A Big Box Game Store Is Coming For Your LGS.
The latest release of whatever card or tabletop game is coming out. Where do you play it? Not at your house, you don't have a table big enough. Not your friends house they live on the other side of town. Luckily your local game store has a half dozen tables ready for you and your friends to meet up and play.
It might not be just a game store. They used to be comic book stores, but that whole model is basically toast. Some have comics and card games. Some have toys and hobby equipment. These days most are strictly game stores, no comics etc. Wizards of the Coast and Bandai don't care what else you sell, as long as you offer tables and host events for their latest games.
Becoming part of the Wizards Play Network requires strict rules about tables, chairs, what goes on the walls, etc. You have to run events which brings in lots of players and increases the risk of theft. You have to rent a big enough space to accommodate the tables. This limits how much product you can put in the store, limiting your sales.
High rent and low margins makes this difficult to maintain. Your distributor won't be able to sell you everything you need. Some products fail and end up taking up space on your shelf for months or years. These are all run by mom and pop companies. Some big cities might have multiple locations under the same brand but it's the same situation and locations compete with each other.
There isn't really a nation wide game store company. Wizards could make their own, just like Games Workshop does with it's Warhammer stores. But those only sell one game. Wizards would be limited to shops with Magic and D&D only.
This is where someone with a ton of investment money could jump in and do the whole roll-up method. Like Waste Management and Blockbuster all you would have to do is go around and buy out mom and pop game shops and turn them into a national brand.
If I won the lottery, I could go around buying out everyones lease, inventory, etc and buy matching tables, chairs, branding, employee polo shirts and all that and then start charging MSRP for everything in the store. After buying like, fifty of these my distributor allocations would be absolutely insane. I could get anything.
Customers would start going to my stores knowing they all have cheaper product with better tables, nicer bathrooms, official judges at events, and product that is otherwise sold out everywhere else. I would move in, build up, and buy out whatever mom and pop place was near me. Then once I become the only shop around I can charge more, offer food, special events, collabs with Wizards and Games Workshop. Why would they want to go through a distro when they can sell directly to me and my mega web of game/hobby/comic stores?
You see how this is bad right?
I hope so.
Because these roll up companies get to a certain point where growth can't really continue. You end up selling the whole thing to a venture capital company. Now the shops sell at 20% over retail. The food is gone. The legit events are gone. Customers stop visiting and now the game itself starts to feel the crunch as their sales tank because I was the main outlet.
Walmart, Target, Bestbuy all sell cards, but they don't sell the important thing: Tabletop Access. You need a large space to play these games. Most people don't have giant kitchen tables or places to host twenty people for an event. That's what the game shops are for. But these days with as expensive as it is to just rent the space, plus people losing jobs left and right, stores like this will run the risk of failure fairly quickly.
"But our shops do great because they sell at market prices for Pokemon and Magic!" Oh they do for now. Bubbles pop. Prices crash. Every other shop I see gets broken into and has their stuff stolen. Look, if everyone has the same PSA 10 graded slabs and sealed collections it's not actually worth what the current price is. The price is based on scarcity. As the economy gets worse, folks will start liquidating.
I've been there for Cabbage Patch Kids, Pogs, Beanie Babies, and NFT's. They aren't worth anything anymore because everyone had them. Have I been tempted to buy Pog collections on eBay? Yes. Should I? No.
Am I still mad that I couldn't sell enough stuff online to be able to rent a storefront and sell all the things I wanted? Yes. I'm also still mad that I couldn't afford to open a screen printing shop in 2012. I can't do a lot of things, but I can jot down the patterns I've seen over the years and complain-blog about it for yall.