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@Peregrine

Here again is where our experiences diverge. For me, the local WH store is in an affluent area next to exclusive shops. It is clean, bright, beautifully stocked, and staffed by a charismatic but easy going manager with good interpersonal and sales skills. The LGS is located in a downmarket strip mall. It is dirtyish and pretty ramshackle. Most of the space is occupied by MtG players who fulfill the usual negative stereotypes, at least superficially. The store is stocked in an amateurish fashion and staffed by grungy looking dudes that spend more time hanging out with the regulars than helping customers - not that you could even tell who works there and who doesn't at a glance. All these typical LGS foibles make the place feel sorta homey to an established gamer like myself. They are totally offputting to others. I won't even get into the issue of how women tend to feel about such places.

The web exclusives I had in mind are things like a box of LotR figs, specific SoB pose/weapon, or a special character for any of the games. Free shipping threshold is 65 USD IIRC. Ican only get there when multiple figs I want are in stock at the same time, which is rare. I ordered both copies of my SWA box online within the first five minutes before they sold out. Because you cannot trust GW to reasonably stock things like this or faction dice or anything they actually tell you is limited, you need to be ready on Sat afternoon pressing that F5 key.

 Manchu wrote:
Here again is where our experiences diverge. For me, the local WH store is in an affluent area next to exclusive shops. It is clean, bright, beautifully stocked, and staffed by a charismatic but easy going manager with good interpersonal and sales skills. The LGS is located in a downmarket strip mall. It is dirtyish and pretty ramshackle. Most of the space is occupied by MtG players who fulfill the usual negative stereotypes, at least superficially. The store is stocked in an amateurish fashion and staffed by grungy looking dudes that spend more time hanging out with the regulars than helping customers - not that you could even tell who works there and who doesn't at a glance. All these typical LGS foibles make the place feel sorta homey to an established gamer like myself. They are totally offputting to others. I won't even get into the issue of how women tend to feel about such places.

Yes, our experiences diverge, and the obvious conclusion from this divergence is that the "advantage" the GW store has in being appealing to new customers has more to do with coincidental facts of one particular GW store vs. one particular independent store than any corporate policies by GW. There's no superiority of business model in recruiting new customers, just one employee who is better than other employees at basic tasks like keeping the store clean.

The web exclusives I had in mind are things like a box of LotR figs, specific SoB pose/weapon, or a special character for any of the games. Free shipping threshold is 65 USD IIRC. Ican only get there when multiple figs I want are in stock at the same time, which is rare. I ordered both copies of my SWA box online within the first five minutes before they sold out. Because you cannot trust GW to reasonably stock things like this or faction dice or anything they actually tell you is limited, you need to be ready on Sat afternoon pressing that F5 key.

Ok, if you look hard enough you can come up with specific examples where you don't meet the free shipping threshold but can't reasonably order through an independent store. But those cases aren't the majority. Most of the time you're either making a significant purchase where you're getting free shipping, or a "pot of paint" order where you can just go to the independent store and buy it off the shelf. So if a customer buys, say, SWA online and has it delivered to their local GW store it's a pretty safe bet that they're doing it because they regularly play/paint/whatever at the local GW store, and just happened to buy this one thing online because they weren't at the store at that exact moment. This might not be a perfectly accurate assumption, but it's almost certainly close enough to give insight into the store's actual net gain/loss for GW in that region.

And perhaps, if you were a company that did market research instead of putting out insane rambling CEO letters about how market research is a waste of your valuable time, you might even figure out the exact percentage of online orders made for delivery to a store come from regular customers at that store vs. random people just taking advantage of the free shipping. Then you could credit each store with that percentage of the total sales delivered to the store. And you might do the same thing with online orders in general, or even products sold through independent stores (on the assumption that people often visit multiple stores, or customers that learn to play at a GW store continue buying elsewhere because the store existed to give them the demo game). So the store's total sales benefit to GW might be 100% of all in-store sales, 90% of all online orders delivered to the store, 30% of all online orders delivered within a 30-minute drive, and 5% of all GW sales through other channels within that 30-minute radius.

Or perhaps it turns out that giving the store 100% credit for all in-store sales is inaccurate, because 90% of those sales would immediately move to the local independent stores if the GW store closed, and then you close virtually all of your own retail stores. But again, this would require market research instead of just checking the state of each store's cash register at the end of the day.

