Pay to Play at FLGS?

[On Puget Sound]

My local store (Above Board Games, Ft Mill SC - awesome folks!) runs a monthly late-night session - 10 PM to 2 AM - which they charge for. Friday Night Magic costs $5, but you get at least one booster pack for playing, and more if you place well. All the entry fees end up in the prize pool as cards. Encounters, Game Days and other sanctioned events are free.
]
Large regular groups have a $5 table fee per person, BUT... that fee goes into a group account, and the GM can spend that as he or she wishes, on anything in the shop. In theory the GM could just augment his/her own game collection, but in practice it's more democratic. We end up getting minis, dice, player mats, dungeon tiles or helping a new player with the basic books or a setting book. (I haven't asked if it's useable for snacks).

The table fee is frequently waived for people who spend money regularly anyway, and as GM I'm willing to cover any of my players for whom it might be an issue (one is newly unemployed), since it's sort of my money anyway.

 

[the Jester]

Let me play a bit of "Devil's advocate" here....

Would you be surprised if a restaurant asked you to make a purchase or leave if you took two hours poring over the menu? Would you be surprised if the coffee shop looked askance at you hanging out with your buddies for hours on end without getting a cup of joe?

No, but I can't have a hot cup of coffee delivered to me at home with a 20% discount from Amazon, and that is what an FLGS has to compete with.

While I totally agree that there is a happy medium to be found, and I recognize the "yer my babysitter har" problem, I don't think charging for the space helps the game shop in the long run.

 

[prosfilaes]

I find the OP's stores to be weird; if you want to sell product, sell product, and if you want to sell space, sell space, but don't mix the two. I'm curious if the games owner can even legitimately ask this for D&D Encounters; I would have expected WotC to have specified this as something a game store owner can't charge for.

Yes, retail space is expensive. But at the same time, there's a lot of coffee shops that wouldn't mind someone taking up a table for a few hours, provided coffee was actually bought, and many groups could find some other place that was completely free to play. And nobody wants to play in an unfriendly environment, so you want charging to be transparent and friendly as possible.

 

[Cor_Malek]

It seems that no member of our little "vocal minority" is against some kind of pay to play policy.

But as always, form matters. The OP descriptions were of shops that had poor idea as to how to do it (ie - lazily; simple time coupons added to purchase would solve the non-transferable problem), wingsandswords account showed poor knowledge of what people would be willing to pay, and what for (overkill both in price and preparation).

On the other hand we can see that many people encountered FLGS with reasonable way of charging - be it with low price, or indirect purchase - snacks (though I'm a bit surprised it was profitable to keep a snack machine in that kind of joint - there's a considerable cost with keeping those).

So yeah, pay to play policy isn't "bad" in and of itself. It can even be desirable for customers as well - by providing additional service, or as a way of organizing play (rent for "hottest" day/hours combo's). But as always, you can't just slap a price on something, be a dick about it and act surprised people got offended and folded (and offend you at the same time, don't they realize it's your business?).

And no. I wouldn't come back nor accept it as "normal" if waiter was keeping a timer on how fast I'm eating my friggin risotto, or whatever I'm having at given restaurant. Surprising as it might sound, I'm not going to restaurants to get rid of hunger - but to socialize with someone over a (hopefully) fine meal.

PS.:Coincidentally, I know of a bar down-town that encourages bringing your own liquor as opposed to drinking what barman/owner considers his stash (limited fridge space, you see) But yeah, Zejman is a peculiar place, and one of it's own

 

[prosfilaes]

snacks (though I'm a bit surprised it was profitable to keep a snack machine in that kind of joint - there's a considerable cost with keeping those).

Who said anything about a snack machine? Every place I've seen just has them behind the counter on shelves, or even in front of the counter where people can help themselves but an eye can be kept on them.

But as always, you can't just slap a price on something, be a dick about it and act surprised people got offended and folded (and offend you at the same time, don't they realize it's your business?).

Yeah. I sometimes find that small businesses have a habit of posting "do nots" on the door, and however justified they may be, it still doesn't entice me to feel welcome.

PS.:Coincidentally, I know of a bar down-town that encourages bringing your own liquor as opposed to drinking what barman/owner considers his stash (limited fridge space, you see) But yeah, Zejman is a peculiar place, and one of it's own

It was actually common at one point in time in parts of the US, where it was illegal for a bar to sell liquor by the glass, but you could bring in your liquor and store it at the bar and the bar would charge to serve it to you.

