Welcome back to Shadowrun Sundays. Yesterday I discovered a local game store, Hammer Hall, had shuttered its doors last weekend after about 2 years of operation and one location move. HH’s owners posted notice of the closure on their Facebook page the week before, but didn’t give much of an explanation. Not that they needed to. To be honest, I saw this closing coming from the first time I walked into the store.
Gaming is a hard business, whether you are a manufacturer or reseller. Gamers grow out of fads just as quickly (sometimes moreso) than they grow into them. A company can’t just have one hit and expect to make money off it forever, they have to diversify. A reseller can’t just sell one game and expect that to make their monthly / quarterly / yearly budget either.
Let me tell you about the history of Hammer Hall. Once upon a time there was a game store called War Dogs. All the gamers loved War Dogs. It would get in all sorts of fun games from RPGs to strategy games to CCGs. In addition to its retail space, it had a large secondary room where gamers could play. But somewhere along the line, one of the cashiers decided to spend more time talking to his friends on the phone than actively helping his customers and another cashier was clueless about the product she was selling and the owner started buying stuff that he wanted to buy instead of purchasing what his customers wanted. (Or so I’ve been told, I’d only been to War Dogs once). At a certain point, the gamers still came to the store to play but didn’t buy anything. When the money stopped coming in, War Dogs couldn’t buy “the latest hot things” on the market and ended up with a backstock no one wanted to purchase. Finally, after years of struggling, the store closed its doors.
This is relevant because Hammer Hall’s owners had a love affair with War Dogs. The owners of this store wanted to recreate the War Dogs experience while doing things the right way. So the first thing they did was buy War Dogs’ fixtures, furnishings, and backstock. The second thing they did was open up a store at a different location, a smaller location because that’s all they could afford, then post a sign that no gamer would ever be turned away for any reason. Not even for hygiene issues. Because apparently it offended them that War Dogs (or maybe other gaming stores) turned people away for not bathing and having body odor issues. When I saw that sign posted on the front door of the store, a store with very poor ventilation, I knew they’d just signed their death warrant.
Hammer Hall had great ambitions. They had a chest of board games for free play to encourage gamers to get into board games (I like this idea). Their first stock purchases consisted of some dice and some Magic cards, but they kept trying to sell the 6+ years out-of-date stock that War Dogs couldn’t even get rid of. They opened up a little office in the back as a coffee shop selling lattes and microwaved Hot Pockets. They purchased food from local grocery stores and tried to sell it off piecemeal (cakes, cookies, etc.) for a bit of a higher mark up. Which might have worked if they understood the appetite of their gamers. But few people actually purchased anything from the coffee shop. I certainly didn’t. I didn’t like any of the food they were offering for sale.
When they moved locations, it was to find a cheaper location. They certainly found a bigger location and while there was much more parking, it was arguably harder to reach than the previous one. Still, they had more tables, more space for more product. They started getting in new product (board games, newer RPGs) and had a dedicated glass cabinet for collectible Magic cards. They started hosting tournaments for Magic, RPGs, Hero Clix (or the equivalent Marvel version), and Board Games. They added a cooler for more soda varieties, added more chips and candy bars to their available snackage (which I did purchase even if the price was a little high), and re-opened the coffee shop with a little more variety of food that I still didn’t like. Maybe if they’d put in a pizza oven back there that would have been different.
The ownership revised their rules on the hygiene issue, presumably after they lost a number of customers who were totally turned off by the “I don’t need no stinkin’ bath” gamers. They even limited their stock to games highly rated on BoardGameGeek.com. But it was, I think, too little too late. While the new place had better lighting and was much cleaner than the new place, the first location had set the rules for what people expected from Hammer Hall. And then there was the Magic tournament issue.
Jacksonville has a local group who likes to run Magic tournaments. While that doesn’t sound bad, the tourney runners pressure local game stores into selling boosters of Magic at a discount. See, Magic cards can be purchased off the internet for a very steep discount when bought in bulk. Game stores can’t buy those quantities because the regular customers aren’t that into Magic. The smaller quantity purchases cost more than the tourney runners pay. So game stores lose either way, whether they purchase in bulk and sit on those boxes until the next tourney or they sell their smaller quantity for a lower price then they paid for it.
The other option is for the tourney runners to bring their own unopened boxes and sell them on the spot to the tourney players, which I believe is what happened at Hammer Hall (though I have little evidence to back this up). The tourney runners threaten not to patronize the store if the store doesn’t play ball (a very Walmart bully economy rule set). Yet, looking at the numbers, most Magic players don’t patronize the stores outside of the tournaments. They chase the tournaments.
Any of these options means Hammer Hall made no money off Magic cards during these tournaments and, despite the players buying some snacks, may have actually lost money by hosting these tournaments.
While Hammer Hall was quite packed most Saturdays and Sundays that I went, the last few times there were so many open tables that my group had the pick of where we wanted to sit. The stock hadn’t done much of a turnover, the soda cooler ended up behind the sales counter (was there a theft problem?), and loyal customers were nowhere to be seen. This change happened over a few months. Gamers, fickle as they tend to be, had gone on to their next fad.
Maybe it was the four competing game stores that opened up on the same street on the other side of the river that did it. Maybe it was boredom. Whatever the reason, for all its grand ambitions and high hopes, Hammer Hall has gone the way of many a game store before it. There are lessons to be learned here. The only game store in town that hasn’t quickly died is Borderlands Comics and Games. But then again, Borderlands diversifies its stock, keeps its store clean, and hasn’t fallen into the local Magic Tourney trap. Regardless, Jacksonville now has a plethora of game stores, all of which seem to think they can do better than War Dogs and Hammer Hall. We’ll see what happens.
Do you have a game store story you’d like to share?
