Behind the Counter

One thing you have to understand about game stores is that, like many low-end retail jobs, no employee makes a living as a simple clerk. Oh sure, the manager may be doing ok (but trust me, they aren't doing great) so the clerks must be doing ok too. Belive me, at $5.15 an hour we could be doing a lot better. Almost none of that money makes it out the doors, either; it gets blown fairly quickly on minis, or books, or board games. Seldom's the day the check even gets cashed in a real bank.

So, the most astute of you may be wondering why we even bother to stay in a money pit like this, pumping our hard earned dollars every two weeks right back into the edifice that is Compleat Strategist. There are two reasons. The first is that we are hobby fanatics. The kind of people in love with games, who buy them even if we don't play them. The second is the discount, stupid. The only real perk of working in a game store is the obscene discount; in our case, 30%. 30% is obviously a nice chunk of change, bumping a $40 game book into the $28 range, or the $60 dollar boardgame into the $42 range. The discount makes slaving away at a register worth it.

Except we don't exactly slave away at the register. Since the point of a hobby game shop is to showcase a product for sale it behooves a retailer to do all sorts of things to increase awareness of our games. That's a nice way of saying we get to play games in the store. We can also paint minis, model terrain, organize games, plan Campaigns, and talk hobby news, turning the Compleat Strategist into a kind of mini Timewaster's Guide, at least for the regulars.

From time to time a sale may creep in, but since game stores are actually filled to the rafters with high priced items, a dozen sales may equal a thousand dollars' worth of purchases. If we hit about 800 every day I suspect New York would throw a party. Obviously the weekend has higher sales numbers, but other nights, like Card Night and new item days, also bring in gamers in throngs. [editor's note: thank goodness for that 'r.']

So what do we sell the most of? Well, thats a sticking point; our store has four foci: wargames (including miniature wargames), roleplaying games, card games and family games. Of those "departments," family games seem to take the biggest hit due to the high number of fat, white gamers that hang out in the store and scare the wholesome people away. If the families can brave the gauntlet, however, then they often plunk down a signifigant amount of cash, which is obviously appreciated.

Wargames is probably our most profitable department, and the one we have the most cash tied up in. The days of the cheap Avalon Hill bookcase game are long gone, and basic wargames can have an insanely high price tag. Several large scale WWII boardgames in the store cost over 100 dollars a box. Obviously, the Games Workshop minis are expensive as well. Wargames also tend to take up a lot of space, and move regularly but sporadically due to the waxing and waning interest in theme. One week World War II may be big, while the next Napoleon or Caeser take the lead. Any game with league play will also sell well, and our Warhammer 40K section is regularly picked over.

Roleplaying games are a bit of a black hole in some ways and a money maker in others. We have a ton of roleplaying games in the store. They sell resonably well, as long as you stick to the basics (D20, OGL, World of Darkness) and less well in some of the other systems. I have lots of books that haven't moved in years, and whose systems are now kaput. A lot of store cash is tied up in product that will probably never move, which means that the New York office will occasionally decide it doesn't like a publisher or a game line. If it hasn't been selling, and their inventory gets taxed because of it every year, then the publisher better have a good salesman when it talks to them or we just won't get the books. Oh sure, we'll still special order it, but special orders are a bit of a pain for us, and we are reluctant to do it without cash in hand.

Card games have a problem similar to RPGs when it comes to sales. Certain lines sell—Magic, Pirates, Hecatomb—and certain ones don't. We have a million Tomb Raider cards, and Shadowfist cards, and a dozen other systems. Who knew there was a Spycraft CCG? Card games are both a blessing and a curse in that they are generally easy to learn and cheap to buy and yet hard to find players for. Like wargames we get around some of that with league play, but with so many games we find it easy to concentrate on a seller and forget about the ones that don't sell.

I've done a lot of talking about what sells because, as a clerk at a game store, the things I see people buy tend to be the things I want to recommend to other people. Its the crutch I fall back onto if I don't know the game or the system. Remember that if you need an in-store review from the clerk: asking what sells is often more reliable, or at least more accurate, than asking if the game is any good.

Which brings us to the subject of clerk/customer interaction. At $5.15 an hour we are not your psychiatrists, or your fawning fan section. We can be your friends, but please, please, please don't tell us about your 82 level druid who has a vorpal dragonlance and can turn into a dragon. If you want us to answer questions about games and we don't know the system, please take a breath and don't get angry with us. Don't get mad because Pinnacle's books are late from the printer, or because we don't have game X before store Y. It's retail, we're human, we have a ton of stock, and we are underpaid. Take the time to let us know about cool stuff and I can assure you we will try to get it in. If you're really hyped about it, we might even let you run a demo game.

Anyhow, that's all for this week; I'll see you guys in the store.

Oh, and I'm not kidding about the druid thing.

Discuss it in our forums.

Written by ElJeffe on April 13th, 2006