Anybody on the forum owns a retro gaming store ?
I was thinking about getting into this but I'm not sure if its feasible. Would love to hear stories if anyone done this before or currently.
Please share any stories
I don't know how to make a poll but i feel like this could use a poll
I don't own one, but I have friends who do and have worked in one.
There is no clean answer to whether or not "it's feasible". In some situations, it will be. In others, it may not be possible. It's going to be challenging regardless. Rather than write an essay here, I'm just gong to list some thoughts.
Keeping costs manageable is the biggest challenge. You need to go through the exercise of doing the math, making worst case assumptions to see how tough this will be, especially starting out. When you open day 1 and have rent due, but have no customer base, are you going to be able to survive taking a loss while you find a way to attract customers? Will you still have cash on hand when a customer comes in with 60 new old stock Game & Watches that they have been sitting on for 30 years, and now that you are open, want to sell to you for less than market value because they don't trust the internet? (true story)
- Location - This is extremely important. Not just "what town you are in", but what street you are on (volume of traffic you are exposed to), the local demographic, how visible your sign and store are, how easy it is to park, what other stores are nearby, what competition is nearby (or was nearby in the past), etc. You can't just pick any storefront, or you are likely to set yourself up for failure on day 1.
- Employees - You are most likely not going to find competent employees you can trust who are willing to be paid minimum wage, and it's going to be hard to pay anyone much more than minimum and still make money. This means you are always going to struggle to find and maintain decent help. Most of your potential employees are going to be teenagers, which means they will not know how to test an RF console or even composite console, or have any idea how to differentiate a real pokemon game from a bootleg. To make a game store work, you will probably need to be putting in 8-12 hours a day seven days a week to start, and it may be hard to ever scale that back.
- Inventory - This will always be a challenge (that worsens over time), but I would say less so than the above. Once you open, most of your inventory will be trade-ins. The upper limit on this is out of your control, so you need to do everything in your power to get people and their friends coming back. On one hand, you are doing them a favor by turning their stuff into money. This is much less of a service you provide than in the past - they have many other ways to get rid of their items for more than you will be able to offer
- You can think of your store as an oil well or mine. There is a finite reserve out there (not anymore if there is/was another store nearby doing the same thing), and the flow will diminish over time. The way to counteract this is build a very good relationship and reputation with your customer base, so they will potentially one day sell or trade their games back to you for a fraction of what they can get on ebay.
- The margins on the games everyone wants to buy will not be great, you might need/want to pay 50% cash value on something like Melee
- If trade ins are not sufficient to keep your store stocked, where will you get more inventory? Ebay? For most things on ebay, you will be competing with collectors who are willing to pay much more than you can afford.