. No table. A minimal investment. No going out. No bad weather. No transport costs. No need for clothes. You could just sit at home in your underpants and simultaneously conquer Azeroth at any time of the day or night.

The Warcraft TCG pulled some of them back – as buyers, and we did exceptionally well with the OP for a while on the back of Spectral Tigers – but it was hard to compete. We remaindered all our Mongoose 3rd Edition books, and wondered what to do.

Four years later we had our answer.

Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition was the perfect product to Warcraftify. Anytime you came in store, we had people to play with. They’d just come, hang out. You can see some of them in the Dungeons and Fanboys video on Youtube. With a constant on tap cadre of players, just rock up to Fan Boy three, ask about D&D and we had a game going in minutes. I ran Tyma 1-1 so many times I could probably run it by memory ten years later if you asked me to! I personally logged 350 sessions the first year.

There were big meetups every time a new module dropped. Private session zeros for our DMs. Random folks who had never ever played before were pounced upon and playing – and buying – and coming back – daily. Most things that Warcraft did, we did. But we did it with added Oxytocin. By the time Martial Power 2 was released, we were ordering more on launch than Amazon UK.

My one store. With no online presence.

For a year now, Magic has had its own online competitor. And its Magic.

On the plus side, this is great news for Wizards. It’s not the first time they’ve tried to implement the Magic experience online – Magic the Gathering Online ran fits clunky little engine along the track two years before World of Warcraft. But this is definitely slicker, and will have attracted 3 million players by 2019 with an expectation of hitting 11 million by 2021.

Many of those players are ‘paper’ Magic players.

When I was a Travelling Man we had four stores. One of the things I did was to model the potential spending power of a city. I did that by calculating the amount Travelling Man Leeds, Derby, Nottingham and York generated, then mapped the data onto the population aged 18-35. It was pretty consistent. You could essentially model the nerd pound. Nerds don’t ‘spend more’ because there are more things to spend on. They have rent, rates, food, transport, clothes, the cinema. The nerd pound was remarkably consistent across all four stores, so much so that we could use it to model Fan Boy Three. We knew that there was £450,000 of nerd pound gaming budget in the city before we opened.

But before you start booking flights to Seattle with pitchforks, there’s a few more things to consider.

In 2009 Wizards released Duels of the Planeswalkers for console. Unwittingly they had kind of invented app games before we had the phones to play them. Duels was light – just enough Magic to get you started, with a driver to stores if you wanted more depth.

It was an instant hit.

Soon there was an actual carrot in store in the form of a promo pack. Everyone wanted it, so much so that existing players bought the game on multiple formats to get multiple packs.

The players that bought Duels and played it had a pastime. The players who got Duels for the promo had a hobby. Hobby’s cost more, but they are more rewarding. You get more out. More Dopamine. More Oxytocin.

Here’s the thing. Players who played Duels who enjoyed Magic were the economic driver behind Wizards exponential growth in those years. Return to Ravnica. Huge FNMs. Huge PTQs. It’s not just individuals who get huge Dopamine spikes form hitting their goals, companies do too.

Like Warcraft, Arena is cheaper. There are always players. Games are faster. Arguably more ‘fun’. But a million virtual people in a room is still just you, and that will always be our USP. People. Community. Belonging. At its height Warcraft had 12 million subscribers. it has a fraction of that now. Hearthstone claims a hundred million. Candy Crush Saga 272 million.

Arena has three.

Warcraft changed the world. It turned a generation on to rolelaying. Sure, it barely benefited us at the time, but we all reaped its rewards. We weren’t just waiting for our D&D players to get bored and come back – we were waiting for their friends and their kids. Orcs, elves, trolls, gnomes – these are common everyday words now. We understand quests. We understand experience and levelling up. People gamerfied everyday tasks so we are chased by zombies on our morning run. Walk to hatch your eggs in Pokemon Go.

The secret is, you store has never been part of the retail industry. it was always the entertainment industry. Your competition was Netflix and chill, or Avengers, or Bowlarama. And if the Netflix Magic show and Arena turn 100 million folks onto how to play Magic, long term we WILL reap the reward.

But I understand that’s not what you want to hear if you can’t fire drafts and standard events.

Because Warcraft WAS a flaming scythe that cut down an industry. Few companies that were big at my first GAMA Trade Show in 2001 are with us now. The game store evolved too – into the Organised Play model – and now we have to change again. If you had not diversified before, now is the time. Think about the ways in which YOUR store, YOUR unique USP IS a unique USP. No lemming ever got rich by following the other lemmings.

You. Will. Lose. Revenue. To. Arena.

You simply will. It’s just not possible to go back to the well again and again and still find water in it. Short term at least – while Wizards see our players as the easiest way to build their online brand. But in time millions of players who have just learned to play Magic from Arena after seeing the show on Netflix will need somewhere to play. With others. Imagine them stepping, blinking, out into the light. It will help you through the dark times ahead.

Because there are dark times ahead.

Few stores can survive any downturn in turnover. Lop the top 10% of sales off most balance sheets and you have trouble. It’s harder to lop that 10% off payroll, off rent, off rates, off inventory cost. Unless you were making money hand over fist in terms of net profit you are in trouble. Since most stores make zero net profit, trouble is what they are in.

This was the secret to Amazon. They didn’t need ALL the sales, just enough of them to bankrupt the other channels to market. Few big box stores were making margins like that – most big British Supermarkets rely on pennies in the pound and long sales terms. This is the part of the thing Wizards simply cannot understand. To them, they gave us the opportunity to profit from selling their goods, and they still are. It’s greedy of us to expect to have 100% of the market. 90% is surely enough? Then 80%. Then 70%. Eventually a cascade effect of non sustainability will kill even the biggest game stores – and we are already seeing that.

The frog is slowly being boiled.

Don’t be a lemming or a frog. Adapt. Evolve. Diversify. I thought Warcraft would kill me. It didn’t. I adapted. Diversified. And you will too. The future will be brighter than you could ever believe.

Let’s talk boosternomics.

I often use boosters to explain economic problems to work experience students. Let’s pretend we were running a Magic tournament. Everybody who wants to play pays a booster into the pot. We then run a tournament. The winner of that tournament wins all the boosters. 36 players in, one booster box out.

There is nothing wrong with running a tournament like that. Winner take all. Most of the other players can afford to risk a booster entry on being the winner and taking it all. Last I heard, Poker was pretty big. World Series of Poker 2019, $10,000 buy in, 8,569 entrants, $10Million for the winner.

