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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MUKid" data-source="post: 1049984" data-attributes="member: 4289">Re: Re: Support Your Local Game Store?You're right, it is the point of capitalism, and if the publisher were in competition with the game store, they should obviously sell it for as low a profit as they can stand.  But the situation is complicated when the publisher depends on the game store to move their product.  By undercutting the store, and thus stealing sales from the store, they are denying profit to the store.  And if the store is denied enough profit, they go out of business.  If all the game stores went out of business, there's no way that someplace like Amazon would make up for all the lost sales, and many, many small press publishers (who don't get picked up by Amazon) would probably go under.An oft-forgotten player here is the distributor as well.  Distributors (like Alliance, here in the Midwest) make money for the service of getting the product from the publisher to the store.  Your FLGS doesn't just call up, say, Malhavoc and order six copies of Arcana Unearthed.  Rather, they call the Alliance people, who have it to them within a day or two.  This helps the publisher get their product into all the stores the distributor does business with, as well as help the retailer by providing one-stop shopping for all the products they carry (well, most of them).So the problem, as you see, with selling stuff at Cons for cheap is that people go to Cons to shop, and they don't spend their money locally.  This hurts the store as well as the distributor, which could possibly hurt gaming in general -- something that none of us probably want.  One only has to observe all the tales here of various shops going out of business (it's happened around here several times) to realize that this isn't exactly a sure-fire market, and stores often eat or starve based on small changes in the sales environment.This sounds like I'm making the point that you should never buy at Conventions, but again, I'm not convinced the lost sales matter that much to a retail store.  BUT, the point that I'd like to make is this -- is it worth it to save $5 and have that cool new d20 book on the day it releases at GenCon, or could you spend the $5 extra, wait four extra days, and help out your local store?  Or, on buying from Amazon (which bugs me more), let's say you save 30% to buy D&D 3.5 -- you just saved $27.  Is it worth $27 to have a local place where you can go and browse and make impulse buys?  And don't forget that you can't get a book like A Magical Medieval Society or From Stone to Steel on Amazon -- if those publishers were totally reliant on Amazon, they simply wouldn't exist.It's all about weighing costs.  If you can save $120 a year -- $10 a month -- from ordering online, is it worth $120 to keep your local store open?Still just curious about what everyone else thinks -- I'm not trying to preach or get up on a soapbox or anything, and I'm still not sure what my own opinion is.</blockquote>

Verification