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Plus if you've got kids coming to game days and such, having a food outlet can be something for parents to go too and have a coffee and chat with other parents whilst waiting for their kids.

It is something missing from Official GW stores. I'd get more hobby/gaming done if GW did a tie up with Costa and my family could go get a coffee while I was in there.

Trouble with that is Smelly Teenagers will also want Coffee.

Then you have Smelly Teenagers On Coffee clogging up your store.

Plus at least in the U.K., you’d need a food license, constant inspections, elf’n’safety etc etc.

Even if you did that? You’re giving up floor space in already typically quite dinky shops to sell a product not already under served on the high street.

GW stores are by and large profitable. They've the bonus of most of them being long term in their regions so they've had time in the 80-90s period to build up fanbases that have managed to last. The one-staffer approach also seems to have paid out for GW in keeping their stores profitable - 92% in the last shareholders meeting and that's pretty darn impressive after 2 years of corona

I think if GW did it they'd be pairing up with another established chain food/coffee brand and pairing up. The idea being that two in one would afford a larger floorspace instead of both trying to share small GW stores.



But its harsh, I've seen GW go from 3-4 staffers in a fairly open space in the main highstreet to 1 in a fairly cramped store that's in the secondary highstreet

I do wonder if part of that was a kind of mass “coming of age”, whereby the kids and Young Ad-Ults* who filled my Veteran’s Nights in the early 2000’s were now old enough, smart enough and organised enough to set up their own clubs, or even have homes with space for gaming in.

I would not be at all surprised if an analysis of whatever sales data GW has showed a decent part of their uptick are now parents of young kids rediscovering GW through their kids getting into it for the first time.

Trust me. That sort of parent is easy to sell to, as they already have typically fond memories of their own days, but this time tend to have the money to enjoy it.

mrFickle wrote:
once I realised you could get it all from other hobby web stores for about 20% cheaper I stopped using GW but as far as I am aware they still do quite a lot of business.

Who pay GW prices when you can get it cheaper?

I do occasionally depending on what my local stores are unable to get, or do not have sitting on the shelf. I make enough money that I don't really worry about saving 20$ on a model kit. Fast shipping and good customer service if anything goes wrong makes it worth it to me when I need it.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Plus at least in the U.K., you’d need a food license, constant inspections, elf’n’safety etc etc.

Same in the US. You can sell pre-packaged food (candy, chips, etc) without all the paperwork but once you get into actual food you've got all the regulatory stuff to deal with. It's a lot of work to deal with and if you aren't going for a proper high-end restaurant + game shop hybrid you aren't going to come out ahead. Trying to sell cheap sandwiches or something is going to add a lot of extra cost and effort for pretty small margins and half your customers are going to go next door to get some food anyway.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
GW stores are by and large profitable.

I'm not sure that's the best metric to evaluate them on. If a store is making $1 million/year profit it's technically profitable but it's a relative loss if GW could be making $2 million/year profit by closing the store, getting the rent/salaries/etc off the books, and selling the same products through an independent store. In an era when GW has ruthlessly cut back on quality in favor of cost reduction I suspect that by independent store standards quite a few of their locations are underperforming at best.

Thing is only a GW store only sells GW products. A 3rd party will sell other products and honestly many/most are much more likely to push card games over wargames.

Magic the Gathering, Yugio and similar games might cost less per unit, but they generate way more profit compared to wargames. Plus cardgames take up very little shelf space and even play space is less than a wargame.


Finally even if they focus on wargames, they've got competing brands to consider and the fact that people don't even have to use GW models in their army.



So for GW it would likely work shorterm, but medium to long term it would be losing them custom. If anything GW operates the other way around. Wait for a 3rd party to be doing well then use that as a metric to open their own store in that region.

 Overread wrote:
Thing is only a GW store only sells GW products. A 3rd party will sell other products and honestly many/most are much more likely to push card games over wargames.

