Why should I care about the FLGS?

[Kaleon Moonshae]

I'd like to think it's because Dragon's Lair puts out such good product that it's taken them about a half a year before they recognized me. Now, Gamemasters in New Jersey DID recognize me sooner than that, but I was a bit more distinctive. I was the only guy there buying any non-d20 stuff...

Also, I usually go to Dlair at nights - although I might check it out during the day tomorrow.

Like I sid, it may just be my experience, sometimes certain people just clash. I just get the feeling when I am in there now (as apposed to the first 4 years) that they are more interested in people who play mageknight, yugioh and the like than people who buy the rpg stuff. I am very distinctive, not so much in the last two months when I finally stopped dressing weird and having odd hair colors. This is why I was very careful not to mention a name in my first post. We were talking bout personal experiences, and I did not want to sway anyone's oppinion on a specific locale. DL is prolly a great place, it just isn't wht I look for in a flgs, it isn't the same level of personal recognition and personal service that I expect for inflated prices. I have been in there numerous times for over 20 minutes looking at stuff and no one has even said a word to me, which I find a little annoying, I was taught better than that in retail. Even the place in vgame store in dallas that I have been to only twice (about two months apart) recognized me and called me by name the second time I was in there. ::shrugs:: as has been said numerous times, ymmv.

 

[Kaleon Moonshae]

One of the nice things about a Friendly Local Gaming store is the selection...they tend to have racks of older books that are no longer in print, like 1e and 2e stuff. While it ain't all that useful rulewise, they're often better written, and provide egads ideas for games. That and they're purty to read through. Also, they have the read through factor, as well as the "Hey, I've always wanted that book but forgot that I wanted it so never looked it up to buy online" factor. Also, yeah, Capitalism supports the big guys, but not everyone can work for a big guy, and by you supporting the big guys, you're taking away part of the little guys income that he needs to live. I've not run into a not Friendly LGS, both the one up at school and the one here at home are friendly. Not too much experience with the one at home, 'cause I just discovered it recently, but it seems good. And besides, getting your group together, in a store, where they have books, makes it easier to coerce those that purchase less material to maybe lend their wallets to the cause.

Not that I'm against buying online, I've done it a lot, but I'm all for picking something up in your FLGS if possible

And thats my 2 cents

Places like Half-priced books here in austin has a better selection of older game stuff than any lgs I have ever been in, plus they are half off the cover price usually. I love used book stores, especially those that get publisher overdrafts (or whatever term you want to use). You can get new books (even rpg stuff) for 50% off from some of the larger companies and if you are lucky you can find great gems from generations past.

 

[Najo]

Please read - Why you should support FLGS

To those who don't support FLGS,

The number one reason to support FLGS is that the ecology of gaming depends on them.

Roleplaying is an activity that on its own, is mostly played with friends and can survive the easiest without retail support. But thats failing to look at the big picture.

Other games, like Magic:the Gathering or Warhammer, do need a community to offer people to play with. They simply would dwindle away and die without tournament and league support. This is a fact that both WOTC and GW have identified, and go to lengths to encourage.

Marketing surveys have shown that gamers typically move between games when they get burned out on playing one. Sometimes they stay with the same system (d20), sometimes they move to another role playing game, sometimes they move onto a different hobby game altogether. Most dedicated gamers play two hobby games (such as D&D and magic, or Warhammer)

When you start playing a role playing game, and you put your group together, pulling from the best canidates who can play at the same day and time, and who have a good synergy together. How often are these people you met playing something other than a roleplaying game?

Gaming is supported by games like Magic and Warhammer, and those games need the community a good game store can provide. Role playing games would indirectly suffer from the loss of these stores. Without game distributors and stores, many of the secondary games and products from start up publsihers lose their ability to be distributed. Literaly, we would be left with D&D, Magic and Warhammer, and those would suffer somewhat by the loss of players having a centralized location to play face to face.

