Closing down the card shop...
This time last year I could go to my local shop and preorder Foundations collectors for $ 199 each. I could open those and make profit on the single cards inside which gave me enough to buy the next set and so on. I did that all last year starting from MH3 onwards.
Then there was the dip with Innistrad Remastered and Aetherdrift. Innistrad was overpriced and Aetherdrift was overcomplicated. The market on single cards completely dried up about a month prior to Final Fantasy's release. Once FF came out I was selling $ 100 worth of cards a day, at minimum. I made my money back from the loss on INR and DFT.
So I bought a little Edge, not much knowing that it was going to be a small market. I was right on that. But now it's time to order Spiderman and ...
It's sold out. Not only that, if I do want to buy a collector box to open I have to spend over $ 1000. The cards inside are not worth that much, not during presale and especially not 3 months after the set is out. Huge yikes. I managed to preorder 1 cbb months and months ago for $ 450 but I have no idea if it will get cancelled because most shops will cancel the order if the secondary price goes up that much.
I did manage to get a case of play boosters for it. At nearly $ 150 a box. The new normal for play boosters is pushing $ 200 for these fan sets. Again, same issue with the collector boxes is that you get 420 cards per box and the majority are worth pennies. About a dozen cards will be worth over fifty cents. One or two can net you the cost of the box.
Don't get me started on the price of the Avatar set. Preorder prices are so high now that when local shops get their allocation numbers they price their product at the current market which at 2 weeks before prerelease is at it's near high.
So how do shops stay open if the cost of the product is do high? They have a distributor. Real shops are allocated so much product each run based on how much they bought last time. Their price is obviously below MSRP and far below market price, which is what I have to pay.
I'm a real business according to the state of Texas but not a real business according to the distributors who only take in new clients if they are a brick and mortar physical location. Many are also moving to in-store game events being required to get allocations. This is to curb the rip and ship people who buy tons of product to flip on whatnot. I tried whatnot and I'm not whatnot material. I'm not youtube material.
According to my numbers from last year I should have been able to make enough by now to open a physical location. (Over 4k per month in profit.) But with the price of product skyrocketing in the last few months, that's out of the question now. Seeing that Wizards will mostly be doing UB sets from here on out, those high prices will be consistent for a long time.
The only sets I will be able to afford are the handful of in-universe ones they plan to do each year. If I had only bought in-universe sets this year I would be absolutely in the red and not mildly break even. Break even after selling a surge foil Cloud, Sephiroth, and Blue Ink Chocobo. Those should have set me up for the year.
So now I have to think about slowly shutting the whole thing down before I lose more money. I am worried that buying any Avatar product and opening it will wreck my numbers. I refuse to buy a bunch of sealed product and keep it on the shelf for years hoping the value goes up.
Now, I can go buy up bulk collections and commons/uncommons for days. 4k cards for 100 bucks. Which I've done. They are all still sitting here on my shelf. There was a reason they were so cheap. People cram competitive decks with expensive rare cards, not bulk commons.
Current Issues:
- I can't get distribution without a physical shop.
- I can't afford a physical shop.
- The price of product is more than the product is worth.
- The affordable products aren't selling.
Solutions:
- Stop buying new product and let the remainder sell out.
- Pivot to another product entirely.
- Take out a massive business loan to rent a shop in hopes of acquiring distribution. (more risk than opening packs)