 

[Cor_Malek]

Who said anything about a snack machine? Every place I've seen just has them behind the counter on shelves, or even in front of the counter where people can help themselves but an eye can be kept on them.

The big room was free to play in, but snacks were not allowed to be brought in - you bought from the store, which had a soda machine, a snack counter, and bottled water for sale at reasonable prices.

I stand corrected, snacks were indeed behind the counter, soda in the machine. It probably makes more sense to keep pop in retailers machine and pay a bit more - but have it served cold and not worry about fridge maintenance.

 

[PaulofCthulhu]

Sadly I think we may see more of this in the future as circumstances dictate.

A Games Shop I know in Manchetser used to have free "play" tables, but then moved to a fee-per-player-per-session.

Further down that road, a local outdoors clothing shop now charges £15 (refunded on purchase) to just try on clothing, due to issues with people using it as a "tryout" shop then heading out and buying it cheaper off the internet. Sounds desperate, but that seems to be the way it is for them.

As for using shops as "tryout" centres, a relative does just that with books. One iPhone, one barcode scanning app. one Waterstones book store and one active and well used Amazon account.

Such changes in commerce were predicted 15 years ago, but now with broadband, highly portable computing devices and people growing up since first school with the Net its looking like it's actually starting to happen in places.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Yeah. I sometimes find that small businesses have a habit of posting "do nots" on the door, and however justified they may be, it still doesn't entice me to feel welcome.

This is my big beef. I don't mind stores encouraging something, maybe even heavily encouraging something but when they start pulling out the "do nots" I get annoyed. We had one store(that went away) which didn't allow outside food of any kind, but allowed us to use their space for free.

They sold small snacks, but we often played 2 LFR sessions in a row there on Saturdays. So, about 10 hours of gaming in a row. Often we'd have 2 tables for each session and one table would go long and have almost no time to eat between the two sessions because of it.

Almost everyone who showed up bought a lot of snacks and drinks from the store(why wouldn't we, it was only 10 feet away from where we were playing, it was very convenient. Much better than walking a block to the nearest place that sold drinks). However, they didn't sell anything that really worked as a meal. Apparently, the owner was afraid of selling real food because of licensing issues. So, we kept asking her if we could just bring in some food for supper in between our game sessions. She kept adamantly telling us no and used to get mad at us for asking.

We had a bunch of players who got really angry about the situation and told me(who organized the games) that they wouldn't come anymore if they were going to be told that they couldn't eat there.

One of my friends actually worked at the store and she pretty much confirmed to me that the store actually sold enough drinks and snacks to almost keep the store running without ever selling a single book.

 

[Shades of Green]

I think that there are two separate issues in here - per to play and pay to browse. Pay to play would be OK under the right conditions - especially if a private room is provided, and/or if a good DM/GM is employed by the store. But pay to browse is bad business. I mean, some malls I know provide you with free benches, tables, chairs and sometimes even children activity just to get people to stay in the mall, and thus get exposed to the merchandise and be more likely to buy it. And, besides, if you want to compete with Amazon, you have to offer something they do not offer, not charge for browsing while browsing Amazon is free.

Plus some people would like to try out a game before playing it. So game-store-organized games are actually advertising in some cases - a good store should organize free demo sessions of varied games just to get people to be exposed to your merchandise.

And there are better ways to profit from players staying in your store rather than charging money for people staying in the store. Selling snacks and/or food is an option, as are renting private rooms, renting books/minis and so on.

 

[MrGrenadine]

It's issues like this that make me ashamed of the hobby.

This last line is a bit dramatic, especially since your examples have nothing to do with the case at hand. Does your grocery store provide stoves and cutting boards? No. And there's no one forcing game stores to provide gaming areas, either--thats their choice.

In fact, I would find it very surprising if any gaming store added a gaming area without at least some way to monetize it. The issue is that there are acceptable and reasonable ways for stores to be compensated for gaming areas: a per hour/ per person fee, charging for snacks, "rent a DM" sessions, etc. As long as the rules are clear and the price reasonable, who would complain?

In the OP's example, it seems like an issue of tone. Instead of telling folks they're not welcome to stay and play in an Encounters session unless they buy something, the store could make it a policy to simply remind every customer that does buy something that their purchase allows them to enjoy one game session of their choice at the store for free, or something.

Ultimately, it sounds like a simple "people skills" problem to me.