I personally feel that it is important to keep gaming strong in our communities, we are already a small minority as it is, and without FLGS gaming is forced out of the public awareness and back into small groups of friends that play in their living rooms. Altough most rpgs are done like this, the difference is the ability for hobby games to recruit new players is ruined.

Seriousily take the time to think this through from the overall ecology of our hobby, and not your own immediate paradigm. Think about how the revenue stream flows through our industry and supports the retailers, distributors, and game manufacturers that make our products. Think about what online purchases does for the hobby and then how a FLGS does for the hobby.

Do you think that kids playing Pokemon started playing magic because of a online store, or because of a FLGS. Do you think that someone buying heroclix who got turned on to Warhammer, and then started painting miniatures and that got them into D&D, did all that through amazon, or did he see those games at a game store. How many of you, get turned onto the products we play because of a game store and then go purchase the product on-line somewhere? Would you have played that game, if it wasn't for a game store. Would your friend? Without game stores, would gaming have gotten to where it is? Would the public attitude towards gaming be as positive as it is?

If we want gaming to survive we need to support the people who help it grow and survive. Not a place like Walmart who wants to censor music and magazines and thinks D&D is the work of the devil. Your $10 you save, is costing you more than you think...

Thank you for listening,

Nate

 

[Ourph]

I bought my first set of D&D books at Sears.

I bought my first AD&D books at Toys R' Us.

I bought my first set of miniatures at a bookstore.

Personally, I think the hobby is better supported by getting rid of all of the LGSs that feature poor pricing, unfriendly and unhelpful staff and a glut of poor quality gaming materials. Let the great gaming stores survive, and give the rest of the market to places that can sell the items for a reasonable price and have much wider distribution.

If an RPG, miniature battle game, or card game is popular and people are buying it, stores will carry it.

Even if those stores mostly sell clothing and kitchen appliances.

 

[The Mad Kaiser]

And the money I spend at these shops goes back into the community. Instead of buying something at Wal-mart, who will take the money and send it off to head office, I buy it at the local hardware store, or the local furniture store, or the local whatever store. The local shops generally have better quality stuff, because they're not trying to sell for as low as they possibly can (Wal-mart and other big chains tend to choose bottom-of-the-barrel products in order to increase their profit margin). And the money I spend goes into the pockets of the people in my community.

If some big chain stores moved in (and they are threatening to), and everyone abandoned the local shops for the big stores, the people who now make a decent living running their own shops would be driven out of business. And while they might be able to get jobs at the chain stores, they'd probably be making minimum wage. So the income level of my neighbourhood would go down. Lower incomes means more social problems, especially when people previously had more money. So the quality of life in my neighbourhood goes down. And I suffer, because I didn't shop locally.

Big chains like Wal-mart and others (but Wal-mart is the paradigm case) have been sucking the economy out of small towns across America for years now.

[counter-rant]
There are plenty of reasons to hate Wal-Mart, but this is way off.

A bit of blame for empty storefronts rests on Wal-Mart's price competition, but this is ignoring the larger economic issues, such as factory closings that force residents to move and reduce the population of local shoppers. If you live in a large enough city, there is plenty of room for both Boxes and Specialty Shops. We have 5 Wal-Marts, a Target, 4 Walgreens, a mall, 2 Big K's, a Lowes, a Home Depot, Grizzly.com, a Best Buy, a Circuit City, a Pet Smart, BB&B, 2 Hobby Lobbies, Bass Pro Shop Outdoor World and plenty of small shops that compete with them quite well. I personaly avoid Wal-Marts for political reasons, mostly for their dealings from 1992-2000. But the facts is the facts.

