Behind the Counter #1

I took a job at a local game store, which I probably shouldnt mention the name of for legal reasons. It's the Compleat Strategist and I'm the Saturday part-time guy. C.S. is headquartered in New York, with the flagship store across the street from the Empire State Building. They're in the business of games, and astute readers of old Dragon magazines (the ones in the single digits) will recognize their logo right away. The store I'm at has been in Falls Church since the 70's. Until recently it looked like it too. Some of that is because of the ex-manager...oh fine, I wont sugar coat it: all of it is because of the ex-manager, who we'll call Gill. Gill was crippled. I say that not to pass judgement or to be cruel, but because it's true. He was confined to his wheelchair by choice, from what I gather from close friends. He was monsterously fat, horribly lazy, and (maybe this last bit is a dig, but oh well) he smelled really bad.

Gill was the reason I avoided C.S. for about two years. He was rude, opinionated, and did I mention he smelled? I don't think I ever bought a game from him without being told how bad it was. He would tell me companies were out of business when they weren't, he would refuse to order things, and he basically didn't do his job. The store was horrific, too. Gill would just throw trash on the floor and leave it there. The bullpen behind the counter was trashed, as in piled waist-deep with trash. The other employees had to convince him that he needed to try and make it to the bathroom and not just urinate in bags and leave them tied off up front. No lie. I complained about this the last time I went to the New York store, which prompted a surprise inspection from national management and improved conditions a little. But not enough.

Now Gill is gone, and two managers later (Garry didnt last 2 weeks) I'm now an employee. The new Manager, Katrina, is in my Hackmaster game, and she thought I could do some work around the store. I sure as heck did. Friday we sorted all the sales records for the last 10 years and put them in boxes seperated by year and organized by month--a better system than just cramming them all in bags and throwing them around everywhere. That took a while, of course, and I can't take credit for initiating it. Katrina cares about the store and didn't want all that junk cluttering up the floor.

Today we had what the military calls a "field day:" I cleaned and cleaned and cleaned. Granted, people have been cleaning the store for a couple of weeks now, but not like I cleaned. The back room was first, with all the 1999 Inquest back issues and the bags and bags of trash. Then I organized and scrubbed the bathroom clean with my bare hands (which was...I dont want to talk about it). I stacked the chairs, reorganized the shelves, gathered up all the swag (free stuff laying around to give out), boxed up all the packing peanuts, organized and stacked boxes, swept, vaccumed, and mopped all the tile. Then I sold the heck out of some board games and talked a couple of folks into some other nice purchases.

Some of it must have worked because lots of folks wanted to stay around today and talk. So many folks, in fact, that we did the same amount of sales this weekend that they did for Christmas.

But that leads me to the first rule of game stores: if the environment isnt friendly, then people don't want to be in the store. Gill is obviously an extreme example of a bad store manager, but in my experience lots of game and comic store owners are jaded, overweight, and surly. They don't think about their customers. Someone like the Geek Girl wouldn't want to go into the old Compleat Strategist, and with good reason--heck, hardcore gamers didn't like going into the Strategist. Going through the receipts for the last few years, I can show you exactly how the sales were affected just because the place was a pigsty. We did less business for 2001 and 2002 than we did for all of 2003, and 2005 took up twice as much space again. 2006 has more in it already than all of 2002, and it's only March. Sales picked up right after July of '03 when I complained before, and stayed up as long as the store stayed clean.

The most important thing for store owners to realize is that they need the customer, and not the other way around. In this day of E-bay and Internet sales anyone with Mom's credit card can get any product they want. To compete with the World Wide Web, brick and mortar stores have to be clean, nice, friendly places where people can hang out, talk, and play games. Today four or five of the regulars came in to say how nice the store looked, and to tell us they were glad Gill was gone. I felt good about it.

The response our efforts are getting from regulars is nothing short of awesome, too. Already we've had volunteers to repaint the walls; an electrican says he wants to rewire the place for free (and put better light in the bathroom), and several regular customers helped me clean today, hauling trash to the dumpster and hanging wire racks. Its amazing.

Next week: the ins and outs of $5.15 an hour....

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Written by ElJeffe on March 25th, 2006