I’m sitting here writing a job description, and so I’m once again thinking meta about staff. What is the purpose of staff? What is their function? At some point we were all staff. A staff of one in some cases – we were general dogsbody, head buyer, morale officer, do you want fries with that …
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Fairytale Endings
This is a column about porridge. Rarely is the porridge just right. Games retail is often a Goldilocks game – too often our porridge is too warm or too cold, our mattress too lumpy, our young home intruder selves lost in the forest about to be eaten by hungry bears whose food we have stolen. …
Never Mind the Bollocks – here comes the anti-shop
Recently I watched Pistol by Danny Boyle, and it reminded me about life in the Seventies. Britain was pretty run down, like we’d woken up from the Swinging Sixties with one hell of a hangover. Pistol charts the history of the Sex Pistols. But to me the absolute stand out performance is by Thomas Brodie …
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Bling it up, Buttercup
Not everyone has to own everything. It is in fact a statistical improbability at the best of times, let alone during a cost of living crisis. In Maslows hierarchy of needs, a blinged up version of Tsuro? Pretty far up the pyramid. But then to most people boardgames themselves are pretty far up that dang …
Futurology Part Four: The Magic 8 Ball
There are plenty of games that are safe harbours. Plenty of workmanlike companies that punt out success after moderate success. There will always be a market for Games Workshop. There will always be a market for Pokemon. There will always be families dreaming of playing a boardgame together. People don’t suddenly drop thousands of pounds …
Futurology Part Three: Four Crises and a funeral
One, a fuel crisis. During the pandemic many people got to work from home. And they liked having more money and more time. These people didn’t want to go back to commuting anyway, and now their fuel costs are doubling or tripling there is even more incentive other than every day being no pants Monday. …
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Futurology Part Two: Crisis on Infinite Crisis
By then everyone was rushing towards nostalgia brands. People laid off from their jobs were opening Pokemon stores in the bedrooms and garages. Distro loves new accounts, because a new account needs to totally outfit their store, rather than top it up. Suddenly Sports Direct are selling the Asmodee Top 40. The money you lost …
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Futurology Part One: Lizard Brain Dave
Every retailer is a futurologist. The future is coming whether you want it to or not – the big question is, can you surf it? Most of the time that is comparatively easy – we do preorders with distributors for the latest Magic set, or we back that Kickstarter, because future Dave is going to …
Happy Desire Day
I have talked in the past about how my ordering at Fan Boy Three is biblical. One. Few. Many. In an ideal world every game is ‘forty’. There are a lot of forty in the bible because that was a really big number. It’s like ‘big number shorthand’ in the way that ‘biblical ordering’ is …
On Asmodee ‘forgetting’ the trade price on HeroQuest (not, surprisingly, in our favour)
Oh, where to even begin? These things happen because: 1) Hasbro don’t like to give full margin on products. Or any margin if they can help it. We get reduced margin on Magic, on Monopoly, on pretty much everything except D&D – and well, they sell it to Amazon at a price so far below …
The Quantum Retailer 