Hey guys, so I was driving to work yesterday I saw up and down one of the main road’s in my home town the amount of antique malls that keep popping up is crazy. Now, I’ve been those shops a few rims with my fiancés parents and typically the demographic for those stores are baby boomer generation. With the resurgence in popularity of Pokémon, sealed video game collecting, and even vintage toys. I’m curious if we could see old school LGS pop up again. Back in the late 90s to around 2008 everywhere you went you saw those stores and then they all slowly closed off. Now, as many of the collector’s who are buying Pokémon, sealed video games, and other collectibles are millennials we are buying what we want. My grandparents born pre WW2 were about coins and garage sales, my moms generation baby boomers are silver age comics and things like antiquing, and now our generation of millennials who are all about 25-36 we are buying things we care about and many of us are now making more money in our lives to afford our childhood. But curious if you think will get these lgs popping again?
No
Wasn’t it sort of attempted and failed already?
All kinds of stores popped up, mainly online ones, and then closed down. Also, streamers/breakers are still around. I don’t think Pokemon or those handling distribution make it easy to register as well. Not sure who mentioned that.
Maybe if Disney Lorcana takes off bringing in a whole new demographic of collector then there might be change. Pokemon though seems like a closed market.
We are also the generation of online shopping so… I would guess no.
I think it’ll be tough. Even when I was a kid, a lot of LGSs had a hard time making money. This is back in the 2000s. Most of the ones I would go to would be open for a year or 2 at most and would eventually go under or become integrated into another business. For example, one in my city eventually became not only an LGS, but also a candy store, bookstore, vintage video games and sports/memorabilia shop all in one just to survive.
So I think the only way to survive as an LGS now is you have to be running one out of a literal hole in the ground with low overhead costs… OR you need to have more to sell than just a typical LGS would offer in the past.
I still support LGSs when I can, but it’s definitely a tougher business than people realize. I didn’t even mention, but the events of the past few years also did not help things, in fact it probably has only made it worse even after all this time.
I’m definitely nostalgic to have that old school LGS experience where people would just hang out and play TCGs together… but I really feel in our current economic world it’s just not feasible like it was. Online shopping has kept a lot of us home and I feel a lot of people have private groups they play with instead of going to an LGS like back in the day.
See I would agree but the problem was when shops were popping up the market was absolutely inflated and those were super inflated numbers. I think now we are finally seeing a market correction and this is real prices. So I could see shops coming back. My biggest reason for it because millennials are now adults and we are buying what meaningful to us. I will say it’s very hard to own a physical location. I don’t see these antique malls lasting more than 10 years because at that point baby boomers are in their 70s and 80s or 90s depending on year. I’ve seen shops really filling up again. The demographic a lot older and from going to collect a cons people do want to buy this stuff. I do agree one more big ip does need to enter the market so if lorcana pops off I could see it more.
How is the antique shop ecosystem over in the states? Very different than here I imagine.
We’ve had a wave of “antique shops” here as well but it appears to be mostly just tats and trinkets leeched from low end estate sales and minimum pensioners which is then flipped from some shithole physical location until the shop goes tits up in a few months. Not exactly a sign of expanding middle class wealth, but I’m sure this varies a great deal depending on where you’re located.
Also, I’m not sure if the lure of an antique store translates to the modern day LGS. When I think antique store I think of that slightly worn $300 cabinet with $10K’s worth of wild Teak in it but I’d imagine most LGS owners today are only too aware of all values.
No.
Most LGSs are not solvent in the U.S. - in fact, many are shuttering their doors. There is simply too much overhead and too little revenue in the collectible space if you solely focus on TCGs/CCGs. Few if any can compete with the prices from big-box stores, Amazon, and eBay.
Many successful LGSs make their profit from Gundam Figures, Warhammer miniatures, plushes, snacks, boardgames, comics, etc. that have much higher margins than selling TCG/CCG singles or booster packs/boxes. But at the same time, these stores must carry the break-even-to-negative-margin TCGs/CCGs because card games bring in their community/playerbase.
Uh, what? Online stores are the reason why so many physical storefronts have closed down.
I don’t think its ever been harder to open a physical hobby shop. I remember making a video ages ago about when @TCAGaming tried doing one, and he ended up having to close. If someone who has been around 10+ years, knows the market well, plus in Rusty’s case has a s tier work ethic can’t pull it off, most people can’t.
Today you need some sort of exception. Either a phenomenal location, or a separate profitable business funding the hobby shop. Otherwise there are so many pressures pushing against you. Also from a consumer perspective, I don’t think most people truly want a hobby shop. Kind of like Blockbuster. Am I nostalgic for when I rented a movie from Blockbuster, sure, but am I going to physically pick up a movie vs sitting in my grandma house and clicking a button, no. I think that is why physical storefronts suffer; the temporary nostalgia is not consistent enough to keep the lights on.
I think for it to be a successful one it has to be a hybrid - one that offers TCG products but also offers a place to play boardgames and offers food. Think Mox Boading House In Seattle. You make the $$ from food and drinks.
