What are some good resources for opening a LGS? I might have a chance to help a friend set up a game store and I want to look at other products to stock besides the usual (MtG and 40K have slim margins). Do any fa/tg/uys have experience working in or running a LGS?
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Don’t, unless you just want a greasy nerd corral. They don’t make money and attract the smelliest geeks imaginable. I once worked the cash register at a Yu-gi-Oh tournament for my buddy who owned a store, it smelled worse than a pet shop where the animal shit hadn’t been shoveled for three weeks. Everyone buys their shit online these days.
Don't. The average survival length of an LGS is the length of a small business loan.
Neckbeards are cheap in really bizarre ways, and it's difficult to move products that aren't WotC or GW.
You might have luck by stocking stuff that boomers might like, historical wargame miniatures and maybe even models.
Everything you could sell can be gotten cheaper online. It's just the reality of retail these days. Find ways to generate income that isn't reliant on just selling cards or board games. Focus on making good food available. Fat nerds (the majority of your clientele) like food. Figure out if you can provide a service worth paying for.
Don't run a LGS just run a cafe/bar and stock it with board games that people can play while they eat. Board games are your gimmick to make people pay for overpriced food, not your stock and trade.
Yea food seems like a good idea, food and coffee can have a much higher margin than products. I think theyre looking to start online and slowly build a retail presence. I’m hoping we can get some historical wargame boomers like
said. Less competition for Flames of War, BA, etc.
I highly, highly recommend a popcorn machine. It's extremely cheap to run, and everyone buys popcorn.
Don't forget overpriced beer. Expensive enough that no one will go there to get drunk but who the frick doesn't enjoy a pint or two.
>Don't run a LGS just run a cafe/bar and stock it with board games that people can play while they eat.
That gets you homosexual hipsters and redditors. Oh, and you still suffer from the 'free day care' problem.
If you are gonna sell snacks and can open up next to a fast food restaurant, do it. You don't want to have to offer public restrooms to these "people" and depending on state law you won't have to for basic vending machines but will if you have an actual cafe. If you don't have to offer public bathrooms, don't do it.
People who don't go outside aren't fit to give business advice.
If you sell you only care about: people who spend money va people who waste your time. Gatekeepers who care about who engages instead of if it will buy something are the worst type of morons.
Hate to break this to you. Hipsters and redditors spend actual money in actual stores as part of the 'experience'. They are the ones you WANT in your store. They are the ones that will go into a used bookstore and keep it afloat just for the sake of saying they bought their shit in a used bookstore.
We just pirate everything and never spend a dime that we don't have to. That is why no one who matters has cared what Ganker has to say about gaming for the last 15 years.
Correct. My LGS is friendly enough, lets me perv on game nights and in return I play 40k on TTS and openly consider buying 3rd party esty models
Ganker should exclusively play old school games, which were created in an era without machine learnings and are superior products anyway
If you’re asking how to run a retail store, I’d suggest looking into business management courses. While product stock is important, maybe you should be asking yourself what audience you want to cater to, how to reach out to vendors, how you intend to grow, etc. Define what your goal is and work from there.
The hobby shop I used to go to before moving actually only had games as a very small portion of their inventory. It was an impressive collection, but they made the real money off of train and RC hobby supplies. Owner once casually told me a normal scheduled restock of that stuff costs $100k. But again, that’s because they knew their clientele.
LGS management could probably be its own college major given all what you need to know and do to even have a shot
You have to understand your clientele and demographics and what appears to be superficially identical customers can have drastically different spending habits. Even for the same CCG you can have wildly different behaviors, such as competitive/rotating set players (who have to buy new product to continue to play in events), alternative format players (who may buy large numbers of older cards, but have no interest in new sets that don't feature reprints usable in their formats) to kids and traders who may be looking to buy booster packs to gamble on the secondary market and may in fact want to sell you cards frequently.
And that's not even touching minature games, board games and roleplaying games. And that's before broaching the store as a location or service. Having tables for play, terrain for wargames, amenities, workspaces and all that other stuff can be what makes or breaks a store... or not, you could be fricked for entirely other reasons.
The long and short of it is you need better advice than asking here. If you have a place that's local (but not too local) maybe make friends with the owner and ask for advice. Barring that, you might want to find work at an LGS to learn how the owner runs things first hand.
I managed the better third of a chain, the college campus store. This is dead on.
A snack rack is not enough, I went to vending machine suppliers.
Allow events and scheduled groups upon vetting. And have at least two sets of open tables that are never spoken for
these are for demos, for idling, and for waiting hangers on, they will be nicer than the game tables and up front instead of in back.
You keep normal tables away from inventory, and in the back.
You never schedule rpg groups as a hard block, its a waste and they make literally everyone else uncomfortable, if you do, never let your wargamers interact, they are oil and water and the wargamers will leave.
Know the event cycle of your two best competitors and slot your stuff in in step, some guys go from store to store on night to night, these guys are also, typically the whales.
Comics are a waste, fullstop.