Magic the Gathering, Yugio and similar games might cost less per unit, but they generate way more profit compared to wargames. Plus cardgames take up very little shelf space and even play space is less than a wargame.


Finally even if they focus on wargames, they've got competing brands to consider and the fact that people don't even have to use GW models in their army.



So for GW it would likely work shorterm, but medium to long term it would be losing them custom. If anything GW operates the other way around. Wait for a 3rd party to be doing well then use that as a metric to open their own store in that region.

Maybe this is a US vs.UK thing but in the US there's an immense difference in store quality between GW stores and independent stores. The GW stores are tiny closets in the back corner of whatever strip mall has the cheapest rent (the closest one to me isn't even visible from the road). They have 1-2 tables at most, limited inventory, extremely limited hours, and have to shut down and send everyone out of the store any time the employee needs to step away for a moment. Meanwhile there are multiple independent stores that have a dozen or more tables, are open much longer hours and give you enough time to get in a game after work, a wide range of non-GW products, and enough employees that someone needing a bathroom break doesn't mean having to pause your game and leave the store. If you have a successful independent store in your area there's no reason to even consider going to a GW store unless you're a victim of the cult of officialness and I've never seen a GW store with anywhere near the traffic or sales volume of a decent independent store.

Actually that sounds like GW stores here for the most part too.
Not quite in the cheapest areas, but not the prime locations any more.



Thing is the GW store has the issue that it can only shift GW product. So its potential profit avenues are limited. On the flipside it only sells GW product, it only pushes GW product and the shop, as long as its profitable, will generate income and new gamers for GW.

The 3rd party when a new person steps in the door "might" start Warhammer. Or they might start Infinity or Dystopian Wars or Magic the Gathering. The staff might push certain games because they generate higher profit; or instead of pushing Warhammer through Killteam for someone on budget they push them toward Malifaux or Infinity.


That's the key difference, the GW store recruits for wargames and for GW brand wargames only. For GW that's worth having their own stores and their own trained staff (from what I gather US staff were very different to UK in hiring policy and practice - at least under the Kirby days they were much more salesmen pushy for the sale; whilst in the UK they are often much more about the hobby - which includes nudging things for sales but without being so pushy and one dimensional)

 Overread wrote:
The 3rd party when a new person steps in the door "might" start Warhammer. Or they might start Infinity or Dystopian Wars or Magic the Gathering. The staff might push certain games because they generate higher profit; or instead of pushing Warhammer through Killteam for someone on budget they push them toward Malifaux or Infinity.

But the reverse is also true: someone who steps in the door to play MTG may see a 40k game in progress and decide to start a new hobby. Someone who stops in because their partner wants to pick up a new board game may impulse buy another 40k model while they're in the store. Someone in the Dystopian Wars group may decide to also come out on 40k night because the rest of the group plays both games. Etc. In a healthy independent store that's a ton of traffic that has the opportunity to buy some GW stuff.

Contrast that with a GW store, where GW is the only draw. And because it's in the forgotten back corner of a random strip mall new customer traffic is effectively zero, the only people who even know the store exists are current GW customers and the friends they are actively recruiting. Even in the unlikely event that someone happens to see the store and decide to check it out they've got a 50/50 chance of the store being open, and if the store is closed they probably aren't coming back. And once you're in the store gaming space is almost nonexistent, prices are higher than any other store in the area, and the only thing you can buy is GW stuff (most of which isn't even in stock and has to be ordered through the online store). So now not only are you getting no traffic that isn't already a GW customer most of the GW customers are going to be buying their stuff from other stores. I remember being in a GW store one time during the peak of Christmas shopping season and one person, IIRC the parent or spouse of one of the regular players at the store, bought anything during an entire all-day Apocalypse game. And IIRC that person was the only non-player to even walk through the door that day.

In short: GW stores made a lot of sense when they were in high-traffic mall locations and could draw in new customers. Now they're little more than a private clubhouse for a handful of existing customers and they only survive by aggressive cost cutting. Profit may be non-zero but opportunity cost isn't.