Here’s the thing though. Most people don’t win. Not winning is, how shall I put this? A Negative Play Experience. Is it worse if you were defeated in the final? Worse if you were player 8,569?

Unless you are in a sealed environment where you have to play, over time, the players who constantly perform poorly will either ‘get gud’ or stop playing. The more one player consistently wins, the faster this will probably happen. The more games there are to play, the more options there are to be the king of any particular hill.

Winners like this system. But they don’t like a system that only delivers twenty players instead of 36. Or eight. Or one. Which is what happens over time.

So perhaps a system where everyone pays in a booster, plays a tournament and gets a booster back is better. Flat prize support is fair, its casual, you don’t need to be good to feel welcome. But under this system the only incentive to play better is to feel better. And why would you invest time and money without a Return on Investment?

You see this in replicated in every political economic discourse. Why try if everyone gets the same rewards. Why try if 35 people out of every 36 lose? Socialism versus Capitalism.

 My mother used to say that striving was its own reward. But she wasn’t running Magic tournaments.

The original concept of Organised Play was as a sales and marketing tool. People would see games being played and want a piece of that action. They’d want the Dopamine hit from buying and the Oxytocin hit from playing. And the more they’d play, the more they’d buy.

From stores, theoretically. Because the internet didn’t exist.

Richard Garfield’s original concept for Magic: the Gathering was the card game that would be different whenever you played against a new opponent. Everyone would buy a deck and a couple of boosters and play each other and be constantly “oh my godness, what does that card do – I’ve never seen that before!” But it was such a success it spawned game magazines that previewed every card and presented price lists, and the values went up and there were singles dealers… and I think it is safe to say that if Peter Adkinson had any idea of the lightning he had captured in his bottle he’d have done it differently!

Nobody expected it to be this big.

The more people played, the more they wanted to buy, because the more they wanted to win.

Winning itself is a hit. Of Dopamine. Of Adrenaline. Success or failure at the turn of a card. In those days people still gambled for each other’s cards – ante. Yeah, that died fast.

Most early tournaments rewarded the top of the field.

But those folks KNEW that they had won. Knew they had done well. I found it… weird that we were not, as an industry, rewarding participation. I’d come from WizKids – from HeroClix and Mechwarrior. There were always prizes for the judge and the fellowship, to encourage good sportsmanship. Mike Jarvis always won it.

Winning wasn’t everything.

A lot of those games companies made those prize packs and prize figures available for free. It was a thank you for supporting them. It meant it was easy to monetise tournaments and still make them cheap.

Konami had the Negative Play Experience – the idea that if a player wasn’t having fun, they might not want to play. Wizards had EV – Expected Value – the idea that if there wasn’t enough of a prize, nobody would play in the first place. If nobody plays there is no visibility, no community, no incentive to ‘get gud’.

There’s no game.

I used to run a lot of high end tournaments, including two of the three biggest PTQs in UK history. My concept was simple – flat prizing for the T8, mostly flat participation prizing for the field. That way the folks who just come for the day out to see friends get a little Dopamine hit at the end as a thank you – and a big Oxytocin hit – and those big comp players feel that travelling and playing in a twelve hour Magic event was worth it.

Worth it – Expected Value – is a hard thing to arbitrate. Players have an expectation of event cost, an expectation of event quality, an expectation of judge professionalism and only the winner is actually happy at the end of the day, so squaring the circle is hard. They have no expectation of your profit.

Konami believe that every player should get their full entry back in product. But woe betide a store that ran without judge team or top heavy prizing. Negative Review Experience.

The art becomes in doing the math, working out break even, and adjusting it for happiness. Boosternomics.

In the beginning I talked about Capitalist models versus Socialist models. But we are a store. We have product at MSRP and we have margin. And that gives us some wiggle room that the Treasury Department does not have. The Organised Play equivalent of quantitative easing.

My tournaments are primarily priced to be affordable. A tournament that is over-priced is an Oxtocin black hole. Fewer ‘community’ players, more entitled players. EV breeds entitlement – it’s almost the definition of it. Look, we are stores – we are no strangers to RoI. We don’t have a monopoly on it. Top tier players expect value like billionaires expect limousines. Some have flown in. How can your $10, $20, $50 tournament generate enough prizing to justify that expense? They are running a constant balance sheet and its always in the red.

Stop trying to make these people happy.

Your target rich environment are the community players. People for whom opening a booster HAS VALUE. A booster has minimal value to you, just like it has minimal value to a top tier comp player. So use it to spread happiness.

That player who got a bad sealed pool. That player who missed out on the cut. That player who wore a funny hat, or brought his mates up in the car and scrubbed out and now has to wait for them. Five boosters is what? Less than fifteen dollars?

(We joke about the hat, but ‘wear a hat, win a mat’ was a feature at our Yugioh Sneak Peeks for three years, until a guy turned up without one and made this amazing crown out of Yugioh cards while playing. That hat was unbeatable!)

At smaller events too.

You see, those big events – with participation prizes and reasonable entry costs to attract casual players – are potential money spinners. Every player you get above break even is at best an extra booster paid out. Your break even is your T8 prizing and your judge and venue costs. Add it together, take off any participation prize from your entry cost and divide the one by the other.

Every extra player you get is profit.  

Smaller events are about expectation management. A tiny number of players is a buzzkill. For you. for the person who turned up. Modern retail is entertainment – sometimes you still have to put on the greasepaint and do the show for an audience of one. The show must go on. That person deserves happiness – they came. Before now I’ve closed the entire shop and taken everyone in it to the cinema.

But first I try to make sure that every event fires. I put staff in. I put random people in to draft for the shop. I was losing money and energy and happiness anyway. Giving everyone an extra booster, or a free event is just another RoI.

Had a guy come in recently, and he told me that he’d first come as a kid. Him and his brother were buying the old Star Wars miniatures that WotC used to make, going through a box of commons and uncommons, trying to work out their money. And I had apparently walked over and said ‘just have them’, because they looked like good kids who would give them a good home. I had loads of those figures. But my actions made a difference in somebody’s life so much that he remembered it.

Came back ten years later to buy all his D&D books from us.

The best Organised Play tournaments give you entry into subsequent tournaments. The prize money can’t buy. Everything else money can buy. Money is the worst, because everyone can see it on the table and do the math. They are conveniently blind to the venue costs and the judge costs.

