Keep the stock rotating! If you’ve had the same box of whatever game sitting on your shelf gathering dust, give it away to your loyal customers.
Sponsor a used game trading night. Invite your customers to bring in their older games that they no longer play so that they can trade among themselves.
Agreed!
My FLGS also sells darts, used DVDs, and disc golf. It is actually pretty well lit and reasonably clean. They do TV ads on the local CW station (during Arrow, Flash, and the like)
They have regular Magic, Pokémon, and RPG nights.
We met there for a while but although it is decent our church space we use is better (open later, more room)
They seem to be doing OK – there really isn’t much competition (there were a couple of smaller places but they are no longer in business. the used record store sells a few games I think)
Are there any gaming meetup groups in the area? Maybe sponsor one. How about local conventions?
Brian
Here’s an idea from tonight’s rerun of The Big Bang Theory The Hookup Reverberation:
So, yeah, don’t do this.
Friend of mine bought a run-down falling-apart comics/SF store, turned it into a very successful comics/geek store, sold it at a nice profit, and watched it wither away under the new ownership and be turned into a vape shop within a couple of years. I talked with him about how he ran his business, and there were a few ideas that stood out.
First, obviously, advertise. The old owner refused to advertise, thinking word of mouth was the best advertisement. That’s obvious bullshit, and advertising turned the business around.
Second, community involvement. He reached out to local public schools and hosted events for kids, like comic-drawing contests and lessons, and made sure they knew about free comics days, and stuff like that. When you have a bunch of kids who want to spend their allowance in your store, that’s a good thing.
But the most interesting decision he made, in my opinion, was about hiring. He said it was much easier to hire friendly people and teach them about comics than it was to hire comics-fans and teach them to be friendly. His staff included women, and you’d be greeted within a few moments of walking in the store and asked if you needed help (yeah, yeah, I know some people hate that, but it was super-successful for his business). The place had a reputation of being women-friendly, unlike far too many comics shops.
He also had other more general business advice, but I’m thinking my memories of those aren’t going to be especially interesting or useful. These were the three things that stood out most to me re: a comics shop in particular.
That’s a great point. The comic shop which I frequent, near my office, always has several women among their staff, and the staff is almost universally friendly, engaging, and distinctly Not Comic Book Guy.
You may well already know this, but it might help your budget a little.
If the store gets it’s DC comics via Diamond Comic Distributors, in the UK at least, there’s a CO-OP advertising scheme where they will match your advertising spend on a sliding scale depending on your DC turnover.
At least that’s how I understand it works here.
Check near the top of a current invoice.
Well, that’s not quite right. About 30% of sales in MtG. The rest is mostly affiliated stuff and board games. Snacks and stuff they half-ass by going to CostCo and using an honor system on paying for them. I’ll likely put in vending machines and work from there.
Board games and role playing games are huge now so be sure to have nights for them.
Wizards of the Coast seems to be putting all their chips in selling direct so you may want to branch out to other games like Keyforge and Pathfinder.
Interacting with people online on Twitter and Reddit for example will help you build a community who will play and buy at your store.
People say that the future is in serving food while people play games but you don’t want to own a restaurant. Maybe you can make a deal with a nearby place that sells food?
I watch Team Covenant on Youtube. They are store owners from Oklahoma City that talk about the industry and did two recent videos with other store owners at GAMA which you may find interesting. Here they are.
Good luck! I live in one of the most populous cities in the Northeast and we have no game store so I hope yours is a great success and encourages others
Yeah, preparing food leads to a host of additional licensing issues, which you likely don’t even want to consider. Other alternatives would be seeing if there’s anything you can do to make it particularly easy for your customers to order from Grubhub, Uber Eats, or whatever delivery service might be popular in your area.
Building on my earlier thoughts on keeping that game room hoppin at all business hours, one person you’re going to want to hire is a host. There are a number of reasons for this, but let’s say in the ideal situation where you have that room booked 80% of the time with either structured events or free play hours - and it’s constantly full of people coming in and out. Someone needs to be a trusted gatekeeper.
Job description could include collecting admission fees for ticketed events, registration for contests, running a snack bar (cooler with drinks, variety of snack food and candies [take reasonable requests from your regulars!]), emptying the rapidly filling trash bins, wiping down tables and chairs/sweeping, maintaining restrooms, and generally being a helpful person. Awesome min+ wage easy job for a college student or young adult, trusted pair of eyes on the busiest part of your establishment, and possibly can refill depleted snacks faster than the vending machine company can.