Wal-Marts often save these failing "ghost-towns" (which aren't that great, really) by buying huge chunks of unfarmed farmland or old factories rotting where they stand. They also give tons of cash to the towns to construct new road intersections and traffic lights, often the first real traffic safety the towns have ever had. They keep young people from moving away, giving them a volume of employment the "little" shops could never bring. You may scoff minimum wage, but minimum wage goes very far when a soda pop is still 35 cents a can and people eat homemade chili and sweet cornbread instead of at resturants every night. To top it all off, most of the people who live in these small towns will drive an hour or more to reach a Wal-Mart to avoid the criminal price gouging of the local monopoly shops. Put money into the community? If it wasn't for Wal-Mart, Arkansas would be the only State owned by the Federal Government (except for Hot Springs) through the welfare, dirt-farming, and forestry programs. What little factory jobs remain there are filled by illegal migrants that are paid FAR below minimum wage, namely employed at Tyson Foods, and live in pitiful slums.

If you need a reason to hate Wal-Mart, look at two factors: Labor Unions and Companies that do Business with China, hire Illegal Migrants or Move to Mexico.

The Labor Unions made US manufacturing 20 to 37 times more costly than third-world maufacturing or hiring migrants, including import levies and shipping costs. This sent domestic manufacturing companies to pressure the government to relax trade sanctions with China and Mexico. In 1993, Hillary let Bill Clinton sign NAFTA into law, and she extended trade privileges that permits the US to import more than $70 billion of Chinese goods a year while exporting $14.3 billion of US goods to China.*

*Obvious Political Bias not Withstanding...

Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Walgreens, etc all get their goods direct from China (and Pakistan, Malaysia, India, etc.)

Since the American factories are closing, hiring illegals, or moving to Mexico, and farming is now also a corporate system that employes migrants at below minimum wage, the little towns need a new industry to prop them up. Else the unskilled yokels would need to move to a large city, where the minimum wage suddenly becomes worthless. Enter Wal-Mart. (the entire economy of nearby Boliver was literaly saved by Wal-Mart, a town that once primarily made it's money from speeding tickets.) Since the entire State of Arkansas is a little town, Wal-Mart was practiced with dealing with small communities. They beat every other Mega-Box to the punch.

Truth be told, I greatly prefer small business over corporate business, but not for the reasons Hollywood wants me to. I'm not big into selfish class-envy, but my heart does bleed for any people straining under oppressive dictators so Americans can get cheap Nikes and Chicken Nuggets, or Japan can get cheap Digital Cameras and PS/2s, or so that France can get cheap non-OPEC oil for "food".

So if you want to hate Wal-Mart, hate them because they do business with a brutal communist empire while undercutting domestic manufacturing, then capatalize on the economic voids they help create. And don't weep for domestic manufacturing either; they got greedy, and it bit them on the butt.
[/counter-rant]

Also, my LGS favors Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh above everything. Saturdays look like a Silicon Valley day-care center exploded; nerd-whelps everywhere! I only go there because they have a used miniatures case, 50% off everything, and Carl knows a lot about WH40K that I don't.

 

[Dragonblade]

As you acknowledge, small stores will never match Amazon's prices. Amazon's overhead for personnel/real estate in relation to their revenue is tiny compared to that for a brick and mortar shop. The smaller the store, though, the worse that ratio becomes. Since gaming is such a niche, we're not likely to get a box store (Gamer's Depot?) any time in the near future. Without the size of a box store like Staples or Home Depot, even 10-15% off becomes problematic. What makes it even harder it that small stores will lose some of their profit to bad "customers" who steal or damage merchandise.

I don't expect the same discount that Amazon can give me. But I do expect them to ditch the plastic and the ignorant staff and pass the savings on to me. Business is business after all. Capitalism works because ultimately the cheapest or highest quality product wins out. I go to a FLGS because I can hold the book in my hand and look at it before I buy it. The debate I have with myself every time I go is whether the ability to browse and impulse buy is worth 25% off the cover price.

Since the FLGS offers me no other real benefit, that 25% is usually just too important to pass up. If the FLGS cannot improve their business efficiency or the value they offer me as a walk-in customer, then I have no incentive to shop there. And if they go under as a result, they will not be missed.

