36th Anniversary

 

Thanks to everyone who came out for our 36th aniversary celebration on Feb 15. We opened the store door's on Feb 14 of 1990 and frankly I am a bit suprised we are still around after all these years.

Store Walkthrough

 In case you would like to take a look at the current layout of the store, we did a walkthrough video to maintain our Ravensburger OP status.

Wizards Premium

One of the things I see happening over the next few years is more stores moving or seeking WOTC Premium store status. Essentially, WOTC has a checklist of things a store to meet to qualify. In exchange the store gets access to higher level events, premium product like more collector boosters and higher quality marketing materials as well.

A major focus, and showing WOTC's direction, is the number of events and players a store has, both active and engaged. An active player is one that shows up to stores and plays in Magic events, (unfortunately, D&D play has no effect), an engaged player is one that registers on the Wizards website. You can play in events without registering but WOTC looks for both. WOTC also, for standing purposes, currently values players in Standard and Draft events more highly than players in other types of events, although Commander may be entering that area as well.  Why Standard and Draft? Players in those events are buying the most recent Magic product, which helps push WOTC sales higher. A Modern or even Pioneer player, since early packs are out of production, typically buys single cards, which do not help the Wizards bottom line.

Preferred Customer Benefit Addition

We have added a couple of new benefits to the Preferred Customer Card.

1) You receive 1 FREE rental per month of any rentable game in the game library.

2) Although you still have to pay the rental fee, we will not ask for a cash or credit card deposit when you rent a game. Just show us your Preferred Customer card and we will note that on the sheet. You will still be charged late fees for bringing the game back late and refusing to pay those will cause you to lose Preferred Customer status.

Game Library

Just a reminder that we have a very well stocked game library that you can borrow from to play here or rent to take home and play for a week (except for Cards Against Humanity, that you can only rent for a weekend). We just added copies of the Legend of Zelda Chess set, Fallout Yahtzee and Arkham Horror to the library bringing us to well over 200 titles for you.

How to Get Hired (or Avoid Getting Hired)

Bob Phibbs, the Retail Doctor, has a pretty good post on, especially if you are a student, how to best position yourself to encourage a potential employer to hire you. A couple of things I will comment on:

1.  If you want a job at a place, show you are interested and planned ahead by bringing a resume with you. Coming in without one and asking if we are hiring indicates that stopping was more of a spur of the moment impulse.

2. Dress appropriately. If you are applying for a job here and are male, suit and tie are not necessary, nor are a skirt or dress if you are a female. Staff doesn't wear them here so you don't need to when applying. On the other hand, staff here doesn't wear pajama bottoms or t-shirts with obscene sayings on them, so applying wearing those is not a good idea.

3.  Much as I tell my students at SEMO, unfortunately, potential employers are not interested in what your job goals are or in which fields you would like to work. Employers want to hire you to fill a specific need they have in the organization. If I need someone to work odd hours on the store schedule, you are more likely to get hired if you indicate you can work during those times than saying you need every night off.

MTG Celebration

We hosted the 2013 Magic Celebration or, as WOTC called it on Twitter #MTGCelebration, Saturdaywith about 18 happy players but no more sales than we would have during a typical Saturday.  Similar to most stores with which I have discussed the MTG Celebration, turnout ran much lighter than it would for a pre-release or Launch Day..  On the plus side we have  6 new players show up and fill out DCI cards, making about a third of our players  either comparatively new or, as several commented, people who had not played magic for several years and wanted to get back into the game.

One comment I heard from several other stores, and thank goodness it didn’t happen here,  related to players complaining about the giveaways for the event. You would think people would be happy, maybe not with the free half deck, but certainly with a free 2014 Core booster and the opportunity to receive more boosters just for winning games of Magic, at no financial cost to themselves, but apparently not.  At some stores, players complained about the packs given out and/or the lack of a promo card for the event.  It appears we have trained those who have played Magic (and other CCGs) to expect a promo card tied to a particular event, and, if there is not one, they feel slighted, even when the event is free.

