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 …
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The Lemming and the Frog
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. …
Boosternomics (Selling Happiness Part Two)
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. …
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Selling happiness part one
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 …
Two Hundred Thousand Years of Retail – Part One
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 …
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It’s bigger on the inside
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 …
Don’t shoot the messenger!
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 …
The Promise
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 …
The Crisp Continuum
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 …
Hi. My name is Dave Salisbury, and I am a quantum retailer
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 …
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The Quantum Retailer 