Offer 3d printing services, with a scaling rate on resolution/grammage.
Hobby materials are going to be a feather in your cap when numbers come in, skew more professional than something like joann or hobby lobby and always stay full.
Board games are a mini-game in themselves because objectively there are three kinds of taste to rank them in, euro/american/bgg(useless). You can stock the objective best and it will sit like an anvil, you have to FOTM board games harder than even your card stock if you are going to hang, they are the day-trading of running a store.
Allow a consignment shelf for used models and equipment, people love that shit.
Have a bitz box that you give people couple percent off (just enough to cover tax) for contributing to either, put both near the nice tables, with sample books and the intro kits.
Card game guysare reliable and serve as background npcs for your whales, a shop without cardboys feels liminal or that something is wrong, so cultivate the card guys but never give them acknowledged priority.
If you have to choose between community events or vendor, go community.
Remember the first rule in business,
Don't get high off your own supply.
huffing glue is a bad idea regardless of whose supply you're taking it from
Funko pops
Splitting the responsibilities and subrenting is a way to go.
>0. Start with a shop selling sci-fi, comics, manga and 'geek' paraphernalia, but keep enough free space or rent a space that won't be too hard to expand. Get a few tables and chairs for people to read at, but make sure those aren't too small.
>1. Research local TCG, RPG, boardgame and wargaming groups, maybe Go players, mini painters and other dorky hobby spaces. Book clubs are a good option too, if your local library is shit.
>2. Get in touch with the more agreeable people in (1), offer a table or two or three for them to run weekly events or games on.
>3. Meanwhile, once there's some regular traffic in your shop, find some art degree holder to run a coffee-to-go shop in your communal space, literally just a hole in a wall with a decent espresso machine, a fridge and a kettle. Keep in mind you'll be subrenting them that tiny space, so you're not risking much.
>4. Once people from one or more of the groups in (1) get comfortable handing around in your place, get some of them hooked with a more regular proposals, like technically hiring some TTRPG club rep part-time to allow them to stay in the shop after hours, and rent the table out to playing groups from their community. One of you will probably have to invest a decent chunk of cash in equipment, and it's better be them.
>5. Repeat (4) while there're still hobby groups worth working with around and space in your store to house at least their printed ads, and at best - most of their activities.
Thus, slowly your borderline-normie shop could transform into not just an LGS, but sort of an all-in-one hobby center. Not all of that might be applicable to US, sure, but the main idea still stands - community first, but you as a proprietor choose who that community starts growing from.
Source: took part in a project just like this one, and 7 years in it's still afloat.
Should've also added this to (2):
>Once people from hobby groups learn about you, start learning about their buying preferences and try getting some good deals while stocking your shelves with their products of interest, ideally those people would prefer to have a look at before buying (miniature paints and less-popular RPG system rulebooks come to mind first)
What a stupid idea, grow up moron
Boo shut da frick up gtfo
I don't understand that pose. Shield is nice though.
A good bankruptcy lawyer if my LGS's have been a good barometer.
Where are you doing this?
You're better off running a Bar/Pub/Social Club that carries some stock and can order more stock, than a store. In places where package theft is common, people will order through you and pick up their shit at the store.
the real money is in board games; normies buy board games, the profit margin on board games is Whoa. If you can be the place where groups of normies come to play their boardgames on boardgame night, you've got guaranteed weeknight business. The place needs to be cool, comfy, and well-decorated. A retro and not-so-retro gaming console setup might work.
You might want to decide what side of the Blood War your store is on;
Option A gives you a swarm of superficially trendy zoomers who will "build a community" the way paper wasps make nests, and blow up your social media presence with clicks and jibber-jabber. But they'll also be high-drama, and Community Leaders will emerge and try to meddle in your business and call you a racist white fascist sexist cis chud if you don't indulge them, and they'll drive away Neckbeards, both the good and the bad ones, and eventually might turn off normies if shit is allowed to get cancerous enough.
Option B gives you all the well-known problems of catering to a /tg/ crowd; your patrons are asocial spergs that buy their shit online anyways, there'll be ThatGuys a-plenty, and you'll be at the mercy of tourneygays who shop around stores for the best FNM payouts so they can roflstomp kids and crack packs to fish for money cards.
Ok. I just want to point out that you are a loser on Ganker asking a bunch of other losers on Ganker how to set up a small business. Think about why that is moronic and then have a nice day.
Don't, you're basically investing a frickload of money to give yourself a job, and alot of game stores barely break even, let alone profit.
Plus, if you don't wanna go under you basically have to stock magic and 40k shit and cater to paypiggies, and the less said about them, the better.
Not worth it unless you’re also running it as a catering business. This is the only way those near me survive, and one of them sells everything at double the price of what you would pay online.
It seems like this quaint and fun idea but it’s going to be incredibly stressful. You will no longer have any free time whatsoever. You’ll have to frick people over to make it work. You’ll lose any love you have for the hobby, and any patience for the other people who are into it.