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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spacecrime.com" data-source="post: 987371" data-attributes="member: 753">(I should note that I'm mostly talking about in-store play here. That's not to ignore other competitive advantages like product mix, customer guidance, and instant gratification. It's just that those benefits are spread pretty evenly between all customers and products, and don' t really warrant separate figuring. In-store play is just a good example of a service that only benefits some customers and that is fairly easy to quantify.)Think about that for a second. Why would I do that? Why would I engage in a business activity that gains me no profit? At that point, I'm better off running a club and not selling product at all. (And if I'm just going to run a club, I'm better off buying a Curves franchise and making some real money.) So, I'm discounting to irregular customers and to regular customers. I think that leaves people who aren't customers as only folks paying full price. Which means we're back to discounting across the board, which is not really discriminating enough for me. <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=":)" />By the way, I'm all for rewarding great customers (which does not necessarily involve purchases -- for instance and IMHO, adults who teach kids D&D are worth their weight in gold). But I'd rather do it with gifts and sharing advance reading copies of books and other small gestures of friendship than by devaluing product that I sell.Except that you're trying to turn a tried-and-true profit center (selling product) into a low-profit rewards program for hardcore players, who may or may not generate profit in a pay-for-play environment.That doesn't make any sense to me, especially since 90% of my current customer base doesn't play in the store at all. In-store play is a good feature to advertise, and it's great for recruiting new gamers into the hobby, but the simple fact is that most of my best customers would gain no benefit from the kind of program you're proposing. If that's the case, then it seems to me that I'm better off separating the pay-for-play business and the retail store. If the members-only club is profitable because I'm charging an appropriate fee for the services I provide, and the retail store is profitable because I'm selling products at the best price I can get, then I've got the best of both worlds.(This, by the way, is a very useful train of thought for me. I'm getting a much better idea of how to approach some of the experiments I want to do in the future, so thank you!)Sure, but that "as much money as possible" has to be profit. High sales and no profit = failure every time. I don't think it's so much that you're off base. But I think you're thinking as a consumer ("it's fun to have a place to play games", and "it's nice to buy games for less") instead of a business owner. I think you're missing the key question that a business owner has to ask, which is "how can I make the most profit for the least risk?"</blockquote>

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