Of course, I'm not saying that 3rd parties won't sell GW stuff. Just that if you're manager of GW itself then the best way to ensure your staff are selling your product and that your product is sold is to have your own staff and your own shops selling your products.

3rd party wargames rely heavily on their community rep systems to help promote their games at the local level. Just look how far Warmachine fell - from 2nd place to Warhammer to almost nothing - and part of that (not all) was down to losing their entire Press Ganger system.




I do agree also that GW stores worked better when they were in higher traffic areas with more staff etc.... I don't think anyone could disagree with that. Where they are now is more a result of the fact that rent and rates for highstreet locations have kept going up and up and up and priced a lot of retail out of the highstreet.

UK GW locations are still usually in town centres and generally a short walk from the main high street. They are still in pretty high traffic locations.

I don't think I have ever seen a GW in a retail park (I think that is the equivalent of a strip mall here). You typically only see very large stores in retail parks.

The dynamic is definitely different.

The UK GW store strategy does seem to be different compared to the rest of the world and especially the US. UK stores tend to be in fairly prominent locations close to town/city centres. This means that GW has pretty good brand recognition in the UK as anyone close to a city or large town has likely walked past a store pretty frequently. The Edinburgh store used to be on the High Street, for example, but is now in a location just off Princes Street, which is the main shopping area in the city. If you're a 14-year old kid from Edinburgh or the surrounding towns, it's almost 100% certain you've walked past the local GW multiple times. GW almost certainly treat their stores as part retail, part marketing.

They get a decent amount of passing trade due to location. It's also often the case in the UK that FLGS are the ones that are more out of the way, especially the ones with significant gaming space, because those types of locations are much rarer here. Taking Edinburgh as an example, we have a handful of FLGS but only one store with enough space to run multiple games of 40k (and I think that's either closed recently or on the verge of closing). Other cities like Glasgow or Aberdeen are similar.

I think the UK differs from the US in how gaming groups are organised as well. We tend to have clubs that are often not affiliated with a store, due to many stores lacking enough space. Many UK gaming clubs are in community centres, schools or other spaces that are available to rent on a weekly basis. That means FLGS can survive without offering playing space, which broadens the number of available locations.

Slipspace wrote:
The UK GW store strategy does seem to be different compared to the rest of the world and especially the US. UK stores tend to be in fairly prominent locations close to town/city centres. This means that GW has pretty good brand recognition in the UK as anyone close to a city or large town has likely walked past a store pretty frequently. The Edinburgh store used to be on the High Street, for example, but is now in a location just off Princes Street, which is the main shopping area in the city. If you're a 14-year old kid from Edinburgh or the surrounding towns, it's almost 100% certain you've walked past the local GW multiple times. GW almost certainly treat their stores as part retail, part marketing.

They get a decent amount of passing trade due to location. It's also often the case in the UK that FLGS are the ones that are more out of the way, especially the ones with significant gaming space, because those types of locations are much rarer here. Taking Edinburgh as an example, we have a handful of FLGS but only one store with enough space to run multiple games of 40k (and I think that's either closed recently or on the verge of closing). Other cities like Glasgow or Aberdeen are similar.

I think the UK differs from the US in how gaming groups are organised as well. We tend to have clubs that are often not affiliated with a store, due to many stores lacking enough space. Many UK gaming clubs are in community centres, schools or other spaces that are available to rent on a weekly basis. That means FLGS can survive without offering playing space, which broadens the number of available locations.

For the US at least, it is probably a feature of car dependency that retail in general relies on drivable locations in most of the country.

The UK is much denser and more compact, so many people do not drive into town centres and they are far more walkable. Large stores are also more expensive due to the constricted space.

I'd be interested to see if mainland Europe is more similar to the UK or US. I'd expect it to be more like the UK due to a similar or lower level of car dependency.

