Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9696273" data-attributes="member: 7044704">I'd be more generous and say too hopeful, but there is a degree of "ignorance is bliss" involved when starting in gaming/comic/book retail.  Can't deny it looks like a dream job from outside, right?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Part of the reason that I never pulled the trigger was due to watching my bosses (and in some cases my fellow employees) make the mistake of assuming everyone loves what they love, even in the face of sales figures suggesting otherwise.  I'm self-aware enough to know my tastes are both eclectic and fairly exotic rather than leaning mainstream, and that's not  good starting point for a store owner in most fields.My second dreadful failure of a boss was a woman who quit Waldenbooks to open her own specialist scifi/fanatsy book store.  Almost immediately discovered she couldn't make a living that way, so she pulled in used romance novels to keep above water.  Then Magic came out, and she was an early adopter and on decent terms with WotC for a few years because of it.  Her tiny book store was suddenly filled with players about six days a week so browsing the shelves became an unpleasant experience, and book sales became such a tiny part of her profits they couldn't begin to justify the space they took up.  And yet she held onto them until the bitter end came with...I think it was a massive overorder on Fallen Empires that put her into a death spiral?  Probably that.  She never understood Magic as a game, just saw it as a cash machine, and when WotC inevitably put out a bomb she had no idea how to deal with it.</blockquote>

Verification