One problem I noted was that, according to the instructions sent with the Celebration materials, stores should run players in pods of 6, sending out a new group whenever the store had six people ready to play.   Unfortunately, the way the event formatted for reporting in DCI Reporter, stores would have to have at least 8 players in the event and submit it as a Swiss style event, with players assigned to an opponent for each round.  This format defeated  the overall casual ambiance of the Celebration and I heard of players complaining about the more structured formatting used at some stores.  Several stores figured out a work-around to this by entering all players into DCI Reporter and matching them for the first round and either have them play each other or give them all “byes”, then submit the event after one round.  Hopefully, for the next Celebration, it will be sanctionable as a casual event, so that we only need to enter players names into it and report the event much like we do for casual play now, without having to force a structured tournament on the format.

No idea how the Achievement Cards went over at other stores but since WOTC really wanted people to tween the #MTGCelebration hashtag as well of pictures of the event (and people promoting our events and store on Twitter and Facebook is always a good thing), we offered an extra booster pack for each 5 achievements they marked off, meaning that, even if you lost all your matches, you could walk off with one , and maybe two, more boosters, as long as you were willing to get on your social media accounts during the event.  I don’t know how highly #MTGCelebration trended on Twitter but I was surprised at the number of people who completed all the achievements, with two of them even creating Twitter accounts while at the store.

GateCrash Pre-releae Wrap Up

Well, we made good use of our customer space this weekend with the Magic the Gathering GateCrash Pre-release running both Saturday and Sunday.  It was our best attended pre-release ever, though not our best sales weekend ever.  We received 150 Guildpacks from WOTC and could probably have used a dozen more to take care of latecomers that we had to turn away.  This is the first time I can recall we have gone through all of the packs provided for pre-release tournament players in the years since we started running them.  Overall, we, and more importantly the players, were very happy with this set.   Suprisingly, we had the highest number of tournament drops of any pre-release that I can recall.  A number of players registered, then either left or played first round and dropped, usually without telling anyone,  Ergo we wouldn’t find out until partially through or at the end of the round, when their opponent would come tell us that no-one had showed.  I don’t recall this proving such a serious problem in prior pre-releases.  All in all, a very entertaining and profitable, made more so by the flexibility WOTC allows us in running the event, made slightly less so by the salad dressing I spilt on my pants halfway through the final tournament.

If You Want to Sell Us Cards:

1.  Have some idea of what we sell here before bringing in your box of CDs or baseball cards.
2.  Don't bring in a box of common Magic, Yu Gi Oh or Pokemon cards and get out of sorts when we offer you nothing for them.
3.  Sort your cards or expect much less from them.
4. Don't tell us you got cash for your Yu Gi Oh or Pokemon last time you were here.  You didn't.
5.  Don't tell us:  "This card sells for XXXX online" because in actuality, someone wants to sell that card for that price online. Doesn't mean they ever got it.

Merle Rasmussen

Had the opportunity to have Merle Rasmussen in the store the morning of August 6.  Who's Merle Rasmussen, you ask?  Rasmussen was a writer for TSR during the early 80s and the designer of one of the earliest espionage RPGs, Top Secret.  Rasmussen is also the writer behind the 1980s modules Savage Coast, Midnight on Dagger Alley, Ghost of Lion Castle, Quagmire and Lathan's Gold, all of which were solo adventures, a rarity for the time.

In recent years. Rasmussen has worked as a property management specialist for Casey's General Stores, while shifting his game design focus to card and board games.  In recent years, he has released Save Your Brain (brain injury/awareness card game), Keep Iowa Beautiful Travel Bingo, Caseyopoly and Iowa State Fairopoly, as well as the Sqwurm card game, which Rasmussen is holding.

Breakdown of Sales

For those interested and who would like a better idea of what sells here in the store, here is a rough breakdown of categories and percentage of sales.  Note that since this is an approximation, the percentages probably won't add up to 100%:

Role-playing games  8%
Boardgames  7%
Miniatures 10%
Paint and miniatures accessories 7%
Collectible Card Games  20%
Single Cards  5%
Card Supplies 8%
Collectible Miniature Games 5%
Dice 4%
Comics 8%
Used Games  3%
Books 3%

Mayfair Games Goes Exclusive and What It Means to You

As the press release below indicates, the big news for the gaming industry coming out of the San Diego Comic Con was the announcement that Mayfair Games entered into an exclusive distribution agreement with Alliance Games and Diamond Comics Distribution (for those who don't know, Diamond Comics owns Alliance):

Mayfair Games is excited to announce their partnership with Alliance Game Distributors and Diamond Comic Distributors for the exclusive distribution of their games to the U.S. hobby retail network.