 Manchu wrote:
Managing table use is simply not a regional-level issue. Because it depends entirely on details about who comes in, when they come in, what they have, etc, etc, all these details unique to that specific store, it is properly a store-level issue.

That sounds like a completely silly approach to take for a retail chain like GW. A sale is a sale no matter where it was made, and specifically talking about products like FW products that we were discussing is a "premium" sale.

Customers should feel REWARDED for buying premium products, not shunned.

Sales are a global concern and support (such as table use) SHOULD be a global concern as well. The only reason it isn't is because GW insists on pitting their own stores as competition. This makes zero sense as the stores aren't independent entities, they aren't even franchises, they are part of a larger picture, I doubt the store managers even know what rent GW are paying to keep the doors open.

 Peregrine wrote:
Yes, our experiences diverge, and the obvious conclusion from this divergence is that the "advantage" the GW store has in being appealing to new customers has more to do with coincidental facts of one particular GW store vs. one particular independent store than any corporate policies by GW. There's no superiority of business model in recruiting new customers, just one employee who is better than other employees at basic tasks like keeping the store clean.

I have this crazy idea that a company's retail stores should all meet the same standards. That a customer's experience should be uniform across the chain. And that policies that maximize revenue for the company as a whole should be basis for the practices of those stores. This person fiefdom approach makes the success or failure of a given store entirely dependent on the success or failure of one individual employee.

And if you look at survey data in the human resources industry you'll find that hiring new employees tends to result in around a 50% mutual satisfaction rate one year later. That means a year after a hire, on average only 50% of the time will both the employee and the employer both be happy about the arrangement. I believe this number is even lower for sales people.

Most retailers figure out very quickly that you need common, proven strategies and procedures that protect against an individual not working out. And the type of procedures that allow people to be their best in terms of performance in key areas. This approach of "run things how you want and just make your sales numbers or you're fired" is really opening up GW to a lot of potential problems. I'm beginning to think Kirby wasn't entirely crazy when he basically threw the sales force under the bus in the notes to the financial statements. Though he didn't seem to realize that the risk in question was something he himself created by taking Mark Wells' plan way, way too far.

 Peregrine wrote:
I contacted GW, and left negative google/facebook/etc reviews about it. The employee's response was apparently to ban me from the store entirely, which is an amusing "YOU CAN'T FIRE ME I QUIT" situation. And AFAIK the "no FW armies" rule is still in effect.

(To be fair, the employee at the other store said I was welcome to bring my army in and play, they're just ~75 miles away in a city I only visit occasionally so I haven't had a good opportunity.)

Leaving negative reviews on Facebook etc achieves nothing except the reviewer either being outright banned as in your case or being made so unwelcome they don't go back anyway.
Most GW managers are fine, it's the ones that get a little bit of power that goes to their heads and think that their god's gift to the hobby and the customers are just a transaction and not a community.
Having the one man stores and sales targets means most managers have no interest in running events or interacting with the regulars that have just come in for a game and aren't buying anything on that visit.

@Peregrine

It's not just a matter of one particular WH store (mine) against another (yours). WH stores are subject to global policies fostering a uniform, reliable experience. Their model is geared toward new customers. The LGS can theoretically be totally different in each instance, though in practice many end up being dingy, poorly staffed, and focused on catering to regulars. It's so obviously wrong to equate the two experiences that I can only conclude you are arguing in bad faith, to wit from the assumption, grounded in personal animus, that everything GW does is pointless, idiotic, and terrible.

You don't need "to look hard enough" to find examples of GW products that don't meet the free shipping threshold. Any item that costs less that 65USD does not meet the free shipping threshold. People who don't want to add more items to their cart to get over that threshold are not some rare-unto-purely-theoretical category. These "most of the time you're ..." and "it's almost certainly the case that ..." and "it's a safe bet that ..." type statements are nothing more than you projecting. Free in-store delivery doesn't add value for you personally, fine. You can't universalize that to every other potential customer. Maybe the reason you have so much trouble understanding the value of multiple sales channels is that you have even more trouble understanding there are customers different from yourself.

@AllSeeingSkink

In fact, it's not the case that "a sale is a sale" for reasons already extensively discussed.

@frozenwastes

You are vastly exaggerating the extent to which WH store mangers have discretion.

