I own a hair salon. Typically, November is my busiest season. It has been SO quiet. A lot of my colleagues are also saying the same thing and have had to close up shop because of it - or get a second job.
People keep saying it will get better and the economy will bounce back but I don’t know. I am so close from just throwing in the towel, closing up shop and getting a corporate gig.
I’ve commented on similar posts here before…brick and mortar indie video game store/trading card game/collectibles store here, and while January-May were up over a record 2022, we’ve been in free fall since. It’s like the entire area went broke at the same time once summer hit. Weekends have stabilized lately, but weekdays have often been barely worth being open for, and many of the people who do come in are looking to sell.
The next six weeks are going to be very telling, in my opinion. I love being my own boss and being able to provide jobs for my employees, but I haven’t had two extra nickels to rub together in months, and it’s exhausting to say “no, we’re out of that” 100 times a day. Plus I’ve been in retail since 1996, and I’m honestly very tired of putting on the smile.
Of course, we opened in May 🤦♀️
Damn I love shops like yours. Where you at?
Good to finally hear from a fellow retailer in the same industry, best of luck to your business
Inflation seems to be affecting everyone, out of curiously, indie video game store? What is this? Sell games or people play in store?(just curious )
Year on year inflation though the start of November was under 4%. Inflation is back into the long term normal range.
But savings from the COVID era are all spent. Interest rates are still high, so folk who’ve had to move are spending more on home loans. Rental rates have skyrocketed, so renters have less cash. And, as others mentioned, student loans restarted so a third of the population just lost a significant amount of disposable income. That alone might be the biggest change.
Video game and Pokémon/Magic card buy/sell/trade.
I’ve seen a bunch of stores similar to yours dropping YGO cards; is that market more volatile or more of a pain compared to pokemon or mtg?
That would be more a question for my guy who handles cards, I primarily focus on the video game and collectibles aspects, as that’s what the store started as before we added TCG product a few years ago, and I’m just not that well versed in that market. I do know that while people try to sell us their YGO cards all the time, no one ever seems to ask if we have any for sale. Pokémon and Magic are king, follow by Flesh and Blood, then there’s a huge drop off from there.
We do very well with new release product, the problem is that people only seem to be interested in that, so they other 26+ days of the month bring in very little from singles, with constant phone calls asking for Lorcana that has been near impossible to get ahold of.
Jan-June were great for me (June was my highest earning month in 2 years of business) then the rest of the year has been wayyyy down
Have you considered online sales ? Is that something that might help? Listing some inventory on eBay/Amazon etc
I don’t know anything about the storefront retail space but I know that if you have access to quality inventory you might be able to find some success online?
We do list on eBay. I generally prefer to sell things in store and keep stuff circulating locally (sell someone a $100 game and then maybe they trade it back in and I can sell it again), however if something of value sits for a few weeks, I have no problem listing it.
E commerce has a host of issues itself. Although helpful in the short term, there are state sales tax nexus issues that would need to be addressed and can take time/money to do correctly. (US based store assumed, SOUTH DAKOTA v. WAYFAIR, INC., ET AL. 2018).
Interesting. I agree there’s a ton of logistical issues to work out.
I only ask because I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2018 and I’ve seen a growing trend of smaller shops that I compete with are actually full blown retail stores that just send shipments out the back.
If you ever dip your toes in the Amazon water and have questions feel free to dm me.
Ebay handles all the state sales tax…
In most states, the reporting threshold is $200k in annual revenue in that state, or 200 transactions. Can’t hurt to dip your toes into e-Commerce, and if you are getting to the point where you are doing that much business in a single state, it makes sense to set up the tax nexus. There are services nowadays that handle all the paperwork for you.
We’ll school loans started back up in October. The hundreds of extra dollars I had in discretionary income is now gone for the next 8-10 years until I pay it off. Gotta cut expenses elsewhere.
If you weren’t paying those loans back during the 3 years where interest was halted, then you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.
You basically gave up the best payment term offer ever for hope on a pipe dream that the government would wave a magic wand and make your debt disappear.
