The health of local hobby shops, another perspective...

Greylock · Mar 21, 2012

This is my fourth or fifth iteration of this topic across diverse forums, so if you've caught all of them.... stop following me, that's too creepy.

MidSouth Hobbies, in Memphis, TN, continues to rock the local hobby world. After about three weeks, the expansion is getting close to complete. They are moving across the parking lot, and more than tripling their space.

To target this to the RPG crowd, well, the RPG crowd is the reason all this has come to be. The manager of this store is an RPG geek of the highest magnitude. He plays in the same game I do, which means he's in a Beale_Knight game. BK's game followed immediately upon the last game authored and ran by none other that of ENWorld's own terribly missed alsih2o. Don, aka dfmoss, is the manager, not the owner. He has petitioned the owner for years to carry gaming things. A year ago or so, he brought in Reaper minis. A few months ago, the shop chanced upon the Warhammer Sale of the Century. That brought in cash flow beyond anyone's imagination. So... MidSouth has finally moved into a space more suited to them, and have hired a new man [heh] to run an actual RPG/Comic shop within the store. The new internal shop will feature everything from D&D to Warhammer to Traveller to comics.

AND - tables for large scale minis style gaming. AND - small side rooms available for amounts I've not yet ascertained to local game groups who wish for a space outside home to game in.

To change this up from my post at Hyperscale, on the downside, Midsouth Hobbies couldn't get a table at the local Sci-Fi, ShadowCon, con this year. They said that they didn't have enough room for them. This in spite of the fact that MSH has more science fiction and space model kits in inventory right now than any model store I've set foot in in 30 years. [I don't think MSH bothered to try MidSouth Con.]

Link: Mid-South Hobbies and Games - Shopping/Retail - Memphis, TN | Facebook

This picture illustrates it well:

429470_303858729669442_237784242943558_757082_734790317_n.jpg

Greylock · Mar 31, 2012

Update

MidSouth Hobbies is hoping to make the reopening date of 4/1/12, but it's going to be tight. They've emptied most of the old shop, although they still have one very big thing to remove - their main slot-car track. [They've got two, one a plain oval, the other quite complex.] Getting the new shop ship-shape is going to take a bit of doing if they hope to be done in two days! In a couple of these pictures, you can see the owner, Emmo Hein. And you can see the mammoth gaming/RPG room. There will be places to paint, tables for Warhammer type stuff, comics, and gaming rooms:

Here's a pic of the track that still needs moving:

The health of local hobby shops, another perspective...

Greylock

First Post

Greylock

First Post

Similar Threads