Hi all. I’m in Customer Service at Noble Knight, and we appreciate the conversation, both on our behalf and questioning the viability and necessity of our organizing. I’ve scanned through the thread, and while there’s a lot covered, I figured that this line of questions would be the best place to start.
I can’t get into specifics about profit margin, but elsewhere, it was mentioned that the average FLGS’s margin is 5-8%. That percentage is significantly less than the profit margin at NK. I mean...yeah, SIGNIFICANTLY less. Think of us more like Gamstop than an FLGS, where selling used games is virtually nothing but profit for a store. If they buy a PS3 game for $5 and sell it for $15, none of that $10 goes to the publisher or to Sony, but they keep it all. Gamstop is a big corporate entity that’s starting to buckle under its own weight, but NK is entirely out of one location. If you think of the store in those terms, you’ll start understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing.
As far as the other questions:
- Shiny vehicles, changing often: yes
- Massive homes: Yes, kind of. One of the ownership group spends the majority of time at one of his houses in Florida. Full disclosure, I don’t know how big the homes are, but once you get to the phrase “one of his houses,” I think that gets the point across.
- Crazy mahogany office setup: Honestly, I laughed when I first read that because I thought “How did he predict that?” Yes, crazy setup with a big stereo system, personal bathroom and a six-foot Harley Quinn (from the Arkham video game series) figure. And that’s the office of that owner in Florida, so the space is used less than a month out of the year.
This is completely anecdotal, but I’ll share my experience: I started the day after Gen Con in 2019. At that time, there were 30 people employed with the company, and the company had just moved into our current location the month before, condensing five warehouses into one one big facility. Now, we are around 75 employees and ownership is already actively preparing to expand our warehouse, even adding a second floor, because we’re just plain running out of room. In preparing to organize, I’ve found that pay has been generally static throughout. One of my colleagues checked the average cost of living needs for the area the store is at and found that it’s a little more than $22/hour. Of the 70-ish of us that would be employees, taking out those in management and ownership, no one makes that. Right now, I only see one person making more than $20/hr. Everyone else makes less than $20/hr, and most make less than $15/hr. If I can give one example of our fight, it was given yesterday after our open enrollment insurance meetings: “Had the insurance meeting. I was on our top tier insurance paying $75/paycheck out of pocket. The new premiums have me paying $103/paycheck out of pocket at the LOWEST TIER.”
I am not pro-Union, and my eyes are wide open in this process. I’ve told my colleagues and the CEA this, and they welcome that concern. I’m sharing this so that y’all understand where we’re coming from. We don’t want to feed the trolls, but have wanted to discuss true needs with management and ownership. We’ve been shut down too many times individually, and have seen the store thrive too much the last couple years, so we’ve had to do something to try to help ourselves. It’s been met with hard resistance, but we’re on the path with a supermajority of the employees on board with the union, and we’re looking forward to the next steps together.