So anyway, I’m the quantum retailer. I’m always looking for the sweet spot between two competing paradigms. Organised Play stores used to be the exception, and now they are the rule. Organised Play used to be a loss leader – for publishers – and now it’s an income generator. Organised Play used to be sales and marketing to drive in store purchase, and now it’s bums on seats and soda sales. I hoped – and I still do – that Wizards Premium is a step in the right direction.

Wizards used to have a policy they called ‘surprise and delight’. They would randomly order game stores pizza for FNM. One in every hundred Helvaults were foil. Mine was. I can testify that there was much surprise and much delight.

But it is hard to corporatise fun.

Fun is organic, like happiness. Generated in the brain when we open that booster or feel welcome. When we belong. When our friendly local game store is there to commiserate us when we lose and cheer us on when we win. For those of us who have gone down the in store cafe route, it’s a cup of Yorkshire tea and an award winning traybake. It’s ambience.

Making people happy is an investment. But bankrupting yourself doing it is not. And that makes nobody happy.

I sell happiness.

My therapist often used to ask me what made me happy. And selling happiness is what does it for me. I’ve thought long and hard about it. I am happiest when my store is full of people enjoying themselves, when the tills are ringing, when the staff are busy. My therapist thinks this is bad. That I should derive my happiness from something healthier, like petting bunnies or long walks in the country.

I asked her if she would still feel I should still do the thing that makes me happy if it made somebody else unhappy. What if my unhappiness made twenty people happy? At what point is happiness governed by morality? Freud’s superego. Freud wasn’t much concerned (it seems) about happiness per se. His id is our base desires, his ego our rationality.

I am a quantum retailer. The idea that we have two competing desires that we have to reconcile is not unknown to me. In fact, it’s my day job.

The happier people are, the more they buy. The happier my staff are, the more they sell. Happy customers come back. Unhappy customers leave bad reviews on Trip Advisor and shop online in future. So my happiness – short term and long term is directly linked to the happiness of others.

But what is happiness? And knowing, can we tap into that knowledge to become better retailers? Happier retailers?

(Cut to the chase, the answer is yes).

Three hormones regulate your happiness level. The first of these is pretty well known – its Dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that triggers when we experience rewards for actions. And it helps us achieve them, to focus, to learn positive behaviour. It’s also the high when you get when you open a booster. Shopping is the number one leisure activity in the west for a reason. See the thing, want the thing, buy the thing = Dopamine!

Uh oh folks, here comes Freud’s ego.

In a study in 2007, neuroscientists discovered that while contemplating purchases the pleasure centres of the brain – the nucleus accumbens – were stimulated. But when shown the price, the prefrontal cortex kicked in. As did the insula, the part of the brain that deals with processing pain. People with more active insulas were less likely to buy.

This pain/pleasure/prefrontal cortex interaction presented a challenge. So at Fan Boy Three we have a variety of purchase option points. From an individual booster at £4 to 4 for £15 and 6 for £20. The option is not ‘buy a booster’ or buy a box – we understand that some folks are on limited budgets and some folks want to treat themselves without breaking the bank. We’re helping your prefrontal cortex to agree with your nucleus accumbens that this is the most rational and pleasurable course of action.

Even your insula is down with it.

The problem with dopamine is that it’s also the hormone most closely connected with addiction. the more you repeat your behaviour to get a reward, the less that reward will mean. The less dopamine gets released. But the more you want it. People with low dopamine frequently chase that dopamine high to no avail. Nothing is as good as your first taste of ice cream. Or heroin.

Among gamblers there is something called ‘the drop’ – the time separation between placing a bet and knowing the result. A healthy Dopamine hit is a function of time x action / reward. But a Fixed Odds Betting Terminal takes the arcanery of placing a bet with a bookie and watching the 6:15 at Haydock Park and turns it into a button press. On average, each of the 33,600 FPBT machines installed in British bookies made £53,000. One gambler lost £13,777.90 in seven hours.

The drop between buying a booster and ripping it open is quite short. Like a good bartender, I try to restrict folks from buying too many packs at once – we don’t advertise multi-box buy offers like some stores. But fortunately Dopamine isn’t the only hormonal happiness high I ‘sell’.

Enter Oxytocin, the cuddle chemical, the hormone released when we find somebody attractive – among other things, fortunately! Oxytocin bonds partners to their mates, parents to their children and D&D players to their gaming groups. You see we crave the social acceptance of others on a chemical level. We want to be part of a group, to have companionship on many different levels. Among other things, Oxytocin governs our empathy. There’s a suggestion that low Oxytocin causes depression, anxiety and a potential biomarker for autism.

Dopamine is easy to generate. Play Magic, open a booster = Dopamine! If only there was some way to naturally stimulate Oxytocin…

What do you know, you run one!

By bringing people together for play you decrease social isolation. Organised Play may have started as a sales and marketing tool, but it has evolved. The game stores that sprang up to fill the needs of Wizards of the Coast to sell Magic boosters instead sold community. They sold belonging. Belonging stimulates your Oxytocin production. Not as much as having sex, but hey – I run a game shop not a knocking shop.

Stores like ours are the universal panacea for an increasingly isolated and lonely population. This is why D&D is so strong everywhere right now – it’s giving us that Oxytocin hit we crave. Its filling our spaces with shiny happy people at the exact same moment Wizards have decided that what Magic players really want is to sit at home alone in their underpants, mainlining Dopamine through Arena.

To maximise your Oxytocin engine, you are going to need to make your store welcoming, inclusive and diverse. To maximise the – relatively minimal – ability to enhance the third happiness hormone – Seratonin – you are going to need to make your store open, light and airy.

We get Seratonin when we exercise and from natural light. It’s going to be a hard one to pull off, but when finding a location for the all new Fan Boy Three we knew that we wanted a location with large windows and natural light. The gaming space in the old store had a back ‘games room’ that had no windows. Part of the problem with being in a heart of major European city is that the affordable spaces are often quirky and you can’t make changes to them because they are historical in some way. That’s certain the case in Manchester’s historic Northern Quarter – so historic it was used for street scenes in Captain America and Morbius. So historic, I’m not allowed to make changes to the external fabric of the store.

Fortunately we found a great unit with a split mezzanine, with these massive windows that let in plenty of light. And you can couple that with daylight bulbs and a massive ventilation system. Manchester’s weavers needed natural light in Victorian times, and so do we now.

