Really!? What do you do? I have a couple players whose better half's hold a shorter leash on them...
Easy we have an impulse buy rule. Under $50 once a month, no questions asked. Hers is usually the show store. Mine varies between Jeep parts and anything else that catches my eye. Generally my online ordering is planned out in advance and she is aware of it for our budgets.
Also we both take the $50 no matter what and set it aside. So if there is a product like World's Largest Dungeon at $100 and I have leftover from the previous month. Guess what I get it. Even though I know I could have ordered it online for $70 at the same time.
But you keep telling me you're not my customer. It's a spiral, if RPG's don't sell, why do I carry them? If I don't carry them, you buy them online. If everyone buys online, how do you find out about them? If DDI can only get 30,000 subscribers, how do smaller games actually get a toehold?
Honestly I don't have a great answer for you.
The only thing I could share would be what brings me into any company's customer base.
1. Knowledge of Product - Weather it's a hardware store or a flowershop or a Game store, I want the person selling me the product to be able to assist in any question I have on a product.
2. Selection of Products - I probably would have never picked up Serenity if I hadn't saw it in the store one day. Asked the clerk about it, and he told me a few things he knew about it (see thing #1). I liked what I heard and skimmed on it. Came home read a few reviews, even asked a question here on EnWorld about it. Went back the next day and bought it there at the store.
3. Freatured Sales - Pick a company/product let them be the feature sale that month. It doesn't have to be a big discount, 5-10% can make people consider trying things out. Again refer to #1, have your staff know what they are featuring.
4. Offer them something - Amazon can be a tool of yours too. How many times do you see on here people complaining about not having a credit card or not wanting to use paypal etc. Guess what if it's not in stock we can order it through you. They pay you cash you order it, Amazon has a nice gift shipping feature you can use to ship direct to them. Charge a $1 for the ordering, $1 if they want it shipped direct to them on top of the ordering/shipping charges. Case example Dawnforge I just found it for $15 new not including shipping. It was a $30 book if I remember right. You don't have any in stock, but you turn to your computer order it for me, its $4 shipping so you tack on a $1 for $20 and you take my crisp $20 bill right than for it. The only real cost to you is the time it took you to enter the order, you call me when it comes in and guess what you made a dollar and made a happy customer who will than share the experience with folks to bring in other customers.
As much as I think WotC wants to move people to the online subscription model (and the one thing I will definitely agree with Smeelbo is that D&D Encounters is an attempt to push the DDI), they would rather have millions of people playing than just the 30,000 subscribers they have now (I'm surprised it's that low personally). Obviously online doesn't meet their minimum sales goals, but book sales do (or are close enough to attempt to push over the top). It's not time to dump the storefront yet, we have value to the majority of players - who don't shop (or post) online
Pretty good actually. I'll add that many stores are upset that we weren't even asked what day would be best for us (Thursdays would work MUCH better for me).
Another reason D&D Encounters are supposed to be run on Wednesday is because WotC was going to incorporate "social media" into the gaming sessions. Twitter was used to add a bonus to rolls at different points during the first one, not sure if they added anything or kept it up last week. Doesn't seem that big a deal to me, I wonder how many DMs even kept up with that part of the event.
As a technicality, stores are allowed to run it different nights - but not as an official "D&D Encounters" event (meaning no reporting to the DCI). In fact, since I've missed the first 2 (and will miss at least 3 until my DM can show), I was told to run them on different nights to "catch up" to the current action. I did have to cancel the events with the DCI though, so I won't get credit for the events (nor will the players, but I'm a little confused as to what they get - unless they can use this to qualify for Magic cards or if they're going to set up something like that for D&D).
Far as the rest of this, I think tying it all to an online experience isn't a good thing. D&D at it's core is still Pen & Paper.