 Shas'O Ky'husa wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Plus at least in the U.K., you’d need a food license, constant inspections, elf’n’safety etc etc.

Same in the US. You can sell pre-packaged food (candy, chips, etc) without all the paperwork but once you get into actual food you've got all the regulatory stuff to deal with. It's a lot of work to deal with and if you aren't going for a proper high-end restaurant + game shop hybrid you aren't going to come out ahead. Trying to sell cheap sandwiches or something is going to add a lot of extra cost and effort for pretty small margins and half your customers are going to go next door to get some food a

Agree. Virtually every FLGS I've ever encountered over the past 35 years here in the US is situated such that if you can get to the shop, then you can get to the local fast foods.
Two of the ones I currently frequent? All you have to do is walk 3 doors down & you're at a bar&grill/restaurant. Within a few minutes walk/drive? Numerous other options.
The worst situated was about a 15 minute round trip to the nearest McDonald's.... but I assure you that if you could get to that shop you could get to the McDonald's.
So yeah. Leave the cost & hassle of serving actual food to restaurants.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Trouble with that is Smelly Teenagers will also want Coffee.

Then you have Smelly Teenagers On Coffee clogging up your store.

Plus at least in the U.K., you’d need a food license, constant inspections, elf’n’safety etc etc.

Even if you did that? You’re giving up floor space in already typically quite dinky shops to sell a product not already under served on the high street.

oh right, the UK and NA arent the same environment.

Obviously here in NA where space isnt an issue, double dipping makes for a very interesting environment.

My local game store is right next to a church rather than food, due to the cheapness of the building. Don't have a Games Workshop proper, and this guy runs the only tabletop focused store that didn't go out of business during covid in my area. You don't get discounts, but the guy is cool, and the guy that works on saturdays is cool too.

About customer service, having worked in a customer service job that was way less forgiving to customers than Games Workshop (a mortgage company), when I received the wrong model, I offered to send it back, sent proof of purchase, and got a response that they'd be sending me a replacement model, and I could keep the one I got by accident. It was plague father something. Just gave it to a friend. But my one and only experience was a good one.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Trouble with that is Smelly Teenagers will also want Coffee.

Then you have Smelly Teenagers On Coffee clogging up your store.

Plus at least in the U.K., you’d need a food license, constant inspections, elf’n’safety etc etc.

Even if you did that? You’re giving up floor space in already typically quite dinky shops to sell a product not already under served on the high street.

Yeah that was why I went with a tie up with Costa (other cafe brands a re available) rather than GW doing to food side. The book shops with an abundance of floor space made this work to keep them around longer then expected. GW stores are small so putting one it in the current stores are a no go but using a tie up to secure a large space is also not unheard of and can bring relative costs for both sides down.

To be fair it would be pretty situational but in some locations I do think could drive more footfall.

 Overread wrote:
Thing is only a GW store only sells GW products. A 3rd party will sell other products and honestly many/most are much more likely to push card games over wargames.

Magic the Gathering, Yugio and similar games might cost less per unit, but they generate way more profit compared to wargames. Plus cardgames take up very little shelf space and even play space is less than a wargame.


Finally even if they focus on wargames, they've got competing brands to consider and the fact that people don't even have to use GW models in their army.



So for GW it would likely work shorterm, but medium to long term it would be losing them custom. If anything GW operates the other way around. Wait for a 3rd party to be doing well then use that as a metric to open their own store in that region.

Did you know that WoTC has recently sold 80$ USD Collector Boosters? I've seen people open them and get 200$ worth of cards. I've seen a LOT of people open them and get 4$ worth of cards. So the old "Warhammer is expensive" trope is something I typically ignore these days.

A note on the card games and space. I don't think that's 100% accurate to say they take up less space. I've seen collections of magic, pokemon and yugioh that dwarf whole army collections in scope, scale and size. It's truly insane.