My GW store is almost the same. In a nice well-to-do area, very clean. Only three tables though and is not open very late, both of which are problems, but the independent the game store which I also frequent is in a grungy and relatively bad neighborhood and yes the staff there are often more concerned with socializing then assisting customers (actually had a female friend I told about the shop point this out to me) but overall it is a good store. Literally the only reason I prefer to play at the Independence store is because they have six gaming tables available and are open late while they GW store only has three, two of which are specifically for 40K with only one for AOS, and closes at 7 in the evening, which typically means I can only play there on weekends because I do not get out of work until 5 and with rush hour traffic I would probably not be able to get there until about 6:30

Right - our local WH store is not open on Mondays or Tuesdays, has shortish hours on most days its open, and only has two tables for gaming because the third table needs to be open at all times for demonstrating hobby stuff to new customers. The LGS has many tables and it is possible to reserve them. The LGS may not look very professional - but of course it doesn't really have to if all it wants to do (and this is often the case IME) is serve existing gamers.

 Manchu wrote:
Right - our local WH store is not open on Mondays or Tuesdays, has shortish hours on most days its open, and only has two tables for gaming because the third table needs to be open at all times for demonstrating hobby stuff to new customers. The LGS has many tables and it is possible to reserve them. The LGS may not look very professional - but of course it doesn't really have to if all it wants to do (and this is often the case IME) is serve existing gamers.

Mine is closed Mon-Tue, open until like 7pm Wed-Sat and 6:30pm on sunday. three 8x4 tables and then two tiny (maybe 2x3?) "demo" tables (of which the GW manager, who didn't know anything about the game before managing the store, does a very half-assed demo that is basically just moving two heroes across the board and rolling some dice) that aren't for use other than demos, but two of the tables are for 40k (one is a sector imperialis board, another is an ice board but has imperial terrain) while one of the 8x4 tables are for AOS using an old realm of battle board, and a mix of old WHFB and AOS terrain. Cannot use the restroom because there's a room adjacent where he has stock wide open (instead of using a huge empty room in the back that could be locked). The FLGS is homely but a nice place (also an amazing pizza place next door hahaha).

A note on LGS, I have been in independent stores in multiple states and have never been in one where the employees looked professional or engaged the customer. In the hobby industry engaging the customer is essential. Especially if that customer is new and curious. I have in fact sat and watched in many stores specifically for bounce rate. It always appears high, with a person walking in looking around confused and if they are lucky getting a hi from the guy behind the counter wearing as t-shirt (and I have already addressed the fact that uniforms = more sales).

The fact is a hobby games store is not a grocery store in which someone walks in knowing what they want and walks out. It is a sales intensive business, staff need to find out how their customers receive enjoyment and make strong recommendations based on that. That is key to customer retention, and customer retention is fantastic because it's cheaper than customer acquisition and word of mouth is actually the number one way new customers get generated.

Quite frankly I do not believe all the standing operating procedures in the world will make a person a good salesman. I was a recruiter at one point in the Marines and that product is infinitely harder to sell the a game. As you can guess the Marines took branding and standing operating procedures very very very serious. In fact while I was doing it they were in the process of having every office have the exact same layout (within the confines of how the building was built). None of this was going to close a sale though, that could only be done by the individual recruiter, and if you were to just speak like you were just talking off a script because all you know are the standard sales lines taught in school then you will sound like a idiotic robot and be really poor at your job. Which will result in you getting kicked off of recruiting for relief of cause which was a black mark on your career. Sales is an art and a skill, it can not "policied"

If people here continue to think that hobby games are a similar retail environment to a Target, Walmart, or grocery store I don't know what to tell them. That's just objectively false, it's sales intensive and that's a fact not an opinion. If it were not there would not be an explosion of Let's Plays and Unboxing media out there. No one does an unboxing of wheat bread though. And these things are true whether it is the GW store or your LGS.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And to be clear not long ago I was the Sales Manager at an LGS in which I lead it from losing money when I took over in February to it's best holiday season on record. The Marines spent 20,000 dollars on me to teach me sales, and I graduated at the top of the dean's list and continued to learn as much as I could long after Recruiter's School. This is not me talking out of my ass, it is an opinion based on excellent formal training, continuing education on my own time and a lot of hands on experience.

Yeah, sales needs training and the right candidate. Standard policy is more about customer experience and making sure things that can damage he larger business don't happen. Though I imagine the right or wrong policy will impact sales. Customer experience usually does.

