The Results are In...

What over 100 of you told us, and what we're doing about it.

A few days ago I put a survey in front of the community and asked three questions I didn't know the answers to: where you're driving from, what would matter most if we moved, and what we could be doing better.

Over 100 of you answered. 89 of you wrote something out by hand — not a checkbox, an actual paragraph, and some of you a good deal more than a paragraph.

Some of it was very kind, some of it stung, but all of it was useful. Now I want to do the thing stores usually don't do with survey results, which is tell you what they actually said.

The short version

You like the store; you don't like the space.

That was pretty much the breakdown of the results. The community and the staff came up over and over as the reason people drive past closer stores to get here — one of you told us this is the best store community you've been part of in twenty years of playing TCGs, which I've read more times than I'd care to admit. And then 21 separate people told us the building is too small.

I can't fix the second one with a broom. I'm working on it — more on that below.

But two things came up that we can fix without a new building, and they're the two I want to spend this post on.

1. Our events aren't run well enough, and we know it

This is the part that stung, especially as a former competitive player.

22 of you commented on events — how they're organized, how they're announced, when they start. Someone who comes in every week told us he takes his competitive organized play to a different store, because every time he asks about tournament structure he gets told we're a "casual store." Another said our own events aren't consistent with each other — that a "casual" game runs tight while one with "competitive" prizing starts late and drifts. Somebody who drives a long way pointed out that a thirty-minute delay is a much bigger deal when you've got an hour of driving after it.

And honestly, they’re right.

Moving forward, I want to clarify what casual means for us:

Casual doesn't mean not professional.

We are a casual store. That's not marketing, it's true, and we're not giving it up — it means friendly, no hard sell, and nobody made to feel less than for showing up with a homebrew deck. But "casual" describes the atmosphere. It has never described how we run a tournament, and we've been using it as a crutch when someone asks a fair question about structure. That stops. You get the warm room and the round timer. You were never supposed to have to pick.

Here's what's changing:

• Published start times, and we start on them. If it says 7, it's 7.
• Never more than two events running at once, and if we have to run two, they will have hard caps. One event is the goal. We've been stacking two or three competing games on the same night and then wondering why the room feels cramped and the seating is a scramble. If a cap is published, we hold it — a cap we break is worse than no cap at all.
• One prize structure, everywhere for regular events: $10 entry, one pack per win, and one pack to every player for showing up. You should never have to ask what tonight's prizing is, and no one behind the counter should ever have to guess. Many of you said you'd happily pay a bit more for real prizing at regular events — this is us taking you up on that.
• We're holding product back to run events. Event prizing continues to come off the top, before the shelf. On premium games — Pokémon and One Piece especially — I can't promise much, because distributors don't promise much to us, but we'll always hold back some prize packs rather than none. If a box isn't on the shelf, there's a decent chance it's being held for an event for players.
• If we say something competitive, it runs to a competitive standard. For premium or larger store events, we'll be adjusting prizing to make the trip worth it for people coming from further out.
• A real event calendar. Posted to Discord, Facebook, and our website at the start of every month, pinned so it doesn't scroll away. Several of you told us you'd been finding out about events by word of mouth, and one of you apologized for not knowing about them. Don't apologize. That’s on us.

One more thing on this. Some of you have noticed that other stores around here have better Magic promo prizing than we do. That's real, and it isn't because they're better connected or better liked — it's because they report their events properly and we haven't always been. Promotional allocation follows the paperwork. We've been running the attendance and not recording it, which is lazy. Proper check-in at every event, every event reported on time. That should show up in what we can hand out within a few months.

A few people said they stopped coming because their game came off the schedule. I understand that and I respect it. With some of the smaller games we run, we try to give those players a place to be part of this community, but when a game doesn't get traction we sometimes have to move on from it. The door is always open, though — if you can get a group of players together, we can try to find you a timeslot.

2. Regulars get first crack at the hard-to-get product

This one wasn't a survey question. It came up anyway, from a lot of different people, and it's something I've been thinking about for a while.

Here's the problem. We sell out a pre-release to a full room because of a guaranteed box, and a good portion of that room we don't see again until the next pre-release. Meanwhile the people who are here every week — who make the community what it is — are competing with them for the same boxes.

That's backwards. Here's what we're doing about it.

A stated share of high-demand product is set aside for locals, and it goes to regular attendees of local events. It's not going to be based on who happened to sign up fastest, and it's not going to be a secret list or a judgment call at the counter. We’ll publish the rule, and it’ll be based on a number of event check-ins you can actually count.

