Board games really take up a LOT more room than RPGs do, no matter how much one tries to spotlight RPGs.
Of course, but they also show up on a shelf much better than any spine-out book will. The RPGs on the floor level shelves should be around eye level in the displays wrapped around the current all-RPG island, with a similar footage of large, slower selling boxed games shifted down to floor level on the island. They can't fix the cramped space, but they could sure make the product easier to see. It would also reduce the traffic flow problem they get with people having to sit on the floor to look through the RPGs, which blocks people trying to get past them.
The space is really tight, enough so that the store isn't fully wheelchair accessible - not that you could reach the comics on the second floor in one anyway.
Yeah, okay - I have no defense for this. That's just lazy.
Some of it's crowding and a weird layout so there's no obvious spot for new releases (and the best there is is tied up with board games, which are a major cash cow), but a lot of it is two-three employees who cover different days and have very different priorities and work ethics. So, combination of laziness and left hand not knowing (or caring) what the right is doing.
To be fair to them, that's because metal figures are near impossible to get from distributors.
Oh sure, they're dying out fast and rarely worth carrying even when a distributor gets some in. The few big US metal casters that might be worth dealing with directly are largely historicals, which are hopeless to stock around here. We're just the right distance from the big Pennsylvania cons that what market there would be just saves their money all year and binges at Historicon or Fall In where the selection and deals are better. The little metal casters are boutique figs, rarely offer a worthwhile retailer discount, and are specialized enough they're impossible to justify.
The only exception might be North Star, who have okay wholesale rates and carry a wide range of genres and periods, but even with them you'd mostly be wanting an account to reliably get Frost/Stargrave plastics (which regular game distributors suck at stocking) and (since North Star sells online themselves) you wind up competing with them and their occasional sales. Access to their metals would just be a bonus, and not something that would move reliably or in large amounts.
My observation about lack of metals in store was largely a consideration on how much things have changed in the twenty years since I was in retail. Back then you'd be cutting your throat not to stock at least Reaper and GW, distributors kept stock on hand even for fairly small metal ranges, and plastics were mostly the province of GW as yet. Much quirkier market back then. Heck, at one point I was selling solid numbers of the 3.0 era Chainmail range and (for the few months it existed) White Wolf's Trinity Battleground range, of all the unlikely things.