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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4287131" data-attributes="member: 14159">I think a lot of the problem with bad FLGS comes from the sad fact that many FLGS are run by gamers with no business knowledge.How many FLGS are run by people who have substantial experience managing a small retail business, or have a business degree, or know anything more about the gaming business than what they've learned about products as a fan of their favorite games?How many FLGS hold on to merchandise that's many years outdated just hoping they'll sell it one day, one fateful day, at full price to that one guy out there who is just looking for some specific old book or a starter set to some long discontinued game?  Wouldn't most non-gaming retail stores have marked it way down for clearance, cut their losses and moved on?  How many FLGS are little more than a hangout for the owner and some of his friends, and if you're not one of the in clique you get lousy service?In the spirit of the thread, here's my FLGS horror story:Almost a decade ago, a new hobby shop opened in town.  It was trying to be a general shop of geekery, it was a fully fleshed out comic book shop, it had a decent sized anime section that did special orders and rentals.  It had a pretty large collectable toy section (and the owner kept his own collection on display there under glass).  The gaming section, however, was weak.  The owner apparently bought  boxes and boxes of bulk gaming books at an estate/liquidation sale and had filled a bookcase with old WoD and GURPS books and 2e D&D books (circa 2001).  He got a few copies of the new releases of the month from WotC and put those up for sale, but he didn't know much about gaming.  When the Wheel of Time RPG came out, he looked at me as he was unpacking them from the box and asked with a befuddled look on his face if it was some new D&D setting or something.  When I talked with the owner, he considered the store a competitor on equal footing to the other FLGS in town, since he figured he got in the same new D&D books as they did, and seemed to be generally clueless about gaming and figured selling gaming books was no different than selling comic books. I stopped going there when three things happened all within about a month of each other.1. My girlfriend had special ordered an anime soundtrack, to which he said it would be due in "next tuesday".  He said that every tuesday for a month.  My girlfriend gave up on that store and stopped shopping there, she randomly stopped by a year later just looking around, and the shopkeep remembered her and said that the soundtrack she'd ordered about 14 months earlier had just come in "last tuesday" and it was going to cost about $60 (about twice what he initially quoted back then).  She said she'd given up on the order a year ago, bought the disc elsewhere, and even if she was going to buy it she wouldn't pay twice what she was quoted for it.  He threw her out of the store and banned her from it for not paying for a special order.2. I came in once and saw that the owner had bought a big load of old GI Joe toys at a yard sale and was piecing through them on a table in the back seeing what was broken, what was fixable, what was junk ect.  I had a lot of those toys when I was a kid and recognized a lot of what was on the table.  I was idly talking about it with him, and he wanted me to come in one day and do the sorting/cleaning/repairing myself.  I asked how much he would pay me, and he got offended!  He wanted me to come in and spend a whole day preparing merchandise for sale "for a friend".  He wasn't my friend, he was the proprietor of a shop I visited, and apparently he saw me as free labor in addition to a customer.3. The proprietor for the store was on the listserv for our gaming club on campus, by his own request.  Whenever a new book would come out and people would discuss where to go to pick it up, or would talk about how they'd just ordered it from somewhere, he would e-mail them off-list to chide them for not buying from him.  He even contacted the club officers wanting some kind of exclusivity deal where we'd only buy from him for all club purchases and to require or pressure our members into only buying from him.  We weren't about to stand for bullying from him (especially since at the time there 4 FLGS in the town, and he had the worst selection and service).He's still in business, but he completely dropped gaming from his store, and most of the anime and toy stuff, and is now just a comic book store.</blockquote>

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