Books get shrink wrapped because bad customers damage them. They drop them, or they tear them, etc. Once something is damaged, it is hard to sell. Be thankful that they allow people to remove the plastic.

As a consumer this is not my problem. I don't like shrinkwrap because it reduces the value of the FLGS to me: the ability to browse and impulse buy. They can justify the need to shrinkwrap all they want. I will take my business elsewhere.

And I should be thankful? That they offer terrible service and high prices? I don't think so. They should be thanking me for still spending any money there at all.

The Japanese have a saying: "The customer is god," and I believe it applies here. They can remove the shrink wrap and lower their prices or they can go under.

You may not be a criminal, but it is pretty obvious that some of the people who frequent that store are. For small businesses, theft is a significant problem. The fault for that lies with other "customers."

Basically, people who frequent the store can do things that ruin it for other customers. I understand you find some of these things annoying, but place blame where blame is due.

Ah yes. Its the customer's fault that they charge high prices, discourage browsing, and offer poor service? I don't think so. If they go under it will be their fault and their fault alone.

If they are worried about theft then they could put tags on the books and put up tag detectors at the entrances and exits. Borders, Barnes and Noble and the other chain stores do this. So do a lot of small boutiques at the mall so it can't be that expensive.

Again, the money they save off reducing theft, eliminating the plastic, and cutting the ignorant staff could be passed on to their customers. Then I would shop their more, their profits and volume would rise and it would be easier for them to afford the discounts that bring me and other customers in to the store.

 

[Umbran]

[counter-rant]
*Obvious Political Bias not Withstanding...

As soon as you realize that you have to note the political bias of your posting, you've wandered into topics that are not appropriate for these message boards. We've got a "no religion, no politics" rule here. So please don't continue along these lines.

 

[Kaleon Moonshae]

[counter-rant]
There are plenty of reasons to hate Wal-Mart, but this is way off.

A bit of blame for empty storefronts rests on Wal-Mart's price competition, but this is ignoring the larger economic issues, such as factory closings that force residents to move and reduce the population of local shoppers. If you live in a large enough city, there is plenty of room for both Boxes and Specialty Shops. We have 5 Wal-Marts, a Target, 4 Walgreens, a mall, 2 Big K's, a Lowes, a Home Depot, Grizzly.com, a Best Buy, a Circuit City, a Pet Smart, BB&B, 2 Hobby Lobbies, Bass Pro Shop Outdoor World and plenty of small shops that compete with them quite well. I personaly avoid Wal-Marts for political reasons, mostly for their dealings from 1992-2000. But the facts is the facts.

Wal-Marts often save these failing "ghost-towns" (which aren't that great, really) by buying huge chunks of unfarmed farmland or old factories rotting where they stand. They also give tons of cash to the towns to construct new road intersections and traffic lights, often the first real traffic safety the towns have ever had. They keep young people from moving away, giving them a volume of employment the "little" shops could never bring. You may scoff minimum wage, but minimum wage goes very far when a soda pop is still 35 cents a can and people eat homemade chili and sweet cornbread instead of at resturants every night. To top it all off, most of the people who live in these small towns will drive an hour or more to reach a Wal-Mart to avoid the criminal price gouging of the local monopoly shops. Put money into the community? If it wasn't for Wal-Mart, Arkansas would be the only State owned by the Federal Government (except for Hot Springs) through the welfare, dirt-farming, and forestry programs. What little factory jobs remain there are filled by illegal migrants that are paid FAR below minimum wage, namely employed at Tyson Foods, and live in pitiful slums.

If you need a reason to hate Wal-Mart, look at two factors: Labor Unions and Companies that do Business with China, hire Illegal Migrants or Move to Mexico.

