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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gilwen" data-source="post: 4003278" data-attributes="member: 1871">I don't think that the arguement is every FLGS is run poorly, I'm sure many are ran rather well. But you don't have to run your business poorly to make bad decisions, mistakes, or to get caught up in the wave of a new market boom. I think a lot of stores made bad decisions early on about D20 and then did really pay attention to what was happening with the market. There were definatly issue with the way WOTC handled certain things post Dancey but that's long standing risk that every gameline has and stores should consider that risk and it could happen with any publisher. At the heart of this issue I think stores that got hit hard by D20 got hit hard because of bad decisions or mistakes they made about the D20 market. They are many things to consider including problems endemic of the publishing industry and particularly the RPG segment. Those are risks though that should have been considered before going into business and should be continually considered after opening your doors, it's part of the sandbox your playing in and you should have ways in place to help mitigate or work with those risks.The most successful stores I have seen are run by gamers who opened a business. They didn't open a game shop because they wanted a cool place to hang out they opened the shop with the intent of working in the industry they loved. They approached it like a business and had multiple way to move product out of their store and they multi-tasked. They found out how the industry worked. They didn't rely one single method of making money they sold a variety of gamer related items and types of games. they hold events at their stores, if they took trade ins they had way of getting rid of that inventory other than just sitting back out on the shelf. They also had ways of getting rid of inventory that no one wanted. Some of them didn't order items for customers with out a least a token deposit (non refundable if the item's weren't picked up), some of them didn't. They also didn't jump in the deep end of D20, they started out moderatly and  built up their inventory on step at a time while paying attention to the reviews, industry, which publishers where bubbling to the top, and what their customers were asking for.I think I'm out of pennies <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=":)" /> Gil</blockquote>

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