Such a person (people?) can go a long way toward keeping your game room as an inviting place, rather than the slightly sticky, BO smelling, neglected half of a lot of game shops.
Invite food truck operators.
In my neck of the woods the new trend is for gaming stores to create gaming pubs as offshoots. You pay an entrance fee or an hourly fee, and have access to whatever’s in stock. One drink minimum. Food offered too.
The hosts explain the games and will demo them for you and your group.
I think there are now 4 gaming pubs in my city. 3 are run by one company which expanded from gaming pub to having a retail storefront, one from a retail storefront that added a pub.
HOWEVER all of these places are adult-oriented and do not allow children.
Have none of you ever taken a marketing class before?
Step one is to figure out who your customers are, or could be. Are they mostly teen/twentysomething males who have neckbeards and indifferent hygiene? Are they a mix of those guys and younger kids? Are there older people in the mix? Women? Is there a difference in the game-playing sorts versus the comic-buying kinds?
Once you’ve done your market segmentation, you then need to figure out how to effectively market to the ones you want to concentrate on. For example, if you’re aiming for the neckbeard gamers, you’ll want to probably have some sort of standing open gaming time where people can drop in and play, and you’ll want snacks and the like. But if you’re aiming at the growing market of adult board gamers (people who started out playing “Settlers of Catan” bought at Target), you’ll probably want to downplay the stanky nerd aspects and overbearing geekery. Similarly, if you’re trying to get young kids and teens hooked on comic books and geek stuff, you’ll need to do a two-pronged thing- entice the kids, and reassure the moms who would be bringing them to shop that it’s not a “weird” place.
One size does NOT fit all in this situation.
My understanding is that most vending machines are owned and operated by distributors who’ll pay you a cut of the business, assuming they find your store is a good place to put a machine into. So that is a low risk way of maybe making some money.
I did! They said that if the first sentence of your pitch was condescending and insulting, your audience would ignore everything else you said. I’ve found it to be super true.
I’ve seen a lot of game stores (and more than a few comic book stores) which have a clubhouse atmosphere. There are a handful of regulars who hang out there. But if somebody who isn’t a regular happens to wander in, only a minimal effort is made to treat them as a customer. The owner runs the store as a place to hand out and play games with his friends rather than a business.
That’s fine if you’ve got the money (and the friends) and can afford to stay in business on that basis. But if you’re in a situation where you need customers, you have to make the effort to reach out beyond your base and draw new people in.
Definitely. There’s clearly a vibe like that but the customer base is large.
Get me, this thing is close to an institution. It’s been open almost 40 years now and more than 25 years in this specific location.
Even with that, though, the real expansion opportunity is to widen the audience beyond where it is now. More products, more marketing and so forth to bring in a wider demographic base.
Like LAZombie touched on upthread - embrace the cosplayers - possibly get in a (small) stock of cosplay materials like foams, wigs and paints, host classes/workshop days/competitions run by whatever cosplay clubs are local to you, try and tie in cosplay to whatever else is going on, like a MtG cosplay competition before a big tournament, or a MCU-themed competition before a big movie release (but with lots of advance notice, that’s quite essential for cosplay).
At least in our small market, cosplayers are quite dedicated, so the one local comics shop that actively embraced them has done way better than the neckbeard-centric one that didn’t. Plus here, cosplayers tend to skew young and female, which is a good demographic to include.
don’t get too involved with the customers that way you don’t get involved in the teen/college interpersonal soap opera bs ……
ive seen 3 of those open and fail because the owners were more interested in watching anime/hentai in the game room with his buddies than seling me the 200 dollar ad&d book set I wanted to purchase I went to amazon and e-bay and bought what I wanted for half price smd stupid things like cheating as DM ….letting their buddies cheat and other such things ….
One tip tho is if you make a larp inform the pd before you do …my brother and cousins almost got arrested because the geniuses signed up people for an assassination tag game in which they used dart guns and so my bros team found another team sneaking about 9 pm and a dart fight opened up in a neighborhood and cops were called by the residents and my bro cousin and 3 friends sat in the station until the store owner explained what was going on …… but they had people shooting each other in malls and such ……the city council shut it down ………
A local comic store does a weekly Heroclix night for the kids to get together and play. I suppose it ties in nicely with the comics aspect and gives the kids something wholesome and social to do (plus, you know, sell some Heroclix). There’s an adult who runs the scenarios and keeps things in line.