While being on a major thoroughfare in Manchester’s party district is great for footfall and sales, it comes at the cost of not having on site parking. Wherever you park, you’ll have to walk a few minutes or take the train, the tram, fly in by jet or travel by coach or bus. We have all those transport links no more than ten minutes walk away. Suddenly that begins to look like a benefit.

The Board Game Trading and Chat UK Facebook Group recently ran a poll to find the Uk’s favourite game store. Fan Boy Three won, with 50% more votes than any other store. Jeff Bezos? Kickstarter? They have ONE happiness hormone. Dopamine. They made it easy like a fixed odds betting terminal. But happiness is more than that. More than how quickly you can get a product or how cheaply.

So what lessons can we learn from neuroscience?

Well, make your stores clean and bright and open. Make your offering attractive enough that it overrides a consumer’s insula. None of us can compete on price against a deep discounting tax weasel who sells for cheaper than we buy at. But we can compete on experience. We can compete on community. We do. A great store offers a buying experience that IS an experience – I often say that Organised Play Stores are not in competition with each other so much as they are in competition with ‘Netflix and chill’. And it turns out I was right because = science.

How do I do this? Stay tuned for part two

My name is Dave Salisbury and I have been the quantum retailer.

For two hundred thousand years we lived on the plains of the Serengeti. Before the first cities. Before the first discount spear shop. Eridu and Uruk, seven and a half millennia ago. We were hunter gatherers for ten thousand generations, city dwellers for a mere 375.

Two hundred thousand years. Ten thousand generations.
Being good hunter gatherers is literally in our DNA. Eyes front and centre, opposable thumbs, tool making, colour and pattern recognition. But one thing made us superior – Homo Superior in fact – to almost every other species.

We were social.

“The lone wolf dies but the pack survives” as GRR Martin would say, before presumably apologising for the ending of the TV show. A good hunter gatherer always knows where they stand. Standing downwind is important for hunting. Standing side by side with somebody you trust. Standing up to protect those unable to defend themselves. Together we were stronger. We hunted mammoth. We dammed rivers. We cultivated crops and eventually we raised pyramids.

But from the earliest there was a dichotomy in our existence. Because while we achieve more together as a group, we mate as individuals. Mostly. I mean, its 2019 and the internet is full of things I cannot unsee.

The point is that we crave individuality even as much as we crave being in a group. Individually you are Dave who builds pyramids. In a mass you are pyramid builder 4635. And nobody wants to be that guy. Everyone needed to know where they stood – subsumed into the mass gave you security. Individuality gave you opportunity. But if you stood a little too far out? ROOOOAAARRR! eaten by lions.

This dichotomy influences every single action every single human being does every single day on the planet. It’s hard wired into us. That fight flight response when you see a mass of football fans wearing the wrong colour shirt? Two hundred thousand years of hurt.

Why are people homophobes? Why are people racists? Why do some vote Republican and others vote Labour? The simple fact is they look around themselves and they know where they stand and who they stand with. People who look like you. People who talk like you. People who love like you. It’s simple, tribal and instinctive. But we can choose to be individuals too, and as individuals we have what our Serengeti roaming ancestors did not.

The ability to forge our own tribe. Our own city state. Our own polis.

Human evolution has given us this need to belong, the ego to exert our individuality and the ability to question and reason. Within the last twenty years it’s also given us the ability to expand our horizons. My ‘tribe’ is global now. My friends are retailers in every continent, all facing the same trials and tribulations, all asking the same questions.

The essence of quantum retail is to understand dichotomy. And then to make it work for us.

In fact we need to do very little, which is why the barrier to entry into our industry is so low. Any space can become a third space when it is inhabited by people, and shared common interest has been a third space driver since the very first instances of third spaces in those proto cities. “If you build it, they will come” said the mysterious voice of baseball god to Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, and anyone who has ever opened their own game store understands that this is true. They WILL come.

But Kev didn’t have to monetise his cornfield. And sadly we do.
The earliest games were designed to hone the skills you’d need for war or a career in Uruk temple middle management. We like it when we win, but we improve when we lose. We needed good focus and pattern recognition as hunter gatherers AND good game players, and we use those skills when we graze the shelfengeti of our local game stores.

You ever hear that Richard Garfield intended Magic to be a game where you just bought a deck and a couple of boosters, and wherever you played somebody knew you’d have the fun of discovering new cards you had never seen before? Ha! Humans have an almost pathological need to complete sets. We hunt. We gather. It’s literally called Magic: the Gathering. And that’s always great news for the folks who sell sets. There’s a reason singles dealers exist, and a reason why most of the early adopters became the Fortune 500 retailers of deep discountsville.

Secondly, we need to encourage folks to participate in our activities. Look in the window, walk through the door, sit at the table – these are still huge steps for some people. Participation is scary – to subsume into a mass – even a mass of individuals – is a scary proposition for people on the outside looking in. The fear of rejection by the polis is very real, because once it literally meant death. We are the gatekeepers of our third spaces, which is great. Because we know what life is like on the outside looking in, and we say “bring it on!”

Thirdly, people inside the mass fear the loss of their individuality. I tell people that I ask everyone their name, even if I know them because it’s embarrassing if you are the one person I’ve forgotten. The average human brain can remember five thousand faces but only 150 names.

At Fan Boy Three we call that Tuesday.

Celebrate diversity. The more ways your customers have to express their individuality the happier they will be. I run forty different game lines for a reason. If one deck or army or game is dominant, then individuality of choice comes under attack by the mass, and you can only express the individuality of success by further subsumption into the mass. This is triggering for a whole load of reasons, and many people will chose to express their individuality by not playing.

We say ‘the format is stale’ or ‘Hogaak is broken’ when what we mean is ‘our polis is approaching critical instability, please send philosophers’.

I would rather at that stage they switched game than switched hobby. I honestly feel that this is a healthier pattern of behaviour long term, and it’s certainly healthier for my store viability in the short term!

Because at the end of the day, the best game in the world isn’t a function of Boardgame Geek rating – it’s the one another person will play with you.

Diversity isn’t just about your Organised Play offering of course. If you are not a diverse play space? Well, you are missing a trick. We are literally spaces where people can be anyone, anywhere at anywhen in human history. All those baggage tags that we humans come with that identify us with who we were born are meaningless in a place where everything is possible. We are the vanguard for the mutability of self. And you should lean in to that as often as possible.