 Togusa wrote:

Did you know that WoTC has recently sold 80$ USD Collector Boosters? I've seen people open them and get 200$ worth of cards. I've seen a LOT of people open them and get 4$ worth of cards. So the old "Warhammer is expensive" trope is something I typically ignore these days.

A note on the card games and space. I don't think that's 100% accurate to say they take up less space. I've seen collections of magic, pokemon and yugioh that dwarf whole army collections in scope, scale and size. It's truly insane.

MTG is way more expensive than 40k, doesn't mean 40k isnt expensive too.

And MTG only takes more place in stores usually, unless you're keeping every single card you open (aka : 90% of the draft chaff in sets)

 Togusa wrote:
Did you know that WoTC has recently sold 80$ USD Collector Boosters? I've seen people open them and get 200$ worth of cards. I've seen a LOT of people open them and get 4$ worth of cards. So the old "Warhammer is expensive" trope is something I typically ignore these days.

A note on the card games and space. I don't think that's 100% accurate to say they take up less space. I've seen collections of magic, pokemon and yugioh that dwarf whole army collections in scope, scale and size. It's truly insane.

Ugh, this again. This has been discussed to the death, how can people still get the facts wrong?

- Starting with MtG and playing at casual/kitchen table/beer&prezels level is vastly cheaper than 40k, even long term
- When playing at competitive levels, MtG is vastly more expensive due to rotations and insane classic format card prices
- Drafting is cheaper to get into than 40k to start, but the costs add up to eventually surpass the costs of 40k, even if you are decent player and regularly turn cards into money
- Collecting MtG is way more expensive that 40k could ever be, because there is more to collect and because only very, very few models actually have any collector value. Unless we are talking about something like a metal thunderhawk, most models are either still readily available or considered to be old junk
- No one really uses boosters as their primary way to get cards
- An army of 40k "plateaus" when your collection reaches a certain size and doesn't cost a lot of upkeep afterwards while MtG keeps costing constant amounts of money, even at casual levels. Well, unless GW decides to invalidate half your weapon options, but there's that
- It is possible (but not guaranteed) that your army is still playable after returning to the game after five or more years. This will absolutely not be true for any of your MtG decks.
- When you spend the same amount of money on MtG than you do on 40k, they 40k collection will always dwarf the MtG collection. The box of a battle wagon box can hold roughly 2-3k cards in cheap sleeves, I know this for reasons. A CCG collection that dwarfs an army is the equivalent of those guard armies which take up whole garages/basements/living rooms to display.
- 2D printing cards is cheaper than 3D printing miniatures
- In theory, playing MtG through arena is free, but then you are not free to play in the way you enjoy most.

Did I miss anything?

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Trouble with that is Smelly Teenagers will also want Coffee.

Then you have Smelly Teenagers On Coffee clogging up your store.

Plus at least in the U.K., you’d need a food license, constant inspections, elf’n’safety etc etc.

Even if you did that? You’re giving up floor space in already typically quite dinky shops to sell a product not already under served on the high street.

oh right, the UK and NA arent the same environment.

Obviously here in NA where space isnt an issue, double dipping makes for a very interesting environment.

It can be, but personally I find its mostly a rarity still. None of 6 or so within a 70-80 minute drive of me currently bother, and when I was in Albuquerque, 3 of the 4 shops failed while I was there, two of which had big food service areas, and the surviving store did not. The other one that failed... well, the owner felt that having stocked shelves was a problem for other people, and 5 private game rooms for board games and rpgs and a couple public computers to rent play time on was a better use of floor space. Boston had a surprising lack of convenient stores, but the decent ones were pretty dedicated game/hobby stores with little else (one had a small setup for used books)

I haven’t bought a GW hobby product in years.

You can get better quality brushes from elsewhere for cheaper.
You can get better quality paints from elsewhere for cheaper.
You can get better quality basing supplies from elsewhere for cheaper.
You can get better quality bags and cases from elsewhere for cheaper.
You can get better quality tape measures/dice/gaming mats etc from elsewhere for cheaper.