Standard policies aren't just about creating a uniform experience across a company's multiple retail locations around the world. They are also about standardizing how a single shop operates over the course of various shifts. Customer-facing factors like wearing a uniform, stocking the shelves in a certain way, keeping the store tidy, staying at your post, etc, etc, are all examples of things you seldom (read: virtually never) find evidence of existing/being effectively executed at a LGS. They obviously exist at the WH store! Just as obvious - when a GW staffer is slacking. Slacking, however, is the norm at the LGS.

DrNo172000 makes a very good point that sales cannot be "policied" into success - after whatever amount of training, it is time to sink or swim. Which happens is not only a matter of who you are but also who you encounter. How many customers walk away from a bad experience wondering, what could I have done to make that go better? Please note I am assuming the salesperson in this hypothetical did their job well - the fact remains, good customer service does not always result in a good customer experience. At some point, a smart customer takes a some responsibility for getting what they want out of a transaction.

My local store has a pretty straightforward policy. First come first serve, game of the night gets preference. Wednesday is specialist, Thursday is AoS, Friday is WH40k, Saturday and Sunday are open. You can play Horus Heresy, but don't use it to undermine sales (had a bunch of hooligans that would play next to the Chaos Marine display and actively tried to talk people out of purchases in favor of the Heresy...).

 Kraytirous wrote:
You can play Horus Heresy, but don't use it to undermine sales.

You don't see the complete insanity of this statement from GW's perspective? Undermining sales by, err, buying more expensive products from the same company.

I can understand respecting the allotted game nights, but the idea that buying a different product from GW that can't be purchased through the store itself is undermining anything is just crazy

 Manchu wrote:
WH stores are subject to global policies fostering a uniform, reliable experience.

Except they aren't subject to global policies involving those "normal-people-friendly" attributes. For example, sure, your local GW store is in a nice location instead of a lower-tier strip mall like the independent store, but my local GW store is in the same kind of lower-tier strip mall. So there's clearly no corporate policy of "only put GW stores in higher-tier locations so they look appealing for new customers", it's just a coincidence that yours happened to be in a nicer spot. I'm sure GW does have a "keep the store clean" policy written somewhere, but with no supervision (due to one-person stores) it's all down to how much the single employee cares about it, just like how clean an independent store is depends on their specific employees. And how nice the customers look is certainly something that is pure coincidence and not GW policy, the people I've seen in the two GW stores in my area are no different from the average customers at the independent stores.

When we look at the actual things that are constant across all GW stores (limited table space, poor product selection, limited hours, etc) we find almost nothing that makes them good at recruiting new customers, or even better than independent stores at recruiting new customers. We certainly see some things that make GW stores terrible at serving existing customers, but being terrible at one thing does not automatically mean that you're good at something else to make up for it.

It's so obviously wrong to equate the two experiences that I can only conclude you are arguing in bad faith, to wit from the assumption, grounded in personal animus, that everything GW does is pointless, idiotic, and terrible.

Your comments about independent stores being dirty/full of awful MTG players/etc are so obviously wrong that I can only conclude that you are arguing in bad faith, to wit from the assumption, grounded in personal animus, that everything an independent store does is pointless, idiotic, and terrible.

You don't need "to look hard enough" to find examples of GW products that don't meet the free shipping threshold.

You do when you consider real orders instead of picking arbitrary products just to make a point. For normal-stock GW items you can just call up your local independent store and get them at less than MSRP (and even at full MSRP you're still paying the same price as at the GW store), and for anything over $65 you can get GW to deliver it right to your door for free. The only situation that really favors delivering to a GW store is when you need to panic-buy limited edition stuff that doesn't meet the $65 threshold AND don't want to buy anything else at the same time AND saving a bit on shipping is more important than saving the time and gas money required to get to the GW store. Are you honestly suggesting that those orders make up anywhere near a majority of GW's deliver-to-store sales? Because if they don't then the assumption that a deliver-to-store order is being made by a regular customer of that store is close enough to use it in counting a store's net financial value.

@Peregrine

You're past the point of even superficially posting in good faith. I described the LGS as "homey" to established gamers like myself ... that hardly speaks to personal animus. Meanwhile you have used the word "idiotic" to describe GW in almost every post you have made ITT.

While no one could reasonably consider your report of conditions at any WH store to be credible and unbiased, I'll readily concede that not every WH store is necessarily located in an upmarket shopping area or staffed by a competent much less successful manager. That would be immaterial to the fact of the corporate policy - which in turn obviously would be better exemplified by newer stores like the one near me (opened 2016). The policies exist to create new customers, regardless of how well Store XYZ is doing at that.