Ten generations of human evolution has led us here, to you. Like those early hominids you are perfectly adapted for your environment. You are the apex predator of retail. Make you store as welcoming as a brightly coloured edible berry. Stock your shelfengeti for ease of browsing and hide your gems around your store to reward the canny. Welcome everyone – be the safe space that nobody knew they needed but that everyone secretly craves. Celebrate individuality and difference within conformity. Allow others to explore their own duality so that you can embrace your own – a third space for fun and profit.

Jeff Bezos? He has delivery drones, algorithms and discount hunting spears.

You won this battle two hundred thousand years ago.

Now go be fabulous.

I am a time lord. My store is my T.A.R.D.I.S.

Every store exists in six dimensions.

As an Organised Play store – somewhere where people can come and play games – we exist in the dimension of space. We become inhabited, colonised. We have capacity. If two people play a game of Magic they occupy approximately 4 square feet of table space and at least double that in player space. A game of Warhammer is played on a 6′ x 4′ table. That occupies a whopping 24 square feet of game and 8 square feet of player.

Purely in terms of table space you can fit twelve Magic games in the space occupied by one Warhammer table.

Should Warhammer table hire cost more than Magic tables because they occupy more space?

Now we enter the dimension of money. RoI, our financial return on investment. The smart money has already ripped out those Warhammer tables and put in Magic tables.

But here’s the thing. You can play Magic anywhere. Table 27 of one PTQ was a toilet. Table 26 the shop counter. But Warhammer needs a 6′ x 4′ table, and that’s a much scarcer resource.

Should Warhammer table hire cost more than Magic tables because they are scarcer?

Warhammer tables need scenery. They require upkeep. People occupy them for longer. Warhammer players often play with existing armies and thus buy less. Wow, I’m making a great argument here for increasing the cost of Warhammer table hire aren’t I?

But I don’t charge more. In fact I charge less. 

There’s another dimension that I have to deal with as a quantum retailer and that’s time. If you have ever worked in a busy restaurant, you will understand the concept of covers and turn rate. A restaurant might have twenty tables – forty covers – and maximises its income when all those tables are fully occupied with happy smiling diners. And then it turns those covers and replaces all those happy smiling diners with another bunch of happy smiling diners. Let’s say a meal takes two hours and the restaurant is constantly full in that time. Every diner is instantly replaced.

That would be amazing. Those twenty tables have now generated 160 covers.

So in an ideal world all our tables would be constantly occupied with instantly refreshing Magic players for maximum income generation.

That’s how Dan Tibbles – who pioneered the Organised Play model I adapted – ran. He ran his store in direct opposition to the Wizards owned Game Keeper brand, who simply couldn’t keep up with the volume of players and events that Dan fired out. He instantly became Top of Mind in Seattle, Wizards hometown. And the entire chain of Game Keeper stores had closed around the time Fan Boy Three opened.

But there’s literally not enough Magic players in the country to support a store running that much Magic. My OP space seats 128 magic players or 96 D&D players or 32 Warhammer players. If I turned Magic players like a restaurant I’d need to have a community large enough to support three and a half thousand play instances a week.

Wizards would love that!

But it’s not an optimal strategy even if it was achievable. Dan’s store is no longer with us either. At last count I ran about forty different game lines in store, split over seven different nights of the week, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly, sometimes bimonthly or quarterly or even annually. The size of your play community often determines your frequency of events. The size of your play community can be expressed as a function of catchment, which again is about space – your location and the location of people around you.

Both the frequency of events and the length of events are a factor of time. The more competitive they are, the longer they are, the more competitive players they attract from further afield. The wider your catchment. The longer people have traveled, the more they have spent, the more they expect to win, the more expensive the events.

Space, time and money, inextricably linked.

Every store is different, and the interplay is different. My portfolio of events has a diversity of game line, and a diversity of casual versus competitive dynamic. There is a rough price pointing across those bands, so a player knows that if they are attending a £30 event it’s probably going to be more serious than a £3 event. Because what is optimal for The Fat Duck is not optimal for Pizza Hut.

While I *have* space, the space each individual event takes up is irrelevant. When I don’t, it’s extremely relevant. Like the best restaurants I have spare tables and spare chairs. There’s always room for one more – until there isn’t. Because nobody wants to be turned away from the top restaurant in town because they turned up without booking six months in advance. It’s a negative experience and we are all about happiness and positivity.

Emotional, not transactional.

So let’s go back to the restaurant. I’m popping in for a quick bite by myself. There is nobody else in the restaurant. By serving me, in a way, the restaurant is potentially costing themselves money. What if a party of forty turned up in five minutes to maximise their covers? And I was there, sat plum in the middle, eating only a starter and drinking tapwater.

However, if they don’t, I am actually adding value. By occupying space that would otherwise be empty I am acting as a living, breathing, eating endorsement. Nobody wants to set foot in an empty restaurant, let alone eat there. In fact, if you are ever opening a restaurant, it’s a great tactic to recruit family and friends to serve as seat warmers. Bring in your most gregarious friends and anyone walking past will think you are the hottest spot in town.

When we first opened, there was Phil, Mandy and myself and our friend Dave. And we sat in the store every night and played Versus. I thought I had made a terrible mistake. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for an Organised Play store? Manchester was grim. The Northern Quarter was still a haunted transient shell in the evenings.

What had I done?

Then Ben and Alex came in. They had just bought Versus too. With six it looked like it wasn’t an accident that folks were still in the building after six pm. More people came. More games. If you had a table of D&D with a woman playing, you went in the window. Representation is important, and so is advertising that you believe that.

Miniature games fill space like nothing else on earth. They are big. They are bold. They are colourful. And 6′ x 4′ tables are a scarce resource. Nobody wants to eat in an empty restaurant. But a full restaurant remembers the family and friends who got them there. Who filled their tables when they were nothing but hopes and dreams.

Time does not just flow one way. The smaller parcels of time and turn rate and frequency are but stepping stones on the path. The space a table occupies is one part of an equation that takes you from the then to the now and into the future. Over time we engender loyalty, we engender reputation, we engender community. These are all functions of time.

Diversity adds value.

The more diversity you have in terms of table activity and table size, the less of a monoculture you will appear. The more vibrant you will be. And vibrancy is attractive. It adds value, and value ultimately translates to money, even if you cannot perceive it right now. I don’t charge the Warhammer players more because they add value. Everybody – every activity – in my store adds value. But sometimes that value comes at a cost.

I know some stores do not charge for space. Ziferblat the time cafe around the corner from us charges £4 an hour. They are always at capacity. Pizza Hut wants to turn its tables four times a night. The Fat Duck only once. Both are restaurants.