I didn’t pay mine during that time because I was laid off just like 250,000 other people in my metro. Many business owners didn’t pay them because no one was fucking shopping for 1.5-2 years. Don’t be a simpleton. This is a complex issue.
Lot of assumptions being made with this comment. I was basically saying that a ton of people now have payments they didn’t the past 3.5 years while everything else is still getting more expensive, hence the potential reason for the slowdown in the economy. That’s it.
Why pay back loans when you can blow all your money and hope Biden forgives your debt in the meantime?
People like to act like it was some big mystery what caused inflation as if printing trillions and pausing paying debt/rent/mortgages wasn’t the obvious answer all along.
It’s not meant as a partisan comment, but more a personal finance statement about how not acting at all to pay loans back was never a good plan.
Anyone who trusts the government to actively wipe away your debt/their income is a fool. PPP loans were paid to the same crooks that run and lobby the government. Contrarily, Trump wouldn’t have even given people the hope of student debt relief. Understandably, people wanted to count their chickens before they hatched and are now going to regret it.
Not the person your responding to but I was paying them for a good amount of time while interest was paused until things got so dire to where minimum payments on bills were the most I could do (if that). You have to remember there’s a reason they were paused in the first place
Seriously. Should have leaned into it and smoked em
Well there was this thing that happened that paused a lot of the payments in the first place since a lot of people lost their entire incomes
If you lost your job, you weren’t contributing to discretionary spending anyway because you were scrapping to stay alive. Thus, if your loans restarting is decreasing your monthly funko budget, you were just making bad choices and avoiding the inevitable reality
Twwnty dollars is twenty dollars.
Where your store? and do you do in store events? If weekends have stabalized , why not lean into that. Im a fan of those kinds of stores and i would lovees a place that does in person yugioh matches-- old school not pendulum or hyper niche tournement , just the good ole assemble your deck and yuuugiiioohhhhh type stuff
I always look at what type of convenience food people buy in America. It’s not good. Most people aren’t buying name brand chips anymore. The big guys have been squeezing every penny out of them and not raising wages to the point that people don’t buy a baggie of chips. I say it doesn’t look good long term. And people should buckle down for the next 5 or more years. In my hyper unprofessional opinion.
Tattoo artist here. We’re also being hit hard. I’ve always booked my Halloween flash for the last six years, this nothing, very telling. November is looking grim.
See, that’s fascinating to me from the outside, as my shop has been next to two tattoo shops over the past decade, and they both seem(ed) to be rocking from open to close. Tattoos always seem to be something that people are willing to push a bill aside for, so I expected that to stay strong.
I’m pulling for you, good luck.
They might be undercutting other shops, that’s also a new poison in our industry. Tattoos were always considered a luxury and I’m seeing it more and more where really beautiful flash pieces are going for $50.
Could depend where you live. I’m in a city where rent is bloody insane, minimum wage isn’t livable and food is expensive.
So, I have a client who has owned a small furniture and bed retailer on the poor side of a Southern college town. For fifteen years he has averaged the following GROSS sales cycle:
$40,000 a month January through May;
$20,000 a month June-August;
$40,000 a month Sept - Oct; and,
$60,000 a month Nov. - Dec.
This year he was high $30k low $40 k till May, below $15k in the summer, and . . .
$8,000 in gross sales in September
$6,000 in gross sales in October.
He is freaking out as he borrowed $50k to expand inventory in the Spring for better deals and can’t get rid of it, with the financing due early next year.
People are now having to pay 200-1500 of their income to student loans now, millions of people. That means less discretionary spending for small businesses.
Granted we had to isolate during covid because of family health issues but even now I feel this super low energy in my town. Feels like there should be more people out and doing stuff? But they aren’t?
Why are you saying “no, we’re out of that”? It sounds like you have customers but no inventory
My business etiquette has been suffering as the business dwindles too, I’m not motivated to make small talk with the random passerby and the thousandth person who wants to see everything up close and touch it but in the end ‘has to think about it’.
I feel this.
We sell on whatnot and that helps a lot.