I haven't "picked arbitrary products" - my reference was to any item that costs less than 65USD. It is imminently reasonable that someone who was online shopping and figured out that they could have an item delivered to a nearby store (for example, in an area they would be going to or past anyhow) would actually do that - because that is exactly the point of the feature in the first place and it has nothing to do with the baseless assumption you're making that this is likely if and only if that person is already a regular patron of the WH store in question.

 Manchu wrote:
While no one could reasonably consider your report of conditions at any WH store to be credible and unbiased, I'll readily concede that not every WH store is necessarily located in an upmarket shopping area or staffed by a competent much less successful manager. That would be immaterial to the fact of the corporate policy - which in turn obviously would be better exemplified by newer stores like the one near me (opened 2016). The policies exist to create new customers, regardless of how well Store XYZ is doing at that.

Again, those policies do not exist. You can say "GW stores exist to get new customers" all you like, but in the end all that matters is the observable results. And when we look at the things that are actually consistent across all GW stores (IOW, those things that are choices made by company policy instead of coincidental facts about a particular store or employee) we see almost nothing that a GW store has to appeal to a new customer that independent stores don't. The only thing I can think of is that GW policy is to have a demo game set up at all times, but in all the time I've been in a GW store I have never seen a single demo game played by a new customer. The only time I have ever seen the demo table used was an attempt to sell a 40k player WHFB.

I haven't "picked arbitrary products" - my reference was to any item that costs less than 65USD. It is imminently reasonable that someone who was online shopping and figured out that they could have an item delivered to a nearby store (for example, in an area they would be going to or past anyhow) would actually do that - because that is exactly the point of the feature in the first place and it has nothing to do with the baseless assumption you're making that this is likely if and only if that person is already a regular patron of the WH store in question.

People that can get an item at less than MSRP don't often pay full MSRP for it, and the only items you can't reliably get at a discount are the limited-edition ones that are often well over the $65 threshold anyway. The fact that you can save on shipping when you're buying a tactical squad (for less than $65) is irrelevant because you can save even more money by buying it elsewhere. The primary reason to give up the additional savings from buying elsewhere is if you're already expecting to be at the GW store for other reasons, so it's worth paying that extra 10-20% to avoid having to make a special trip out to some other store. So yes, it is safe to assume that "online delivery to a store orders are made by regular visitors to that store" is a good enough approximation for analyzing a store's net value to GW, even if it isn't true of literally every single customer.

I still remeber a game I did right after the 7th edition codex necrons came out and no FAQ's were made yet. My freind and I were doing a two-on-two game at a GW store and my team was Necrons and Tyrannids vs. Imperial Gaurd and Black Templars.

The GW guy was saying that I was illegally feilding my Trancendant C'tan from Warhammer 40000: Escalation. He said that the rules said I could not do it, and I pointed out that I can with all rules back up. He then said it was an overpowered unit and will be banned from the store.

Now the context, my most pwerfull unit was the C'tan, my teammate's most powerfull unit was the Diachimeron from Forge World. But the GW guy never complained about the Baneblade, Shadowsword, Plasma Obliterator, Imperial Knight Paladin, and Relic Sicarian Battle Tank on our opponent's field. That immediately turned me off to the store and only go there whenever my LGS is out of some particular model or paint.

@Peregrine

The topic of this thread is the variety of WH store policies regarding how the store's table are used. GW has a policy of devloving some authority on this question to the store manager. Your position is that this is "idiotic." My position is that it makes perfect sense, considering the stated purpose of the WH store. The difference is a function of our premises: You begin with the assumption that virtually everything GW does is "idiotic." I begin by assuming that GW is capable of making both good and bad policies. Even if your conclusion happened to be right, it could not be demonstrated by your argument because you are simply assuming your conclusion.

Furthermore, your conclusion is incorrect. This is because you outright refuse to accept some key market realities. For example, you assume people don't pay retail when they could buy at a discount. This is obviously false. People pay retail in shops all the time, This is because an in-person experience is "value added" for some, although hardly all, types of customers. For example, people find value in being able to try on clothing in a shop. Similarly, the WH store adds value to customers starting out with the "GW Hobby." There are considerable barriers to entering this hobby that can be significantly reduced by a personal experience. Naturally, the stated purpose of WH stores is to demonstarte the GW Hobby. Existing GW customers do not require this demonstration - but new customers do. And they are willing to pay for it, especially if they do not magically know about online retailer discounts.

