I'm looking for any and all advice! I'm currently in the process of writing up a business plan and am working on the financial section. Its a small coffeeshop centered around TTRPGs and board games. I'll be doing just a small amount of books, dice, and supplies, nothing to crazy. My question is how does one find the prices for building your starting inventory. The only way I could find was contacting distributors but I already need the business in place to get prices. How does someone find prices before starting the business?
Hiya! I'm probably one of the folks you can talk to about this. I've owned a Comic and Game store for 31 years.
In my experience, you can expect your discount to be about 40% off - or to look at it another way, your cost is 60% of retail. This may not take into account shipping charges, which are insane at the moment. So, in the discussion above, you may have trouble matching MSRP even
without charging "keystone". Or you
can, but you just won't have very good margins. But then, so what else is new? You're in it for the love, right?
Right? Because it's a lot of work, and the money ain't great.
That said, it's
awesome to do and you really
can make a decent living, once your volume gets to the right place. For me, I now make enough to support a family of four, but it took me about ten years to get there. I never
lost money doing it, but I didn't make much during my first decade. Luckily for me, I was young then, and didn't have much in the way of expenses either.
OTOH, perhaps you can make up for low margins on games, with your coffee sales. I have no idea how to run a coffee shop. If you have
that in place, I can see the two sides of your business bouncing off each other in positive ways.
If you're lucky, you can get the business to the point (like I often do) where you can run games while your employees do the clerk-thing (or in your case, barista-thing). Treat the employees well. You'll want them to stick around.
Any questions?
