If You Cannot Sell It, Give It Away
One thing my game store had was space. If fact, we used to boast that we were the largest game store in New Mexico…and we were…by square footage.
The site we chose had two main rooms, a cement-floored forward retail space and a vast, polished hardwood back room, not suitable for display cases and the like because it was semi-isolated from the front of the store. We did not consider this a major limitation. We wanted this vast back room as a gaming room—space for our customers to hangout and play the games we sold them.
It did not really work out as planned. The forward room turned out to be plenty large enough for all the gaming the customers needed. They quickly moved our thoughtfully provided tables and chairs from the vast and quiet back room to the cheerier, brighter front room. This suited us well enough. Having the gamers visible from the front window is always an attractive quality in a game store, and the sense of amicable hubbub it lent the store was a nice contrast to library-like quite that might have otherwise dominated our retail space.
This left us with a dilemma in the form of nearly 3000 square feet of unused space. The space wasn’t isolated enough to make renting it out reasonable. The solution was to give it away. Specifically, we invited any organization that seemed likely to have a significant overlap with the gaming population to use the space, for free, for meetings, practice sessions, and the like.
As you can imagine, the result was a rapid increase in our name recognition and customer base. Our existing customers brought organizations to us; the organizations brought new customers into the store. Most nights, our back room bustled with SCA meetings or Live Action Role Playing Games causing our front room to bustle with customers who just came in for the meeting…but thought that they might just go ahead and buy that gaming book they saw on the shelf as they headed for the back room.
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