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I appreciate that there are some stores and store managers that somehow make the one-man store strategy work, but the entirety of the Western retail economy shows that even one more staff member would be beneficial.

When I was in college, I worked in a tuxedo rental shop, a business at least as dependent on personal salesmanship and customer retention as wargaming, if not more so. It's also very seasonal work. But even in the dead of winter, when the store would be lucky to see more than a half-dozen customers a week, my manager always kept two part-timers on the schedule.

 Da Boss wrote:
That's the place alright. Pretty decent, though not much gaming space for wargames readily apparent - I think there's a room upstairs but it seems to mostly get used for card games.

Awesome shop though.

I see the local GW guy doing a lot to try and compete and he seems to have carved a niche of fairly dedicated players out, but I feel like he's seriously got his work cut out for him, poor guy. The problems I encountered in using his store were more to do with how GW have structured things than a reflection on him as an employee or worker.

Yeah I should stress that I've got had no problems with the single staffers on a personal level, they've all been good guys trying their hardest.

Herzlos wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
That's the place alright. Pretty decent, though not much gaming space for wargames readily apparent - I think there's a room upstairs but it seems to mostly get used for card games.

Awesome shop though.

I see the local GW guy doing a lot to try and compete and he seems to have carved a niche of fairly dedicated players out, but I feel like he's seriously got his work cut out for him, poor guy. The problems I encountered in using his store were more to do with how GW have structured things than a reflection on him as an employee or worker.

Yeah I should stress that I've got had no problems with the single staffers on a personal level, they've all been good guys trying their hardest.

With the home office doing their best to make sure that hardest is as hard as possible....

The Auld Grump


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Or educate yourself?

I've always found getting better at or better informed about something preferable to just giving up and walking away.

But, no, anecdotal evidence has a place, but if it contradicts the general facts of a situation, then it's fair to assume it's aberrant and not terribly meaningful.

Anecdotal evidence is most useful in aggregate - and can be used to discern trends.

If fifteen people say that X type of shop is doing better than Y type of shop, and one person states that Y type of shop is doing better, then it is likely that X type of shop is doing better.

Back when Pathfinder came out the game was selling better, locally, than 4e.

I posted about that, thinking that what i was seeing was that my area had better taste than the rest of the country.

Then I started seeing posts from a lot of places that Pathfinder was outselling 4e.

There were plenty of 4e folks denying that was the case, as more and more reports came in that 4e... was not selling as well as Pathfinder.

Then came a report from ICV2, confirming the anecdotal evidence.

And 4e fans were still denying the trend.

And then... WotC announced 5e - 4e, it seems, was not all that.

Right now, we are seeing a lot of people saying that one man stores are not meeting their wishes, and a few that are stating that the one man stores are doing fine.

This results in a certain level of deja vu....

The Auld Grump

It's also possible that some one man stores *are* doing fine, whilst the rest aren't.

Herzlos wrote:
It's also possible that some one man stores *are* doing fine, whilst the rest aren't.

I don't think anyone has really denied that, just that it's not a good default policy and even if you're doing "fine" doesn't mean you might not do better with 1.5 or 2 staff instead.

Just throwing it out there but I did go into my local GW today to pick up a couple of models that were ordered in for me. When I got them I found one was missing parts and showed the employee.

He had to fill out a form to send off to the warehouse, which he had never had to do before so he had to call the battle bunker where there was an employee who could spend five or ten minutes walking him through it.

It still took him half an hour or so to fill out fully and submit, plus the break he had to take to serve the customer that came in in that time.

Admin stuff can't always just be brushed off as a 'do it after closing, overtime is part of the job' thing. He also made a comment about how he was making progress painting up the stores copy of the Horus Heresy boardgame. Since it released how many months ago he has painted like... two characters and nearly 10 marines.

It's simply impractical for management to expect him to be able to paint up the display models for the store while on the clock, and unreasonable for them to expect him to do it in his own time (which I think I've heard they do in some cases).

I'm not sure my local GW manager has managed to paint much at all for display. I haven't been there for a while, but the AoS stuff last time I was there was mostly just basecoated with a few details picked out, some where still wearing primer, that was several months after AoS came out.

I believe a lot of the stuff in the display shelves are stuff he painted before he actually started the job or stuff painted by customers. It's not always practical to get customers working as slave labour to paint your models Though my local hobby store (not GW) also has a display cabinet full of customer's models, so I guess it's not unheard of (though that's also a bit of an oddity because the owner of the store is good friends with a modeller who has had his models in magazine articles).

Now that you mention it the last time I saw my local's AoS models (I didn't look at them today) they were in the same state as the HH set, the sigmarines were sprayed gold with like 2 of them painted and the Chaos were sprayed black or red with some skin picked out here and there.

I know most of the models in the actual display cases are local painter's models because I have a shelf of random models in there myself. I think the battle bunker has a lot more cases and have a lot of staff projects in them, but have plenty of customer models too. It'd have thought it was just the norm that the display cases were filled with customer stuff.