Considering the intended purpose of the store, it logically follows that (a) there will not be many tables at the store and (b) there will be restrictions on how those tables are used. Moreover, some of those restrictions make sense for every single store to have in place while others must be left to the discretion of the GW employee on the ground simply because they are not only the person best positioned to know what would work best but indeed probably the only GW employee who could know.

Neither of us know or could know whether a direct, physical retail channel is ultimatley driving or hindering GW's profitability. It is pointless to pretend otherwise. Even the argument that "they wouldn't do it unless it is profitable" assumes too much. What we can know is why GW operates WH stores - because GW is on the record about it. We can also see how GW policies we do know about, such as manger-level discretion about store table use and not crediting purchases not made in the store to the store, harmonize with that purpose. Therefore, it is impossible to reasonably conclude that such policies are flatly "idiotic." At most, you could argue that they are not successful - but again you lack any credible basis for that conclusion.

@Longshadow7

Sure, managers are not always going to make the calls we would like. This past Sunday, the manager of my local WH store informed me that she had houseruled Shadow War for the store league. She allows unspent points earned at the end of a mission to the roll over to after the end of the next mission. Her rationale was, some KTs have really expensive fighters. I really disagree with her changing this rule - I believe that it is an intended limitation on factions with very powerful individual fighters like Nid Warriors and GKs. I explained that. She replied that we only one KT in the league was using such a list.

In the moment, I considered that she might have been trying to placate that player and had calculated that doing so outweighed the amount of flak she'd take from other players in the league. So now it was in my court - do I make a fuss about it? After all, there is a solid argument against such a call - not least of all that it is explicitly contrary to the published rules! I decided to drop it. If it was a purely abstract discussion, like here on the forum, I would have pressed the point. But in the context of getting along with people IRL, it just wasn't worth stressing over.

 DrNo172000 wrote:
A note on LGS, I have been in independent stores in multiple states and have never been in one where the employees looked professional or engaged the customer. In the hobby industry engaging the customer is essential. Especially if that customer is new and curious. I have in fact sat and watched in many stores specifically for bounce rate. It always appears high, with a person walking in looking around confused and if they are lucky getting a hi from the guy behind the counter wearing as t-shirt (and I have already addressed the fact that uniforms = more sales).

It's funny you say you've never been to independent stores where the employees looked professional or engaged with the customer.

3 hobby stores I know around my area the staff wear uniforms, 1 of them is an FLGS the other 2 are general hobby stores.

Another local FLGS doesn't wear uniforms, but I'd say they're pretty good at engaging customers. When I've hung around there I've seen the employees engage with customers to identify why they're in and if they're new gamers try and identify which games they might be interested in and build some enthusiasm for it.

(and I have already addressed the fact that uniforms = more sales)

You cited an article.... none of the occupations on the list were "hobby store retailer". They're all occupations where having a uniform just makes sense... occupations where you come out to peoples' homes, occupations where people are putting some level of faith in your expertise (drivers, medical professionals, people who handle food).

There's no real mirror to "hobby store retailer". I'd argue "hobby store retailer" is one area the customers don't care nearly as much whether or not you're wearing a uniform.

The fact is a hobby games store is not a grocery store in which someone walks in knowing what they want and walks out.

Eh, depends on the customer, I rarely go to a grocery store knowing exactly what I'm going to walk out with, I almost always go to a hobby store knowing what I want to walk out with and if I don't it's usually because it wasn't in stock.

That is key to customer retention, and customer retention is fantastic because it's cheaper than customer acquisition and word of mouth is actually the number one way new customers get generated.

Yeah, that's why it's important to not do stupid things like making customers of your company feel bad just because they're not customers of your specific store.

Quite frankly I do not believe all the standing operating procedures in the world will make a person a good salesman.

I don't think anyone does believe that, but having some good basic policies helps protect your company as a whole from individual morons. Teaching employees that they are representing your company and that customers will view the company as they view the employee is a pretty fundamental thing to teach them. It also helps when you have to fire people for not living up to the standards of the company. I don't even work in a retail field but I still got taught when signing up for my job how I was expected to act when representing the company.