Time. Space. Money. All we ever see is one tiny part of the equation. A slice through the space-time-money continuum. Who knows what the future brings.

Daleks probably.

Nobody likes being the bearer of bad tidings. King Tigranes the Great of Armenia was so displeased to hear that Lucullus’ legions were marching on him that he executed the man and listened only to advisors who flattered him. This is because nobody likes to hear bad tidings. And we lash out, desperate to cling onto the illusion of power when confronted with powerlessness.

The Pound continues to slide inexorably into the abyss.  

Most businesses hold the line as long as possible. We have these things called price points – places where customers feel something has intrinsic worth at that price. As a quantum retailer, I didn’t peg my currency fluctuations to the dollar or euro or the gold standard.

No. My economy is based on Coca Cola.

Everyone knows how much a can of the world’s most popular carbonated caffeinated fizzy beverage costs. It’s both a supermarket and a corner shop staple. Because it’s a luxury but also a lifestyle choice, when the price of Coke goes up we sort of make a mental accommodation to other prices going up. Little lifestyle luxuries.

This is the territory we colonise as quantum retailers.

Coke was 50p a can when we opened Fan Boy Three in 2004. Now it’s £1. Chocolate was 40p and now its 80p. But during that doubling of price there have been certain points when this manufacturer or that decided to hold the line on price at my expense and price mark their products. This allows them to appear to be ‘the good guys’ while simultaneously reducing my margin.

Margin is what keeps retailers in business. It’s the pool of money we use to pay our staff, our landlords, our taxes, our utilities and hopefully feed our families. Most people don’t begrudge a retailer a margin to live on… HA, WHO AM I KIDDING!!! Literally everyone begrudges a retailer margin.

In Britain, our retail margin is usually around 35%. It’s 50% in the US. Our tax – VAT – is 20%. That’s not a lot to play with. Fortunately for many products if we buy more we get a better deal.

This week Yugioh joined Magic in having a substantial price rise of almost 10%. It had risen a couple of times before – during the crash of 2007 – but had been static at £3.59 for a while.

The first thing I check when I hear of a dramatic price rise is whether or not the MSRP will rise. Because if the MSRP does not, it’s like those price marked Cokes. Konami and Asmodee feel pretty good at keeping my customers happy, but I lose margin. I watched margin creep go from the 40% I used to get to 35%, and I literally cannot afford the creep to colonise 30%.

Can I be honest? That margin creep is worth more than twice my salary across a year. And that’s not something I can absorb.

Look out your door. You see the world. Tariffs on China. Brexit. Dark clouds gathering over Iran and North Korea. Chaos makes money for some people – arms dealers, currency speculators – Opportunity for others and misery to the rest. To us, chaos only means higher prices and a falling standard of living.

If we are lucky.

There were plenty of shopkeepers in Syria too.

Nobody wants to put prices up, but if we must, that has to come from the top. It has to be clearly signposted by distro and publishing. My customers will respect that. I can sell the price rises along with the product if I have a clear and concise message in terms of an MSRP I can point to.

To manage price point expectations.

In 2004 a Coke would cost you 50p and a Dairy Milk 40p. It’s now double that. A Yugioh booster was £2 and a Magic booster £2.50. And if we hold the line on price in troubling times, it’s because as a retailer I WANT To. I want to make a stand, to buffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I’ll take a short term hit on margin in extremis, not a long term margin erosion because a publisher wants to appear generous with other people’s money.

Asmodee agreed.

The uncomfortable fact is that it’s easier to soak margin creep on a more expensive game, because to a quantum retailer there are two ways of looking at a sale.

Let’s say you do 100 transactions a day. The price ranges from £1 to £100. Your margin was 35% on each transaction and your operating costs were 20% of that turnover. Lets break it down further. Let’s say I sold:

1 x £100

2 x £70

4 x £50

6 x £40

10 x £20

12 x £10

15 x £5

50 x £1

I’m in Britain so I’m going to have to pay tax. I did £1125 turnover. After tax I made £937.50. After margin I generated £328.12 and my operating costs were £187.50. My operating costs stay the same whether I lose margin or not. In fact, they are so static I can say that over a hundred sales, each transaction costs me £1.87 (£187.50/100).

This is coincidentally why a bums on seats and soda strategy doesn’t work. You would need an infinite number of bums to drag the per transaction fee down – I’d need to sell 1125 sodas to keep my operating costs from overwhelming my cashflow.

Now, on a £100 MSRP sale I make about £30. Margin creep here is less perceptually problematic – if I assume my operating costs are fixed at £1.87 then I have £28 profit to play with, right? Only I don’t, because all those soda sales are actually costing me money on a fixed transaction cost model.

Still, this is the reason that car dealership is willing to haggle when that lemonade salesperson is not.

This became relevant when I was seeking a new credit card processor. The per transaction fee makes small purchases problematic. No transaction fee but a higher rate makes large purchases less attractive. And with prices rising on boardgames all the time, an additional 1% adds up over that time.

This is the economic juggling act of the quantum retailer.  

At Fan Boy Three we are constantly attempting to mitigate price rises and expenses while still covering our overheads. If a boardgame goes over the £50 price point we’ll have knocked a bit off to show willing, and we run a perpetual ‘buy three boardgames get 10% off’ deal. A lot of the time people will have ended up saving 20%, but on bigger ticket items where I can absorb it.

The high end items are where internet deep discounters hit you the most, because there’s an argument that when you operate on a large enough scale you CAN fix your operating costs, then price everything £1 more and still generate profit. But unless you are Amazon, the first return or missing order wipes out hundreds of successful ones and leaves you zero sum. That’s why it’s hard to start a deep discounter without large reserves of other peoples money.

And like I mentioned before, I’m not big on self aggrandisement using other peoples money.

We had a guy who used to steal Yugioh boxes off us, sell them and live large gambling in casinos. Maybe dicking other people over is a smart business strategy. I mean, it got Trump to the White House and Boris Johnson to 10 Downing Street. And it dumped me in the mess where Yugioh has to rise in price.

Sorry everyone. I’ve been the quantum retailer.

Don’t shoot the messenger!

I’m running the UK HeroClix Nationals 2019 as I type this.

Everyone loves something. They love it passionately, beyond reason. As a quantum retailer and a third space, I promised myself a very long time ago that I would not betray that passion. I would be a space for everyone, underdog and overdog alike.