A few of you suggested a raffle as a means of spreading product around and I thought about it. But a raffle run by us, in our shop, still leaves room for favoritism— or worse the appearance of it. You can't audit a raffle you didn't watch. A written rule about who's here every week is something you can check.

The One Piece part, which deserves saying clearly

One Piece pre-releases will no longer come with a guaranteed box.

This is a real change and I want to call it out.

The reason is simple: a guaranteed box turns a pre-release into a vending machine. It fills the room with people who are there for the product rather than the community, and then the people who play here every single week go home with less overall. I'd rather the regular gets more product than the person who came once because a box was promised.

So instead: boxes go to our regular local players at as close to MSRP as we can. Distributors will occasionally juice the store for more and to maintain our margins, we may have to sell for slightly higher than MSRP.

Seals get cracked as normal. Product sold cheap to locals is product for playing, not inventory for reselling. If we sold sealed boxes under market to a defined list of people, we'd just be somebody's cheap supplier, and within two sets the whole thing would be gamed. We know how the internet works too. Cracking the seal is what lets us offer MSRP at all.

If you think I've got this wrong, tell me. Discord, in person, whenever. But I'd rather be the store that looks after the people who are actually here week in and week out.

And yes, we sell some boxes at market. Here's why.

On some sealed product — the hot stuff, the chase sets — we sell a small portion at market price. Not all of it. Not the allocation set aside for regulars, which is out close to MSRP number. But some, and deliberately.

Here's the part of the economics of a game store that nobody really talks about. Most of what we sell makes us very little. Singles are generally thin. Sleeves and deck boxes are thin. Entry fees don't cover the prize pool — a $10 entry that puts a pack into the pool is close to a wash before anyone's been paid to run the event.

Small and new games are usually a loss for the first year or two, sometimes longer. That’s not a complaint. It’s the reality of trying to build a community around a game before you know whether the community is going to show up. Really, that “new” game community is one of my favorite parts of owning this store. Nicknames I gave people in One Piece Set 1 are still being used 4 years later – that part is fun.

Hot sealed product is one of the only lines with real margin in it. So when we sell a chase box at market, that money isn't disappearing into a pocket. It's the thing that pays for:

• The MSRP allocation for regulars. The reason we can sell boxes at MSRP to the people who are here every week is that we're not selling every box that way.
• A real prize pool. A pack per entrant, every week, on games where the entry fee doesn't actually cover it.
• Keeping the everyday stuff cheap. Sleeves, singles, accessories — the things you need in order to play at all — priced so that shopping here isn't a tax on playing here.
• Paying our full-time staff properly. More on that in a second.
• Games we believe in before they're safe.

I want to speak on the last two a bit, because these matter a lot to me personally.

Every game gets carried before anyone knows whether it works – I have a list of great games that didn’t get traction. Somebody has to buy the product, give it a table, run the events, and eat the loss for months while a community forms — or doesn't. Look at what people named in this survey as their game at Stevenson: Grand Archive. Riftbound. Sorcery. Gundam. One Piece. Several of those were not obviously going to make it when we picked them up. One of you wrote that the Gundam community here is the best TCG community you've been part of in twenty years of playing. That community exists because we all were willing to be wrong about Gundam.

That's what the market-price boxes help us pay for. It's how we can take a chance on the next Gundam, or the next Sorcery, or the next One Piece before we know whether it's going to work.

The other big one is much less obvious.

Our full-time employees are paid a fair wage and have benefits. That is not normal in this industry. Game stores are notorious for paying badly, treating staff as interchangeable, and burning through people who love the hobby until they don't any more. I decided a while ago that we weren't going to be that, and it costs real money to not be that. It's one of the largest things on our books and it's not the kind of expense that shows up on a shelf where you can see it.

But you can see it, actually — you see it every time you walk in. Somebody in this survey wrote this, and it's the reason I'm mentioning any of it:

"Community is the #1 draw that keeps me coming to Stevenson. While expanding, please continue to invest in a wonderful crew. Their warmth is what gives the Stevenson brand life."

That's not a thing you get from good hiring alone. You get it from people who aren't stressed about rent, who can afford to see a doctor, and who intend to still be here next year. Somebody else in the survey singled out our staff for building the community. People who are treated like the job is temporary don't do that.

So when we sell a chase box at market, some of that money lets us take a chance on the next hit, and some of it helps make sure the person teaching that game to you can pay their bills.