Management at Mayfair Games foresees a future bright with opportunities for national campaigns with coordinated outreach and events. With the advent of streamlined, focused distribution to the hobby trade, Mayfair anticipates continued direct support of the hobby retail channel through the MAR program and other means.

Dan Hirsch, President of Alliance notes: “Having worked with Mayfair from the early days of both companies, we at Alliance are excited to partner more closely with them. This partnership allows both of us to focus on the things we do best – Alliance coordinating and wholesaling, and Mayfair developing award winning titles, building brands and communities!”

What does this mean to you?  If you are one of our customers, not much.  We deal with both Alliance and Diamond so we won't have a problem having to open up a new account to keep stocking in Mayfair Games.  If the agreement helps keep Settlers of Catan and its expansions in stock, it helps make certain we don't suffer out of stocks of Catan and other popular Mayfair products

It may hurt other retailers that don't have an account with either of the two distributors as it means they will either have to open an account with Alliance or drop the Mayfair line.  Mayfair is the top selling board game line in many gaming specialty stores, so stores without an Allinace account will need to decide if it is worthwhile for them to create one. It also means that retailers won't have as large a selection of sources from which to procure Mayfair. Currently, if one supplier is out, stores can try another one and hope to find copies there.  Now, if Alliance or Diamond are out, so are we until Mayfair ships a reorder.

The gaming entity hurt most will be other distributors.  If they dealt in boardgames, Mayfair likely accounted for a significant portion of their sales.  Poof, that vanishes as soon as they sell out of their remaining Mayfair stock, leaving stores one less reason to put orders in with them.

Summing it up, little change for the customer, not much change for stores already dealing with Alliance or Diamond, major changes for stores that don't and other distributors.

Kossi Software

Tried out the Kossi software for running Yu Gi Oh today.  Typically, Kossi runs on the cloud which makes it very easy to upload results but makes the system run very slowly if lots of people access it at the same time.  Konami has made available downloadable software to run tournaments, which runs a lot more quickly than the could based stuff does. The big problem is that it doesn't automatically upload when you end the tournament.  You have to save it to the hard drive, then send it to Konami's tournament organizers, adding an extra step to the process.

A Tale of Two Paints

Probably going to drop the Howard Hues line of paints.  We brought these in about two years ago and have sold less than half a dozen bottles, despite their quality and value.  We currently stock, in depth, the Games Workshop and Privateer Press lines, because both of those sell steadily, the GW paints outselling the PP ones by a factor of 4 to one, mainly because of the high number of Warhammer 40,000 players compared to Warmachine and Hordes players in the area.  We have looked at expanding the Reaper line but haven't been able to get any info on a rack.  We have toyed with bringing in the Vallejo line of paints as well, as people speak quite highly of them, but the Vallejo paint sets we brought it, to test the waters, moved very slowly.  Ergo, we are pretty leery of bringing in the entire Vallejo line, given that it would amount to a significant investment on the store's part to do so.

Thanksgiving/Black Friday Specials

Since we've had a few people ask about the specials we're running, here they are:

Thanksgiving Day--open until 6 p.m. HeroClix tournament at 4 p.m Table of items including Magic, Warhammer 40,000, HeroClix and Yu Gi Oh plus assorted RPGs and boardgames, 30% off. For every can of food you bring in, take 1% off your total purchase, to a maximum of 10%.

Black Friday--Open 5 a.m. Specials good until 10 a.m. Free bagels and cream cheese, while they last. Remaining items on Thanksgiving sale table 40% off. For every can of food you bring in, take 1% off your total purchase, to a maximum of 10%.

Mural Contest

We're putting a mural on the side of the building between the entrance doors and the street and we're asking for artwork for you. What we're looking for:

1. G rated artwork. This will be seen by 7000 people per day so huge demon princes are out.
2. Scalable. The space we're filling is about 8' x 12' so your work will need to expand to fit that area without losing recognizability.
3. Related to what we sell. Games and comics good, rock band symbols, not so much.
4. Does not have to be a completed piece. If you can just give us a sketch indicating your ideas, that would be great.
5. It can be B&W or color. The finished mural will be color but if you want to turn in a B&W piece, that's fine.

