I am a little late in finding this, but hopefully this place still is in business. I would love to be able to support a local games store.

As far as I know there isn’t a single independent game store in San Francisco proper. I would LOVE to be proven wrong, but I have yet to be able to find one. There is a place called Gamescape that is sometimes listed as one, but it’s actually a “game store” that sells D&D and stuff like that.

Gamescape! That’s the store that tricked me into walking into it! If you saw this Tomorrowland sign, you’d do just the same.

do not be tricked

But it is right next door to a comics store that, despite the 1991 awning vibe, IS AMAZING:

Now, I was just explaining to KBsaurus the irony here. It isn’t that I dislike tabletop games—it’s that I wasn’t expecting Warhammer when I walked in. Conversely, I expected little from the nearby Comix Experience. But they had everything I was looking for! Including one copy of each volume of Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service I needed to finish my collection (ahem). But seriously, that is a special-order type of item! Why do they even carry it? I’ve never been so shocked in my life.

Moving right along. From the very same digitpress thread, the Giant Retro Gaming Map!

Serious props, Kevin B.—I am going to go register for their forums (finally). Thanks for sending me there!

While he does do plenty of business with his newer games, his older stuff moves pretty well. Also, like the Chicago store, he supplements his income with a LAN gaming area, and arcade machines.

Good luck to Star Games! If I’m ever in San Francisco, I will have to make the trip. I just saw a new game store in Detroit, right in midtown where the colleges are. Their selection was practically nonexistant, but I have high hopes.

Yet, once I have a free day and a local ID bubble tea in my hand, I’m SO THERE. And this post will have made me the happiest person on earth.

But again, it comes back to that thing where you actually have to have interesting, real-life inventory to wow your customers and keep them coming back. And how, exactly, are you supposed to hang onto all your really good merchandise—probably by marking the prices way up—and still turn a profit, or for that matter, break even? But as soon as you sell all those holy grails in your inventory, poof, you’re not competitive with GameStop anymore. What a harrowing, thin line to straddle.

I’ve always dug specialty game shops Video Games New York and AfterShock in Madison. Even though I could order online, I always made it a point to visit these shops whenever in town so I could actually experience the tech before I bought it.

In my limited experience—and by that I mean only that I’ve observed plenty of friends succeed and fail—a brick-and-mortar specialty store, no matter its location, benefits from supplemental online sales, just so long as the online inventory is very deliberately limited without being crippled. Like, you want your local, real-world customers get first dibs on new items or things in extremely limited release.

Now I’m going to contradict myself: in the case of Threadless, the Chicago-based collective had, in addition to their online retail store, a supersecret location in Ravenswood where you could show up and buy things only if you were in-the-know. So in that regard, it was like the brick-and-mortar location was the ‘supplemental’ business. It wasn’t until 2007 that they opened a ‘real’ store—by that time, they’d established plenty of brand recognition, and they could actually swing having a retail location.