As for models, I always buy from places like eBay or cheaper stores like Darksphere.

I love Warhammer, but I don’t like GW. I’ll especially never forgive them for what they did to WHFB.


That being said, I would probably be inclined to buy more products out of sheer convenience if I still frequented the local GW store. I used to love going down there every weekend 10-15 years ago to play and paint with my friends, but then they started to phase out ‘public use’ tables, and the tables gradually turned into beginner intro game tables one by one that were reserved for 15 minute sales pitch games. I can see why they went this route, but it just meant that most people I know quit the hobby because there wasn’t a gaming club around. That must’ve been quite a lot of income lost for the local GW.

Yep, GW killing its own hobby base out of sheer MBA style min-max bs that ultimately shapes the rules and now, yeah, I dislike GW as a corp as much as I dislike Monsanto and CocaCola, all to blame for making the world more toxic and the people less healthy.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:

 Togusa wrote:

Did you know that WoTC has recently sold 80$ USD Collector Boosters? I've seen people open them and get 200$ worth of cards. I've seen a LOT of people open them and get 4$ worth of cards. So the old "Warhammer is expensive" trope is something I typically ignore these days.

A note on the card games and space. I don't think that's 100% accurate to say they take up less space. I've seen collections of magic, pokemon and yugioh that dwarf whole army collections in scope, scale and size. It's truly insane.

MTG is way more expensive than 40k, doesn't mean 40k isnt expensive too.

And MTG only takes more place in stores usually, unless you're keeping every single card you open (aka : 90% of the draft chaff in sets)

As someone who was familiar with the MTG release model back in t'day before the Dark Times came upon us - yes, I mean early 2020 - I couldn't make heads nor tails of the current release model when I was looking at boosters in my FLGS the other week/month.

The fact they need a poster saying what might be in each type of pack is crazy talk to me.

Yeah They've 3 or 4 types of "booster" now and that's before you get to the one time specials and the INSANE price on some of those "collect old card" packs

 VladimirHerzog wrote:



MTG is way more expensive than 40k, doesn't mean 40k isnt expensive too.

And MTG only takes more place in stores usually, unless you're keeping every single card you open (aka : 90% of the draft chaff in sets)

MtG even durning covid was so big here, that even when our store went down, they still had MtG weekends at our local KFC. Nothing official, but 20+ dudes spending 8 hours at the venue, buying food every 1-2 hours saved the KFC from going bankrupt after the middle school next to it was closed for kids to have all classes online. MtG power is strong, comparing to it w40k is a small hobby. Even at my new store, aside for midnight weekends for veterans, the store owner would be okey for table top to die. But not MtG. We had store events pushed or post poned, because of MtG releases etc Even 8th and 9th ed start didn't push MtG folk from having their one table reserved.

MTG can cost way more than 40K BUT because of how cheap booster packs are there is a huge amount of potential to just make lots of small encouraged sales.

Then there's things like Boosterdraft; a game format that you have to pay to take part in even if you are just purely buying the packs of cards to take part.



For all we talk about how GW monetizes 40K and Warhammer and such; they have nothing on MTG.

 Jidmah wrote:

- It is possible (but not guaranteed) that your army is still playable after returning to the game after five or more years. This will absolutely not be true for any of your MtG decks.

For someone complaining about others getting the facts wrong.....

You don't seem to know that MtG has more formats now days than ever before.
I've bought 1 new card in the past 10 years - because I liked the art.
A few weeks ago? I was talked into playing a few games with some of the kids at the local shop.
The newest cards in any of my decks were added when Coldsnap was the new set.
We picked some vintage/legacy/eternal format that my decks fit (I don't recall it's name) & played a few games. All 3 of my decks still worked fine & the kids got some xp playing something other than draft/Commander + got to see some stuff almost as old as a few of them