Tuesday, September 12, 2017

The Arizona Gamer Story, Part 5: Cart

Welcome back to the meandering tale of the Arizona Gamer, my second game store in which I was a minority shareholder and served operationally as "the card guy" and "the organized play guy."

I told the tale of how Jason Barnes started Arizona Gamer as a mall kiosk.  Arizona Mills Mall is located at the epicenter of the metropolis, at the junction of I-10 and US-60 in Tempe, just southeast of Sky Harbor Airport.  It was still the newest mall in town when Jason got started there, so even after moving to a permanent storefront at Mill and Baseline, he intended all along (and I agreed) that it was worth our while to get a mall presence again.  Enter the cart.
That photo is about what our cart looked like, though we had it arranged so that the center was an open surface for a Warhammer 40K demo, and the endcaps had mini-shelves full of TCG booster packs and sleeves.  We kept getting moved around by mall management, so we basically played the role of the Tuatha'an and made our camp where we found it.

The part I wasn't privy to was that November and December were triple rent months, wiping out most of our profit on the cart.  We had no point-of-sale apparatus back in those times, so the benefits of load-balancing were essentially absent.  Our employees who worked the cart were sometimes on the ball but sometimes absolutely not.  The mall environment is a weird microcosm and is not entirely unlike what I imagine it would be like to work at a theme park.

You know what?  I'm already tired of reminiscing about the cart.  I'm not even going to stay on topic for the rest of this article.  I thought the cart would hold up for a full-length article because anyone who was part of the Arizona Gamer inside circle back then remembers the cart so prominently.  It was this really unusual way to run a game store, or an advert for a game store, or kind of a convention booth that never closed?  I'm not even sure what the hell it was.  I kind of want to try it now, except that like everything else, it doesn't rate a spot on my priority list, which is utterly dominated by the store move until I have no damned idea when.  Hopefully soon.

If you want to make sure you have every good idea on the planet, just be busy enough with an overwhelming deliverable that you have no time to allocate to anything new.  Inspiration will spring forth.  A geyser of profitable ideas has been flooding in basically all year, starting right about when I finalized DSG's previous lease with the existing landlord and concluded that renewal was simply off the table in any realistic way.

I really, really want to punch the person responsible for the abortive attempt to build out the Chandler suite before we got to it.  Every day is a new adventure in discovery.  Oh that floor covering?  It's actually stucco and is proving hideously difficult to remove.  The drop ceiling above the restrooms?  No, they didn't dismantle it, they just cut all the beams flush at the edges.  Tile glue?  Oh, don't we wish.  No, they used tar, because of course they did.  There's Cat5e run everywhere that we don't need any and never will.  I'm fully ready to discover a chupacabra nest somewhere under the electrical panel.  (Which was a hideous mess and cost us almost four figures in labor to have our electrician fully refit.)  It's like that movie The Money Pit, except without the charm of Tom Hanks and Shelley Long in their prime.

Concurrent with this insane behind-schedule buildout, I'm going to have to assemble the store while contractors continue work, and aim to get all our ducks in a row quickly enough to avoid downtime.  If you asked me today what the odds are, I'd say 50/50 at best that we close Gilbert and open Chandler without skipping a beat.  And this is a ton of up-front expense that doesn't go toward inventory or other stuff we use to generate revenue... no, it's just a sunk cost that amortizes out over five years.

It's enough to make a guy want to abandon the entire plan and just open a mall cart.

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