Absolutely Osbad - that is exactly what I am doing in my B&M store in the UK and you are right to point out all the costs invovled in gaming generally. In the town that I have set my store out there are at least 2 clubs of which I am aware and a Games Workshop with a reasonable set of gaming tables.

Furthermore Osbad I think that the store that is near you is working in exactly the right way (as it is exactly what I am doing) - as a permanent venue you need to make use of the features that you can offer that are unavailable to either a club or to an online retailer and make sure that you maximise on those.

My model is to have a set of games that can have events related to them and to run these on a rotation basis to ensure that they do not get stale and encourage the footfall to the store by a varied set of customers on a regular basis. Whilst many people will definitely be buying their stuff from an online retailer my experience is that they will spend a certain amount whilst in and playing. This is how you make your money and Amazon cannot compete on that level.

On the other hand I can also think of a store (too far away to game at regularly, sadly) that is more like a club. Yes it is a retail premesis open to the general public, but they have gone hell-for-leather in actually making its major activity the playing of games. They have a huge warehouse style playing area and run big terrain-making and painting workshops, and regular competitions for around 3 or 4 main product ranges (GW games, FoW & Urban Mammoth). Products are on sale at full retail and of course the profits subsidise the gaming aspect. Definition of “store” = no sub needed to join, open to non-members.

Obviously gaming space has to be paid for. A larger club will do it by charging a small membership and renting a local community hall. Smaller clubs will do it for free in a mate’s basement. A retail store will do it by subsidising the renting of non-retail space from its profits, which hopefully are boosted by its organising gaming space and thereby providing customers with a need to purchase and an easy route to do so.

So we can perhaps agree that it is “immoral” to utilise but not pay for gaming space. In a club you can say “no subs paid, no entry”. In a store they can’t do that, so they have to make the urge to buy from them irrisistible I guess, and also do stuff like put in snack machines. We are all at heart lazy, which is borne out by the fact we will pay £1 for a can of pop/soda from a nearby machine rather than walk a couple of hundred yards down the road and buy one from a store for 50p! It works the same in games retailing. We are prepared to pay a reasonable mark-up for getting our stuff right now from a pile in the store instead of at 20% discount mail order/online.

Maybe the answer is for stores to be a little more transparent in their subsidy of gaming. They need to be up front and honest with the punters. Tell them that their gaming doesn’t come cheap and offer incentives to buy for them.

Or maybe they should just form a club that uses their premises… ;)

What would make you want to shop at your local B&M store rather than use an online discount retailer?

I mentioned ‘discount’ as I have bought stuff online that I know will never make it to any stores nearby and I appreciate that some (often really good) products are only available online.

I reckon dropping the ads is fine as it’s your site Zac.

of course that would be like asking for the return of those pesky “space dwarves” - see the “space dwarf” clock references

That is a particular lunacy that is the product of GW Canada’s rather bizarre pricing model and the rather dramatic upturn in the Cnd currency.

Prices do take a long time to change since they are set months and months in advance.

GW Canada has no excuse though as they have been pricing their products, in relation to the US$, at a rate that hasn’t been valid since 2006.

Splash releases are another GW oddity as well.

GW seems to have spent the last three years fighting against the online discount retailers that their own pricing and release policies drive to those same stores.

And how few of them are on Amazon :-)

Amazon only carries the big sellers. They have GW products in stock, Mechwarrior and the click games as well as some Warhammer Historical but its not some wide range of stock they have.

They sell the “bread and butter” stock that keeps a lot of shops open and lets them carry other ranges.

Besides, the issues isn’t online retailers, its online retailers offering significant discounts that grossly undercut other stores.

If you want your local LGS to stock everything you might ever want, you’re living in a dream world. To stock a new range involves a lot of money, and that money is tied up until the stock is sold. Quite a lot of stuff may never sell, or it may sit on that shelf for months on end.

Throwing £1000 at a model range to stock it, having an open copy to demo, and hoping you sell at least 75% of that range to turn a profit (demo copy, your time learning the rules/painting the models etc) just isn’t really gonna pay off. And don’t forget you have to pay for the stock before you get chance to sell it, so the money for it has to come from either the most-likely dwindling profits of your store or your own pocket.

Online is different, since one man can service an entire country, and that means they have many times more “footfall” who might buy their stock. So they buy in £1000 of stock, that’s only 5 people with a starter game and a few expansions. Nationally, that’s not hard. In one town, it’s harder than you think.

Blah blah blah, this sure rambled on :O

Use the contact form to email me if you want to continue the debate via email :-)

I don’t think you understand what the laws in question require. The issue isn’t that the book’s price is artificially inflated. Its that resellers can’t artificially discount the priceto attract business.

Nothing to “buy”. :-)

It seems quite empirical. German and French laws appear to have fostered a larger market of stores and publishers and the lack of those laws in Switzerland have created lower prices for mass market books but higher prices for other books to make up the loss of a margin from those bestsellers.

Yes, there might be more shops, but that in itself has no added value.

It does if you are a publisher and a book buyer.

Liberating the market will kill off some smaller shops…

That argument doesn’t seem to take into account the externalities of the “equation”. People buying all their goods online from giant mega stores doesn’t do anything to help foster a vibrant local economy that has jobs and helps to create the tax base that provides services to people.

Indeed if all you want is the cheapest price possible then buying online is a good idea but that only makes sense when one thinks purely of oneself.

We don’t live as isolated economic units. We live in wider communities that ultimately depend on local economic activity to create the economy that helps provide public services and the higher standard of living that we all enjoy.

Liberating markets is really about allowing larger economic players like Amazon to dominate a market and make more money. Because ultimately it is those folks that benefit and not the small local retailer that is going online and selling at a discount.

I don’t see the value in that.

I’d much rather see a more robust and varied local economy than have everyone buy everything at Amazon (for example) or even “big box” stores because really all that does is siphon money from the local economy.

Liberating the market will kill off some smaller shops, but while that’s not good for the owners, it will not necessarily be a loss to buyers purely in terms of what they pay & what they can get.

You may want to look into that as it is the one factor that has been credited with the diversity of book sellers and publishers in Germany.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/arts/24book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

In Switzerland where they dropped this practice some book prices have been rising.

It has actually been shown to work decidedly in Germany and I can tell you that in Canada where we don’t have this sort of retail law we have almost no independent booksellers that sell new books. The only stores that do are fairly large chain stores like Chapters.

Maybe there are more back est in Ontario but where I live all the independents are gone.