| Everytime I see the topic come up everyone seems to want to blame the glut of D20 products that were crappy and label the downfall of the FLGS on that glut. Everyone tends to gloss over the FLGS's responsibility for their share of the problem. Stores who blindly bought any D20 book and/or overstocked the D20 stuff probably were hurt and that's mostly their own fault. D20 was a new market anyone who blindly jumped to that market without researching it or moving in with a plan wasn't very smart. The market's not going anywhere why not play it smart and pick the books you know will move and then bring in some fringe products to support those lines. To many times did I see FLGS, especially smallers ones, stock any and everything D20. There was no reason to go over board and stock everythign you can get yoru hands on. There was nothing forcing them to bring in so many books so quickly, I mean common what happened did the RPG truck pull up and just dump the books on them out of the blue?
There's really no reason for that old product to still be in store either, there are a variety of ways that stores could move that product out, granted it might not be at a full or even any profit but if the survival of your store depends on you making a full profit on each and every item then you probably need to reevaluate your business model. Get that old crap out it is a sunk cost and take what money oyou can get and reinvest it in new stock after doing some research in the market.
Gil |