A lot of the game stores started selling snacks and drinks many years ago. Even if people are buying online and only coming in to use the store’s tables to play, they’ll often times buy snacks and drinks for themselves. The local game store in Little Rock starting selling beer a few years ago. It’s not exactly a cafe yet, you can pick up a nice pilsner and pair it with some beef jerky or a cold pop tart, but it’s something.
One thing about yarn and fabric stores is seemingly still being around more than other hobbies is that there’s a tactile component to it. If you want to knit or sew a particular item with a certain feel, there’s value in shopping for the material in person to get the texture you want. No one wants baby blankets made of scratchy plasticky yarn!
Paints, model kits, figurines, cards, etc will be the same whether you manipulate it before buying or not. So the stores that sell both might have a larger physical footprint for the yarn and fabric, but they can still deliver the other products.
It’s a small part of the overall puzzle, but I don’t think it can be dismissed.
That’s not unique to textiles, though. The other day, I needed some wire, and I wasn’t sure precisely what size it would be listed as (the fact that there are multiple different standards for wire gauge doesn’t help), but I did know what the wire I needed would feel like.
Quite.
The recent thread cited below is more or less all over that topic: the difference between a successful retail store and what late wife and I used to call a “retail museum”. I.e. a place where people go to look, maybe touch, but not to buy. Most retail museums are inadvertent and then short-lived.
My example was Comic Book Fans. I’m always taken aback by how much they spend.
In my usual shopping experience, I’m leafing through the Dollar Bin while the heavy hitters are chatting. Then the owner says “Okay, Fanboy, I got your pull list ready.” And it’s a list of at least thirty new comics that came in that day.
At four to six bucks an issue, they’re slapping down a Benjamin or two.
I remember visiting a Hobby shop in Little Rock. It was crammed full of train sets, leather working tools, wood burning sets and so on. There were a lot of books and magazines for sale. The shop was a meeting place for hobbyists.
They also sold parts to repair old trains.
I only visited once with a friend that was fixing his lionel train. That store closed at least 25 years ago. The shopping center is very run down.
I guess most of that inventory can be found on the web. It’s not the same experience. A big part of hobbying used to be making friends and sharing interests in projects.