The Labor Unions made US manufacturing 20 to 37 times more costly than third-world maufacturing or hiring migrants, including import levies and shipping costs. This sent domestic manufacturing companies to pressure the government to relax trade sanctions with China and Mexico. In 1993, Hillary let Bill Clinton sign NAFTA into law, and she extended trade privileges that permits the US to import more than $70 billion of Chinese goods a year while exporting $14.3 billion of US goods to China.*

*Obvious Political Bias not Withstanding...

Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, Walgreens, etc all get their goods direct from China (and Pakistan, Malaysia, India, etc.)

Since the American factories are closing, hiring illegals, or moving to Mexico, and farming is now also a corporate system that employes migrants at below minimum wage, the little towns need a new industry to prop them up. Else the unskilled yokels would need to move to a large city, where the minimum wage suddenly becomes worthless. Enter Wal-Mart. (the entire economy of nearby Boliver was literaly saved by Wal-Mart, a town that once primarily made it's money from speeding tickets.) Since the entire State of Arkansas is a little town, Wal-Mart was practiced with dealing with small communities. They beat every other Mega-Box to the punch.

Truth be told, I greatly prefer small business over corporate business, but not for the reasons Hollywood wants me to. I'm not big into selfish class-envy, but my heart does bleed for any people straining under oppressive dictators so Americans can get cheap Nikes and Chicken Nuggets, or Japan can get cheap Digital Cameras and PS/2s, or so that France can get cheap non-OPEC oil for "food".

So if you want to hate Wal-Mart, hate them because they do business with a brutal communist empire while undercutting domestic manufacturing, then capatalize on the economic voids they help create. And don't weep for domestic manufacturing either; they got greedy, and it bit them on the butt.
[/counter-rant]

Also, my LGS favors Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh above everything. Saturdays look like a Silicon Valley day-care center exploded; nerd-whelps everywhere! I only go there because they have a used miniatures case, 50% off everything, and Carl knows a lot about WH40K that I don't.

Man dude, who shot your dog? I mean China has some problems, but politically speaking they have progressed a long way in the last few years. Calling them "a brutal communist empire" is stretching things a little bit. Politically speaking they were never true communism (we called them communist because they sided with russia, but their brand of comunism is far different and should have its own name, also don't forget that they came to us first before going to russia and we threw them out on their ear cause we didn't think thye had any future) and are closer to neo-capitolism now than anything else. They're coming into the real world. It is true they have problems with human rights, labor and draconianism but then so did we when we first got into the modern world. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but lets keep the blatant political sectism to a minimum when it isn't directly related to the topic (I mean no offense, btw, everyone has reasons for their beliefs and most views are valid in one way or another, they just are not proper discourse on the boards, per the rules).

just my two cents

 

[elforcelf]

None of the Walmarts here in Mesa,AZ carry roleplaying stuff.elforcelf.

 

[Glyfair]

True, no non-gamer is going to hit an online shop for gaming products, but I doubt speciality stores such as your FLGS, the Game Parlor in this case, attracts many customers who aren't already gamers.

Both my FLGS attract many customers who aren't already gamers. Admittedly, they are "gamer friendly" customers for the most part.

The first store is on the main street in a college town. It carries a good selection of fantasy gift items (things like Enchantica dragons, etc). A lot of walk through traffic is looking for cool gift items or just come in to browse. A number of them become regulars and eventually start gaming.

The second store is a combination shop (although there isn't a lot of room for in store gaming - usually 1 game at a time unless the other games are a collectible card game or such). It's a book store (with a large science fiction/fantasy section)/comic book shop/gaming store/"new age" store. They have a lot of non-gamer traffic, especially people looking for hard-to-find books.

What's really great about the second store is the owner is totally against marking up hot items. If you look through his back issues, they are all cover price. Even if it's the "hot" book that's marked up ten times the price at other comic book stores, he keeps it at price. He has a LOT of out-of-print games (indeed, some long out-of-print), some of which go for high prices on eBay. However, if you want it, you pay the normal retail price when it was released.