DnD Worldwide game day

[grysar]

I went to it and as this Dork Tower suggests, it was a lot of fun. Even got my PHB from the store in question. That said, I won't be buying my three pack from my semi-local game store. I support local gaming and all, but a 50% discount is a 50% discount.

Does anyone know what is up with that? I mean sure running stores is higher overhead and all but if they were able to offer competitive prices I don't think they'd have that hard of a time selling a lot of the core books at least in the initial offering period.

Comments

[ninjadebugger.livejournal.com]

Online retailers have both the advantage of warehousing and the advantage of volume. The two combine to do some pretty crazy things.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

::nods:: Yeah, the normal discount makes sense. Just in this case the advantage of warehousing doesn't seem as big. If the stores could offer the core books at a competitive rate, they could probably clear out an initial set of them. There's a lot of demand focused in a single release period. It seems like the differential should be less than usual, not more, on roll-out week.

[lampbane.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking it would be nice if local stores would discount PERIOD. I don't expect a 50% discount, but maybe a 20% discount combined with some other perks would be nice.

Like, I don't know, offer coupons for other inventory. Or even give other stuff away for free (how about some d20s, sir?).

[ninjadebugger.livejournal.com]

Most of my local stores are pretty much locked into the "buy 100bux, get 10% off one purchase" mindset, and they suffer for it. Local game stores are often run by astoundingly stupid people, and they make bad business decisions constantly. Like the store that wanted me to pay them for space to run tournaments. You don't charge people to come into your goddamn store and play every week, they're guaranteed business.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

I did get a figure and a d20 in addition to a table to play world game day at. I've similarly gotten some good freebies at a Heroclix event and I think some of those were from the store. And not surprisingly I tend to buy more stuff at those stores. That said, don't recall getting freebie with purchase.

Practically speaking, I go to local game shops first and foremost when I can trust the quality of their advice.

[lilinthra.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the figure and die were provided by WotC as part of the Game Day bundles. The HeroClix freebies were partially from the company that makes the brand, and partially from the judges' private collection.

[ninjadebugger.livejournal.com]

Making sure that everyone goes home with swag is becoming a pretty standard thing in the gaming industry. It's a cheap way to engender some good feelings in potential (and actual) customers.

[grysar.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, not the stores then.

[dshadow.livejournal.com]

At game day, the manager of the store mentioned to me that he could buy the books cheaper from Amazon than from his distributor. I'm assuming that that's typical, so its not really surprising they don't like to give discounts. Plus, it wouldn't surprise me if they had to agree to sell the books at face value or risk their distributor dropping them. (I bet the distributors wouldn't care if the brick and mortar stores went away... Why sell to low-volume outfits when you know you can sell a million units to Amazon?