Of course it won't magically make bad salespeople good salespeople, but hopefully it'll limit the damage of the bad ones and foster an environment where more good ones can grow and learn.

If people here continue to think that hobby games are a similar retail environment to a Target, Walmart, or grocery store I don't know what to tell them.

Oh come on, it's similar in some specific aspects, we aren't pretending they're identical. GW, Target, Walmart are all large scale operations where individual stores are simply cogs in a larger machine. Obviously the actual product being sold is different and the approach has to be different, but the concept that stores are part of a larger whole instead of individuals is the same between GW and all those other large chains.

They are unique compared to independent retailers in that independent retailers absolutely should be looking out for themselves first and foremost.

This is not me talking out of my ass, it is an opinion based on excellent formal training, continuing education on my own time and a lot of hands on experience.

I was always taught that my arguments should stand in their own right without having to make an appeal to my qualifications

 Manchu wrote:
For example, you assume people don't pay retail when they could buy at a discount. This is obviously false. People pay retail in shops all the time,

I'll pay more than retail if it accomplishes my goal. I have had a string of bad luck of back ordered items, cancelled preorders, stores selling my special orders to other people and pretty much everything that can go wrong with buying miniatures that aren't right there in stock happening.

I value product in stock more than any other factor and will pay above retail if something I wanted was right there and I could just get it without any further hassle.

 frozenwastes wrote:

 Manchu wrote:
For example, you assume people don't pay retail when they could buy at a discount. This is obviously false. People pay retail in shops all the time,

I'll pay more than retail if it accomplishes my goal. I have had a string of bad luck of back ordered items, cancelled preorders, stores selling my special orders to other people and pretty much everything that can go wrong with buying miniatures that aren't right there in stock happening.

I value product in stock more than any other factor and will pay above retail if something I wanted was right there and I could just get it without any further hassle.

Yeah, if I go through my recent GW store experiences (I don't go there often, but none the less)....

- was closed for lunch
- didn't have the product I wanted (out of stock)
- didn't have the product I wanted (out of stock)
- was closed during normal business hours
- didn't have the product I wanted (was something resin)
- actually had the product I wanted and I bought it, yay!
- was closed for lunch
- actually had the product I wanted and I bought it, yay!
- didn't have the product I wanted (was a pushfit set which apparently GW stores don't carry but a lot of independents do)

That's a bloody horrible success rate in securing a purchase for someone who actually wants something I actually quite like the store manager of that GW but there's only so far I'll go out of my way to make him a sale.

Entered the thread looking to read about insane store managers who allow models on the table made out of toilet roll.

Leave the thread with an economics degree.

 foostick wrote:
Entered the thread looking to read about insane store managers who allow models on the table made out of toilet roll.

Leave the thread with an economics degree.

So you came with nothing and left with less than nothing *badumtiss*

They can't ban forgeworld it's owned by GW, and some codexes have FW products.

Honestly I thnk we need a £1 fee for using tables.

CIRO wrote:
They can't ban forgeworld it's owned by GW, and some codexes have FW products.

Yeah...

While I agree that a FW product should be just as valid as any other GW product when used in a GW location in theory, try going into a "no FW" GW store, insist on playing using FW models and let us know how you get on.

 foostick wrote:
Entered the thread looking to read about insane store managers who allow models on the table made out of toilet roll.

Leave the thread with an economics degree.

Literally this showed the difference in attitudes to creativity between two GW stores I used to frequent. Being a penniless student I built a unit of Nurgle Plagueriders (Plaguebearers riding Beasts of Nurgle) out of papier mache and green stuff being ridden by metal Plaguebearers. One store loved the scratchbuilding and creativity and was fine with them being used in the store. The other store told me to "Get those awful Mr Hankys off our tables!" and ridiculed me for not using GW models (of which there were none ).

Yes, the latter store was the one I referenced in my first post ITT....

 Kriswall wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Kriswall wrote:
Yes, your all Forgeworld Heresy Era army looks amazing, but you haven't actually bought something in this store for a long time... so that other guy gets to use the table.

If you pulled that on me it's something I'd be emailing GW customer service about and hoping you get you pulled up on, and if I was in a particularly grumpy mood tell my friends to avoid your store like the plague.