Or just one that is run online, but I guess that’s not an LGS
The big one is food. Although I don’t know if that’ll cut it anymore. Any LGS near me did cards, and video games and events/local play. Unless yo do Warhammer AND Magic, these stores just tend to be dead in my area. Was always dead despite having pretty good prices. So they shut down. Food on top of that is hard to do unless you get a huge space to accommodate for that. So it’s a huge investment. And seeing pc bangs who serve food that was actually decent struggle to stay open pre-pandemic, I’m doubtful,
It’s interesting that people say price is king over experience and yet there are people on WhatNot and Twitch massively overpaying two bit streamers for the “experience”.
I may have missed it but I don’t think anyone said anything about price over experience here. In fact, you can read tons of articles out there that talk about millennial consumers prioritizing experiences over things.
The primary difference between whatnot and a physical store is that be barrier to entry for whatnot is opening an app versus physically leaving your home and taking an intentional trip to a physical location. The second factor is that whatnot always has something there for you versus a store that may be quiet and unchanged since you were last there. The final nail in the coffin is that you do not have to be physically located in a certain place to use whatnot whereas a game store is entirely dependent on local visitors
Side note from a recent lgs visit…
I was looking for Pokémon singles (duh!). The lgs owner had one, mostly empty, binder of Pokémon cards. However, the store did have an entire wall of Magic singles, lots of sports, comics, dead tcgs, vintage mtg, and just about everything else you might expect from a comic/games/card “all in one” store. There were lots of sealed modern Pokémon product, but very few individual cards to purchase. I asked if the owner had any more Pokémon singles, bulk, binders, etc, and to my surprise he did…Essentially 99% of his Pokémon singles are at an external storage location and not in the physical store. The owner has most of his Pokémon inventory uploaded to Tcgplayer, while the other various card games are a mixture of in store/online. I was still able to buy a couple cards, but I was definitely disappointed.
Now, how does my story explain the likelihood of a tcg/gaming store resurgence? Tune in next time on Dragonball Z!
The last time I tried to buy something in person the vendor quoted me an unsold buy it now price from ebay because I was, quote, “buying it now”
I think buying in person is very romanticized
This is actually very funny 
Not in this thread, but in general on Discord, Reddit, YouTube etc. I see people just prioritising price. If somewhere else has cheaper booster boxes/product, then there is no loyalty.
So in that sense, it’s weird to then overpay dodgy streamers.
Maybe they are two different demographics, and if they are, the latter are inexplicable. I’ve seen Twitch streams (no WhatNot access here) and I have no idea what the experience is that justifies that extra charge. The breakers speed through packs, talk about generic things and the chat is just people making generic comments. It’s all/majorly modern packs as well not vintage which of course it would be since the breakers are mostly jumping on the bandwagon.
If I ever did another store it would be focused more on what I know how to sell and after my 3 kids are much older. My biggest constraint was time. You really have to want a store, as an online one has so many advantages. The overhead between rent, employees, insurance, security, restocking, and time is so vastly different than if you are sitting at your house doing whatever you want while you work. I took 3 months worth of overhead and built a 1120 sq ft builing attached to my house for the transition during shutting down. It would cost a lot more now but I was also selling mostly during the 2017 timeframe.
You could find $5 collection boxes from distribution at that time as nothing was really worth too much during that time for Pokemon. You could almost get whatever set you wanted by the pallet-load for $75 or less a box. I would still rather have that than not being able to order any booster boxes like right now.
My biggest mistake was trying to sell comics just because everyone in the area told me it was a good product line to have. I knew nothing about them and it showed.
Food and drinks were definitely big but watch your expirations. Usually bundles of snacks have crap thrown in them that no one wants. With drinks I was very lucky as a Coke rep dropped in one day and I told them I had no interest unless they were going to let me have it for free. To prove a point they dropped off a 6 foot wide LED cooler for free delivery and pickup with zero obligation to buy anything and I could stock it with whatever. That is something to possibly look into
League was huge for the store, but I was only able to have that for about 6 months in store. I tried grabbing a league a month before Pokemon Go! hit and that delayed me nearly a year coupled with the name issue.
I only had a store for 18 months and while it was fun, it was so much added work. I lost a lot of time with family and was the worst collecting 18 months I have had in the hobby. My mindset was much different in what was a part of my collection and what was not. I was always trying to move as much as possible for the business and being in a hurry is not the best strategy for a collector.
My favorite parts were the kids. Sitting down and taking time to know some of them was very fulfilling. I wanted to eventually start up an afterschool program for the Elementary school beside of us. As a kid can you imagine walking next door after school to a card shop? We could start with some homework and then use Pokemon as the reward. Battling out with pre-built decks def helps with reading, writing, and strategy development. Promos, cheap cards, and packs for free as more of an incentive. I decided on prioritizing time with my own kids for now, so I’m sure that dream is easier said than done anyways. Maybe one day!