I don’t share this expecting any praise, I do it because I believe it is the right thing to do. Being a regular at the store ensures I can continue to provide that and it means a lot to me personally.

One of you wrote that we've always been fair on pricing and that it's why you're loyal to us. I'd like to keep it that way. So: some chase product at market, a stated allocation at MSRP for locals, and the boring stuff kept cheap. If you ever think we've drifted off that, say so.

On pre-orders, honestly

A few of you asked us to be clearer about what can be pre-ordered and when. Fair, and we'll do better on communicating it.

But I want to set expectations, because I'd rather under-promise here than keep letting people down: pre-orders are genuinely hard for anyone right now, because we don't get guaranteed allocation from distributors. We don't find out what we're actually getting until close to release- sometimes the week of, and on the hottest products it's frequently a fraction of what we asked for. Some pre-orders product are without images. Some are needed 6 months in advance. Taking a pre-order we might not be able to fill is worse than not taking it — that's the thing that actually breaks trust. That happened to me at OP-02 and I haven’t taken a pre-order I couldn’t guarantee fill since.

So for now, we’re working toward a system that lets us open pre-orders on the things we can commit to, and be upfront about the things we can't. When that's ready you'll hear about it here.

On the move: it's Option A or B, and it isn't south

I'll keep this short because there's no signed lease to announce. But I can tell you how we're thinking, because you're the ones who gave us the data.

We took every ZIP code you gave us, matched it against how far each of you said you're actually willing to drive, weighted it by how often you come in, and asked: from any given spot on the map, how many of you do we keep?

Right now at the current location, 87% of visits are inside people's stated travel limits. Here's the part I didn't expect: nowhere in the search area beats that. The Stevenson location is .5 miles away from the “ideal” location.

So this was never a map problem. It's a square footage problem. Which narrows us to two options:

Option A — stay in this pocket (Pikesville/ Owings Mills), get a bigger unit.

Option B — the Timonium / Greenspring corridor, near where the old Titan store was. This costs us 1.3 percentage points of retention. In exchange we'd likely get a much bigger building, in a corridor where a lot of you already live, that has already housed a game store.

To be straight about it: the map does not tell us to go to Timonium. The map is neutral between A and B. If we go, it'll be because of a building — the room, the tables, the paint space — not because of geography.

And south is off the table. I want to say that clearly so nobody wonders. Every southern location we modeled is net negative and it isn't close: Columbia would cost us 26. Glen Burnie would cost 31 — nearly a third of the people who make the trip comfortably today. One of you also asked us directly to stay on the north side of Baltimore, which is a pain to travel across, and you were right to.

The thing we're not doing yet, but haven't ruled out

We asked about wargaming space and dedicated RPG rooms, and I want to report this one carefully, because the headline number is misleading.

Most of you said neither is important, and nobody picked either as their single most important thing. Fair enough — that's a clear answer about the store as it exists today.

But 44 of you — about four in ten — said at least one of them would be nice to have or better. And of course the current numbers are low: there's nowhere in this building to put a terrain table or run a large campaign, so that demand has nowhere to show up. The survey also only reached people who already come here, which means the people who'd come for a paint night were never asked.

So it isn't a priority for the room we have now, and it won't be what decides where we move. But more space is the moment to try it cheaply — a couple of tables with take terrain, a paint night, and we find out. One of you described the old Timonium store having a free painting area people just hung out in, and that's stuck with me.

Same conversation: several of you asked about board games and non-card events, and one asked whether we'd run paid 3D printing off the printer. All of that is on the list.

Quick things, coming shortly

Sound panels in the play room — a few people raised the noise independently, including one who told us it's genuinely hard to be in there when it's full, and that one matters. We're going to hang some more panels. It may be an eyesore, but it's better than ear pain. Bulk product cleared off the play tables before events. More drink options. Somebody visible in the retail room, because a first-time visitor told us they couldn't work out to check out with.

Two of you said we have the cleanest bathroom of any game shop you've been in. One of you asked for it to be cleaner. We're taking the average and checking whether the standard slips during and after big events.

 

Thank you

The volume of unprompted kind things in this survey was, frankly, not normal. All staff were named in some capacity. The Gundam, One Piece, and Riftbound communities got paragraphs. Several people said outright that they'd follow us wherever we went as long as the atmosphere came with us.

That's the part we're actually trying to protect. Everything above — the start times, the caps, the allocation policy, the sound panels, the wages — is in service of that one thing.

Keep telling us when we get it wrong and Happy Gaming.

— Larry