Luckily the dude who works in the local GW wins people over with honey rather than vinegar. He seems to maintain a pretty good turnover while not being a dick about where you bought your models and whatnot. Of course he'll still try and sell you stuff, but it's far less obnoxious when he tries to sell you something after he's been friendly rather than abrasive.

lol... you can email GW customer service all you want. Generally never did anything. Ultimately, the stores answer to the regional managers (or whatever they're called nowadays). Things may have changed, but a few years back a complaint to customer service would filter to the regional manager who would follow up with the store as necessary. My regional manager fully supported the concept that paying customers were prioritized over non-paying people using the store as a hangout. From a store profitability standpoint, boycotting a store when you weren't really a paying customer accomplishes little to nothing. If you weren't spending money, a boycott takes away how many sales? (Protip... it takes away no sales.) Also, and don't take this the wrong way, but anyone who doesn't get their way and retaliates by trying to hurt the store is generally poison to a gaming community. They tend to be a ticking time bomb. Ok, you can game on the table today. Will you freak out and organize a boycott tomorrow if we sell out of a new product before you're able to come in?

Also, I don't know why you assume I was "abrasive" or that I only used "vinegar". I was actually pretty friendly. It was generally understood and accepted that the tables were there for paying customers of the store first and foremost. Never once got a complaint over that policy. Table space, both gaming and painting, was limited. If a seat is free, feel free to sit down. If no seats are free, I might ask someone who hasn't spent anything in a long time to give up a seat. I know this is a wildly unpopular concept with certain entitled gamers, but GW stores are profit oriented, sales driven retail stores where the managers are paid more when sales go up. Lots of people hang out there, but they aren't gaming clubs.

See, your problem is that A; a lot of us remember when they weren't any such thing, and B; the extent to which they are varies drastically from country to country and even from region to region.

The "retail-sales model" is hot garbage in general, designed explicitly to exploit workers by forcing them to work like salesmen without giving the commission that was once expected to accompany such a role, but it's particularly garbage in relation to a chain of stores which was created and is supposedly still intended to function primarily as marketing and recruitment rather than a pure sales channel. The problem is that the blinkered "corporate efficiency" attitude that took over GW a while ago can't grasp that the sales performance of an individual store in that context is pretty much irrelevant unless it's truly abysmal, all that matters i that the chain isn't a drag on the company and the company as a whole is profitable(which isn't to say that sales data or salesmanship is irrelevant, just that whether or not the Chumblybumbly Town store sold through 0.04% less value than the same day on the previous year isn't a useful indicator as to whether or not the store is attracting new customers to the brand given how many customers then go on to buy online or from third party retailers).

If you have a problem allowing people who bought GW products to play in GW stores because they didn't specifically benefit that store's targets thanks to buying online or from FW, take it up with GW, but don't pretend GW's crappy attitude to their staff is the fault or responsibility of their customers.

 foostick wrote:
Entered the thread looking to read about insane store managers who allow models on the table made out of toilet roll.

Leave the thread with an economics degree.

I still haven't seen anyone talk about econometry, microeconomics or public economy, so we will have to wait a bit prior to giving you the degree but will look out to validate the credits so you can finish the remaining subjects on an homologated institution.

I agree with most views on this... Does Games Workshop even audit their stores??
You would think there would be a written standard of operations with so many out there.
Having traveled to a number of locations in the states and world; some GW shops I've seem
are like a fashion boutique with nice set ups and lively staff.. while others seem like an adult day care.

As with my local.. the clerk is on you as soon as you hit the door with his sales pitch and when you explain that
you are just looking; he goes out and smokes a cigarette.. seen this happen a number of times
and I am not a regular customer.

Also the stock is very limited there. I would hope that a GW store would have everything the web site has..
But just a few weeks ago.. I went to the store looking for the reactor model to add to my SWA terrain stuff.
It was not in stock and said I could order it and have it shipped to the store...
Then I thought a watch master.. nope..out of stock... Looking around I noticed that a lot of models
on the shelves was months old except for new releases..like a reorder gap....
Do GW force stores to keep a low stock also?

On top of that it was the 5th anniversary of the store.. so the shop was crazy..
They had the Eldar Art book.. the clerk pointed it out but never said the price...
I was told by a buddy afterwards .. "You don't want to know" and after seeing the prices
on eBay.. I imagine it was another one of the "Spend this much money to be able to buy this"...

One other thing is a follow the shop on Facebook and it seem like the guy is always "sorry we are closed today"
or "we are closing early today" I know the shops are a one man operation. but you would think they
would have a better plan like part time help to cover such a thing.