Organised Pay is a promise. A promise built from publishers to support the games they publish with events, a promise to support the venues and the players that in turn support them. I discovered it almost by accident with the birth of HeroClix; there were these promo figures you could only obtain through running official events promoting and supporting the game, and I wanted them. I craved them.

Beyond reason.

It would lead me to fly to the GAMA Trade Show to pick up a Galactus figure. Wow, he was so cool. Unbelievably cool. One year I flew home from GTS with a Mechwarrior Dropship as my hand luggage. I was stopped by Homeland Security at the airport. The stony faced agent looked up from his x-ray…

“What’s in the box?”

“I can explain…” I replied

“IT’S THE MECHWARRIOR DROPSHIP!!!” he effused at me. “Do you want to see it!!!” I effused at him. Organised Play was like that. It brought people together, in mutual co-operation, to build something better. To build a society where like minded people could geek out about their personal geek.

When I opened Fan Boy Three back in 2004 I learned that as a retailer I too had made a different promise. Organised Play was sales and marketing – if I ran a game line, I sold it. If I sold a game line, I ran it. And I would make sure my events fired, whatever the cost.

It was Konami who coined the phrase Negative Play Experience. Many things can turn a play experience negative. Salty players, offensive players, dirty stores, bad judges, bad organisation. But the biggest negative play experience of all is to find that nobody plays your game.

Nobody.

So I refused point blank to let events not fire. There were always people in store, always people who would sacrifice their time to make sure people had a good positive play experience. I would pay for folks to play in drafts and use their cards for singles, put people in tournaments with loaner decks on us. Every ‘bye’ became a potential ‘teaching experience’ if there was a person in store with time on their hands. Organised Play IS sales and marketing, but part of what you are marketing is you.

Your store. Your ethos.

This last weekend I have heard of stores where premium events did not fire. Wizards require 8 people to sanction a tournament. Once that would have been an easy ask, but as Arena puts Magic only a click away wherever you are, as stores grew exponentially in number beyond reason and as players aged out of the natural growth demographic and started to get jobs and houses and families, the ask is no longer as easy. But I guarantee that if six people turn up to play and the event doesn’t fire, it’s a negative play experience.

And that’s on you. Not them.

You can make all the excuses you want. Apologise all you like. Sure, a Negative Play Experience ultimately reflects badly on everyone. But right now, in the now, you are the face of it. The stupid, gurning face of self justifying apology. Promised me a lifetime of friends, happiness, a community. Did not deliver. One star.

Here’s what I used to do to avoid that fate.

1) Have a staff member who can play. Or two. This is sub optimal as that staff member has a salary cost. But hey, they can drop after a round once the event has fired.

2) Have a loaner deck on hand. It does not have to be great – it can be a good teaching deck or whatever. The person who plays it IS going to lose, You can pretty much guarantee that. But if you explain what you are doing to their opponent, they’ll usually react favourably to what you are trying to do.

3) Have local casual players on tap. My Commander players would always be up for a draft if I paid them in. Which is to say, provided boosters for them to play. I then kept the cards or the figures or whatever. I would messenger players I know lived close if an event was failing to fire.

4) Sunk costs are sunk costs. Your costs in time, in staff, in venue… they were already sunk. Sunk costs are lost. Gone. Pining for the fiords. When events go poorly, you have to learn to take it on the chin and double down.

It took me a while to learn this. But pining over what could have been was less important than dealing with what I could do in the now. I could turn that negative play experience into a positive. A booster is a booster. It costs you $2.50 or less. Would I sacrifice $2.50 to make a customer so happy they returned to play and shop again? You betcha. Would I do that today and tomorrow and the next day? You betcha. I’m in the happiness business baby, and happy customers spend more. Just maybe not today.

Miserable customers? They never come back.

But I’m not a millionaire. My store isn’t a Warlock store or a vanity business. I want to support every line I stock, so that it supports me. But sometimes, well…

5) Just because it exists doesn’t mean its for you. Lots of stores treat Organised Play as a loyalty test. They ran Open House because they felt Wizards wanted them to. Otherwise why make it sanctionable, right? PPTQs as well. The world went from a couple of hundred PTQS to several thousand competitive PPTQ events, most of which were in stores who had never run competitive events before.

There’s a unique mindset to running events designed to be new player recruitment. There’s a unique mindset to running competitive events that attract competitive out of town players. Back in the day there was a PTQ held at a store in Nottingham where table 27 was literally the toilet seat. They played across a toilet seat. Negative Play Experience. And probably a Negative Toilet experience too, if you needed the loo.

Wizards or Fantasy Flight, or your favourite boardgame company will not reward your loyalty for running an event that only one person turns up to. Or so many that they play on a toilet. You won’t get five star ratings on Google and Facebook and Trip Advisor. Organised Play is sales and marketing, and when your events don’t fire all those positive, happy vibes that OP engenders become Negative Store Experiences.

And they work against you. And they work against the publishers interests, and the players interests and it becomes a negative feedback loop. If its not generating sales, and its not generating good marketing, and its not bringing in players and its not getting you positive feedback, it is literally damaging your business.

So yes. I would do almost anything to stop my events not firing. And that includes not running them.

The HeroClix UK Nationals is now in the final. Everyone left happy. I made profit. My work here is done. I’ve been the quantum retailer.

So, before we delve further into the world of quantum retail, we could do with a little light snack.

Crisps are Britain’s favourite snack food. You call them chips in America, but in Britain we call chips chips. So I’m glad we cleared that up.

Britain’s most popular crisp is Walkers Ready Salted. More packs are sold of Walkers Ready Salted than any other crisp, closely followed by Cheese and Onion and Salt and Vinegar. This is the crisp industry holy trinity. If you sell crisps, you likely stock Walkers. If somebody comes in asking for crisps, you wave your arm in the direction of your display of Ready Salted, Cheese and Onion and Salt and Vinegar and probably get a sale.

Here’s the thing though. If you look just at ROI – Return on Investment – on crisps, Ready Salted give you a marginally better bang for your buck. And in business, that’s what we are told to prioritise. Stock up on Ready Salted, sit back and watch those tasty, salty crisp profits roll in. And if you were on a station forecourt, catering to a busy traveller whose priority was convenience, they probably would.

But your journey into the crisp continuum has just begun. Walkers have $660 million turnover. Their nearest rivals are McCoys (£130M), Supermarket own label (£117M), Kettle Chips (£96M), Tyrells (£46M), Seabrooks (£27M), Golden Wonder, Jacobs, Ritz, Mackies, Burts… and Just Crisps.