We'd like to have your sketch by June 19, either on paper here at the store or sent via email. We'll post them up in the store and let our customers vote. The one getting the best response by July 4 wins first (and only) prize of getting muralized (is that a word) on the wall.

Shoplifters

Well, hopefully we caught the couple that shoplifted the Dungeons & Dragons Gift set a couple of weeks ago. They were in here on Saturday, just before 6 p.m., selling some used DVDs. The guy kept asking about chess sets, then asked if I would stay open a few more miniatures while they went over to the shoe store to get a friend to look at the set. Needless to say, the gift set went with them, though I didn't notice it was gone until we got a call from Book World Monday that the same couple had been down there half an hour later selling a D&D gift set still in the shrink wrap. The clerk though it was strange since they had been in before selling stuff but this was the best quality item they'd ever brought in.

After he bought it, he noticed they had walked out with a season one Star Trek DVD set, which I assume they tried to sell someplace else. The police think they have identified them so we'll see what happens next.

Break In

I got a call at home about 7 a.m. on May 1 from the Carbondale Police Department, letting me know that someone had forced in the door of the store. Arriving I found two police cars there, along with two officers. They entered the store with guns drawn and searched it to see if anyone was still there before letting me enter.

Someone had heaved a 25 pound (more or less) concrete block through the bottom of the front door, crawled through and done it again to the bottom of the inside door. I found the blok lying a good dozen feet inside the store, in front of the store TV. Bits of broken glass covered the carpet in the vestibule and for a good six to twelve feet inside the store. Whomever crawled through the inside door failed their reflex save as the police found blood on the glass and took a sample to send to the state forensics lab.

The thieves weren't very good at their job. Near as we can tell, the only things stolen were a Magic Sliver Deck, another doezne Magic decks and about a dozen Magic booster packs. All told, about $200. I guess they were animal lovers as they bypassed a collection can on the counter for the Humane Society with about $20 in it. They also aren't very good Magic thieves as none of the singles were touched, nor was the $100 From the Vault on the shelf near the Sliver deck. Joel half jokingly suggested, and I rather agree, though there's no way to know for sure, that the thieves sale the "Games" sign, thought video games would be easy to pawn or sell, got inside, looked around and said "What is all this stuff? Where are the games?". They had some friends who had talked about Magic, saw the name on some of the packages and grabbed them so the break-in wouldn't be a total waste of their time.

Tried calling the insurance agency but they don't work weekends . Called Glass Doctor to see about getting new glass for the doors, they wouldn't be able to get anything until Monday. Called Universal Glass. They came right over and we had the glass replaced by a bit after noon.

Near as we can tell, the break-in took place sometime between 3 a.m and 6:30 am, when SIUC Police spotted the broken door. Friday Night Magic wrapped up about 11 p.m. and there were heavy rainstorms off an on until about 3 a.m. but no water inside the vestibule, which should have been wet, given the amount of rain that night.

Dual Terminals

Thinking about getting in one or two of Konami's Dual Terminals. Got a chance to take a look at the at the GAMA Trade Show and they are pretty cool looking. One of the things that concerned me originally was that they were counter top sized units, which would take up some pretty precious counter space in the store. Instead, they are floor standing units which work much better since we have much more floor available than we do countertop.

The price is a bit off putting, $2500 per unit, and the cards for the unit are fairly expensive as well. Konami expects most stores to hit breakeven with the units in about a year. Some some stores are doing much better than that. Another plus in their favor is that there are currently only about 100 units in the US, located in about 80 stores, making them a heavy drawing point for Yu Gi Oh players from miles around. My concern is that the Yu Gi Oh fan base in southern Illinois is not strong enough to support one machine, let alone two. I'm going to carefully look at Yu Gi Oh sales and tournament attendance through the end of May before making a final decision.

Storm

Well, we made it through the storm. Our power came back on sometime Monday night and most of the rest of Carbondale's power came back Tuesday, though 20% of town is still in the dark. I'm proud to say that we maintained regular, (albiet dark) hours during the storm, when even Wal-Mart closed up