...And We're Back...

I got back from the trade show yesterday. Honestly, I pretty much skipped the last day. I left the open gaming function they had on Thursday night not feeling my best, and when I woke up Friday morning that feeling had lingered. So I looked at the schedule of seminars, found only one I was even semi-interested in attending, and weighed it against the "bleh". "Bleh" won. Thus, I packed the car, checked out of the hotel, said goodbye to a couple of friends, and ditched out. I got home in the afternoon and still felt "meh", so Loq ran the store for the night while I went home and "rested".

I put the word "rested" in quotes because while things were going well for the most part, about 8:40PM I heard two very loud POP/BANG sounds happening VERY CLOSELY outside my house. I grew up around guns... My father hunted and collected firearms... I know what gun shots sound like... These were gun shots. So, with adrenaline ramping up, I called 911 to let them know something was up. I never got a follow-up from anyone, so I've sort of dismissed it for now, but I'm a bit more on edge as it were.

Eventually, Loq calls me up and says that people want to do an after-FNM event, but she doesn't have it in her. So I went in and ran (and played, to make it even) that event, and then went through and received all of the shipments that had come in from Wednesday to Friday. I got home somewhere in the region of just after 5AM.

I'll be leaving soon to go to the store and take over for BigBank. It'll be nice to be on home turf once again...

I do want to say thanks much to HiSign for his help with the store in my absence, but the biggest "thank you" goes to my lovely Loquacious one. You knocked yourself out keeping the store together while I was away, sweetness. Thank you... I missed you, the kids, the dog, and the store more than you could imagine. Perhaps that ache and longing was the "bleh" feeling I had while I was away... who knows?

-- GopherDave

Part Of My Day...

I awoke in Madison this morning to this type of view...

I'll be the first to admit that I overpay for my hotel stay here, but this is so worth it... That elation is somewhat tempered by this...

...but getting to see cool stuff like this...

Sorry this is blurry... I took the picture with my phone and others wanted to do the same, so I was pressed for time. 

This picture... this is all BADDDDDNEEWWWWSSSS folks!

...raises my mood right back up and makes it worth coming here... These are the two of the new Warmachine Colossals, my friends, and they look absolutely bad-ass in person...

Enjoy...

-- GopherDave

Here... Not Home...

Once more I have traveled to lovely Madison, Wisconsin for ACD Games Day, a trade show with retailers in mind. It's full of helpful seminars, and a number of manufacturers are around ready to get an earful of what they are doing badly from a retailer perspective, but also a spoonful of what they are doing right.

It is that direct contact with various game companies that makes this valuable for me. Letting them know what's working in our stores, as well as what is not working helps shape how they approach things in the future. Ultimately, the companies still follow the almighty dollar, but many have found that working with retailers helps increase cash flow for themselves, thus, we have a voice.

There are a couple of trends in the industry that have sort of drawn my ire as of late. One is "paperless" invoicing. This is where you order something, and they send you an e-mail with an attached PDF. That PDF is your invoice. If you want a paper copy, you have to print it. Nothing irritates me like opening a shipment and not having paper to check it against. Really, folks... It's paper and a smidge of toner. Put a damn invoice in the box instead of making me track down one specific e-mail out of hundreds and print something out. I'm paying you, remember?

Another wonderful trend is the lack of information about products until something like two weeks before their release. Retailers are given no hints about how much an item/product line is going to cost, so any release from companies who are engaging in this practice becomes something like an unexpected expense. I'm not fond of surprises, especially of this sort, and I'm fairly certain a number of other retailers agree with me.

My last major gripe concerns the increasing number of "exclusive" arrangements between various game companies and a select few distributors. I hate these arrangements because it forces retailers to spend money in a certain way, as opposed to leaving the choice to them. The question has gone from "okay, which distributor do I need to get game X from while balancing keeping our customers happy and maximizing our money" to "I need game X. That means I need to place an order with Y distributor even though the markup will be poor and we don't need anything else from them."

Yeah, folks love me at these things... =P

-- GopherDave

The Day Before...

Typically, when I start these entries, I'll get started at home by getting ready for work, taking a picture, and uploading it to Blogger while placing some "add more here later" placeholder text. Fact is... I had almost forgotten I hadn't written an entry until about 2AM the next day.

As it goes, I'll be leaving for a business trip here in about 9-10 hours. In that time I will be...

...finishing up some laundry...
...taking a nap...
...packing...
...catching up on e-mail...
...obsessing over some last few details that I honestly cannot predict...

The trip I'm taking is pretty much the same one I took back in September of last year. They have moved the days around as a fair number of folks were complaining that it was too close to GenCon to do both comfortably. I wasn't attending GenCon, so I didn't mind, but I do see their point.

Due to a number of things, I'm riding solo on this one. I *AM* going to miss my family, and our store, but going by myself, I think it will force me to be more social and actually network more. As social and gregarious as I am at a game convention, I am not the boldest person at functions like this. Despite doing this for 3+ years, I still feel like the I have *NO* idea what I am doing sometimes. I think that is what keeps me getting better, though. I haven't grown complacent yet in what I am doing, and I still want to learn more about my "chosen" field of work.

Let this be a lesson, kids. Sometimes, you find your career path... Other times, it finds you...

-- GopherDave

Thankful Beyond Normal...

Sunday... Went and ran a short game today. Short enough that I could come home and change clothing as opposed to doing it in the store. So, the blog stuff can be done before I go relieve HiSign at the store. It's the night where we do floors at the store, so I have to be there.

Overall, It's been a "meh" day thus far, mostly due to it being a religious holiday. Now that I think about it, I am glad I no longer do the restaurant work I did a few years back at the breakfast-oriented  place I used to work at. Each Easter, the Korean churches in the area would hold Midnight masses, and then when things were done somewhere in the 6AM range on Sunday, they would descend upon the place I worked like a swarm of locusts. It was good for business, and they were not bad customers. It was just shocking to be instantly balls-out busy when we opened the doors at 6:30 or 7:00AM when we were not used to it. I am glad I don't do that anymore. Between that and graduation at the local University, it made some Sundays incredibly stressful in the short term sense.

I've said it before, and I'll repeat it. If you ever have the chance to be your own boss, take it... You'll never work for anyone better... =P

-- GopherDave