If you wanted to be a SPECIALITY crisp shop, you might want to stock all these. In all these flavours and more. In Prawn Cocktail, and Smokey Bacon, and grab bags and multipacks and family bags with a week’s calories worth just waiting for you to gorge yourself on. There are tortilla chips, nuts, lentil snacks, crisp breads… supermarket shelves are laden with choice, both in terms of depth – variety – breadth – manufacturer – and shelf presence to maximise brand exposure. You could literally fill a shop just with UK crisps, before you imported American crisps or European Paprika crisps.

Now when a customer walks in your store and they ask if you sell crisps, you scream “Our store is LITERALLY called World of Crisps. Gaze on my works ye mighty and despair!”

World of Crisps is what we call Top of Mind – it’s a destination store that will attract traganiphiles from miles around. I bet they even have Really Ruthless Spicy Mexican Meatball (my all time favourite flavour, out of production since 1994. I weep bitter tears of regret daily). But stumble into World of Crisps on the way to catching the 10:19 to Basingstoke and you are going to miss your train.

But here’s the 79p question. Realistically, how many packets of crisps does the average customer buy? What your breadth and depth and shelf presence has done is given you a greater chance of sales capture. Of maximising the chance of selling that one packet of crisps. In almost every way that is really bad RoI. It sucks greater than a man who has just eaten spicy Mexican Meatball crisps for the first time and is gulping down the nearest frosty beverage

You see, these are extreme poles on our crisp continuum. We want some kind of breadth, depth, shelf presence, RoI and ToM, simultaneously. How does a binary choice help us here? How many flavours of crisps is choice? How many varieties before we can call ourselves a crisp shop? Where do we stand on the crisp continuum, and is the profit enough?

We stock Just Crisps. The brand. Not, you know, just crisps. I realise it is probably needlessly confusing at this point but hey. “ARE YOU CRAZY DAVE?” I hear you ask “You literally just told us that the brand leader was Walkers!!!”

And that’s why I don’t stock them.

Being a quantum retailer is about choice, but that choice is even more complex. I found the best tasting crisp on the market and I stocked it. I’m not on a commuter rat run, and I’m not World of Crisps. And I’m not Tesco’s. When it comes to crisp my customers are not price sensitive, so I don’t have to compete on convenience or price.

I can choose to compete on taste.

And if you want Walkers, Tesco’s is a minute away. Sainsbury’s a minute away. A dozen newsagents, a minute away. And they are all competing on price and convenience. And they are all competing on the same

one

product.

Because that’s what happens when you chase the biggest brand from the biggest industry leader. Everyone chases the easy money, the low hanging fruit. Or in this case, vegetable.

I chose to be Top of Mind for my crisp curation simply by carrying the best. I chose to believe that my time, my effort, my curation added value. If you travel to my store and eat my crisps, I honestly believe you will agree that they are the best crisps you have ever tasted (pending a time machine, and a conveniently located frosty beverage. For emergencies).

And I guarantee you’ll pass a shop selling Walkers cheaper on the way.

My name is Dave Salisbury, and I have been the quantum retailer.

p.s. why not join the Really Ruthless Apreciation Society here: https://www.facebook.com/ReallyRuthless

As any kind of retailer, the question I get asked most often is how do we retail in the Age of Amazon? I hear that a lot. Conventional retailers sold stuff. Piles of stuff.

Pile it high and sell it cheap was the motto of Michael J ‘King’ Cullen, founder of the modern supermarket. But a shop without overheads, with ultra cheap postal rate deals, with shonky records on taxation and employee welfare. Yeah, yeah, we meet all federally mandated obligations, while lobbying to keep those mandates low impact to our bottom lines.

But the games industry had a model.

Games Workshop had perfected this model of boutique stores that had play space. Once it was freed from the limitations of only stocking one manufacturer – via a network of independent stores doing pretty much the same thing – this idea of what we call experiential retail – organised play activities surrounded by stock to purchase to enhance those activities – became dominant going into the 2007 global downturn and the rise of Amazon.

Just games. Tabletop games. And we prospered when all around us the conventional retail chains, the out of town malls, the bookstores and record stores and other hobby stores burned.

We were Apple stores before they were even a pip.

Experiential retail before hipsters.

You see, as a species we crave third spaces. We crave places to go, to inhabit, to create culture in. From the forums and cauponas of ancient Rome to the salons of Paris and the coffee houses of Regency London. To the pubs and the bars and the youth centres. Society requires social spaces to happen, and social spaces cannot be delivered by drone from a warehouse where the staff have to piss in bottles.

Why quantum retail though?

Erwin Schrodinger had a cat. It wasn’t a real cat. It was a hypothetical cat, and it lived in a hypothetical box. It’s the thing everyone knows about quantum physics. Is the cat alive or dead? It doesn’t matter. It’s only through observation that we know. Light can be a wave and a particle. The fundamental building blocks of the universe are malleable. What we take for certainty is untrue.

It’s a trap. A logic puzzle.

Now, if you are impatient and want to cut to the chase, here’s the punchline. The easy money is in the path everyone else is going. That’s the received wisdom of retail. Do it bigger, do it better, do it cheaper. If that seems achievable as we head towards a monopoly, be my guest. How did that work out for Best Buy? For Toys R Us? Prove everyone wrong by proving them right, or right be proving them wrong. That’s the problem with received wisdom. It’s like telling a toddler to stay up past their bedtime “Well daddy, I am just going to prove you WRONG by going to bed early, so there!”

There’s an important lesson here. You see, business often presents us with a logic trap. And like the cat, you cannot see the box from the inside.

Amazon teaches the quantum retailer one important lesson from the get go. Because a political lobbyist doesn’t just back a single side. As a species we crave the Manichean simplicity of duality. Good versus evil, left versus right, light versus dark, male versus female. Open your window and look outside – that’s not our world anymore. Certainty has left the building.

All is chiaroscuro. Our world is quantum now. And the secret is, it always was.

If you back both candidates you own whoever gets in power. From a game playing point of view, this seems an optimal strategy. And we are good at games, and we are good at logic puzzles, and we know a bit about bravery from all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons. 

Our quest for meaning through sales and sales through meaning is an adventure through two hundred thousand years of retail, from the plains of the Serengeti to the man machine interface.

To the singularity and beyond.

Together we will answer the question of what it means to be human. And more importantly, how to sell to those fuckers.

My name is Dave Salisbury. I am a quantum retailer.

Welcome to my blog.