Tabletop gamers... (Cheyenne, Casper, Gillette: sales, living, costs)

[Plainswalker]

While I've got my heart set in Wyoming (made sure to leave it there during my 2 week vacation in it!) my poor husband still has those darn Iowan roots (pronounced 'ruts' by his family hehe) stuck in the ground.

Once we tie up his things here in a year, I entertained the idea of opening a game store with him. (Not like gamestop, like board games, card games, DnD, Magic the gathering, miniatures, the whole lot!)

I just read on the Star Trib about a guy in Casper who opened a store there last year or late 2011, which was encouraging! There are gamers out there!

While I'd like to ask if there's any stores in certain cities, it'd be better to know if there are gamers in them too...

I'm lookin' at Gillette, Buffalo, and less preferably Riverton!

[NDak15]

Gillette would probably be your best bet and then maybe Riverton. Buffalo is a pretty small town.

[KillerK]

I live in Buffalo and would definitely patronize such an establishment if one ever came here...

Sheridan would work too. Buffalo and Sheridan are close enough together that if there's a unique place in one or the other it's not unusual for people from one place to go to the other quite often.

For example people from Sheridan come to Buffalo all the time to eat at Winchester's for their amazing steak, while people from Buffalo go to Sheridan all the time to go to Walmart or Albertson's, etc.

That said though, Sheridan is a lot bigger than Buffalo but not quite as big as Gillette, but is definitely larger than Riverton. I'd probably look into Gillette or Sheridan first, though Buffalo is a great place to live too. (I would personally pick Sheridan over Gillette for living there, but that's just my opinion...)

[sunsprit]

In my Wyoming travels, I see this type of merchandise available at other stores.

Typically, they incorporate several different facets, including book/magazine/newspaper sales, coffee/tea/juice sales, snack food sales, antiques/collectable/flea market sales, and similar related ventures under one roof.

IIRC, there is a shop on the main street of Sheridan that fits that description ... part pawn shop, part musical equipment sales, part junk/flea market sales, part sports card collectable store, etc. Been in there a couple of times, the owner was sitting around, noodling on a guitar to pass the time. Unless he's negotiating a lot on his prices, I didn't see how he could make a living at the place ... I saw little turn-over for much of his merchandise in several visits during 2012. Calling his shop "tatty" would be an insult to those little hole in the wall places where you'd go to dig through all the crap to find that one treasure you couldn't live without at a price you could justify ... and I've got a lot of practice passing time in such places in my travels throughout the state. I recall stopping in his place to look at a couple of violins because I have a neighbor who wants to take up "fiddlin'" with a country band he jams with ... but the merchandise was all beat-up old low quality student violins and he wanted the price points of new ones; I guess the new ones don't have the provenance of his old ones.

I can think of at least 4 similar shops in Cheyenne in addition to the B&N on Dell Range. I think those 4 shops all compete for a very limited niche marketplace which has been sought out by the prospective clientele. B&N is a totally different marketing paradigm, but it's clean, well-lit, organized, and professionally merchandised/managed/staffed which is a huge difference from the jumble of the other shops.

Two observations:

1) there is already a market presence in the towns you're considering for the merchandise you want to sell

2) the folk who sell it now appear to have multi-faceted businesses to survive

IMO, you need to investigate the real costs of a retail storefront in the respective towns you are looking at and weigh that against the likely clientele base and prospective sales volume/margins per average customer. If the existing shops are doing these sales as a sideline to their other operations, what will you do to capture the niche marketplace to your financial benefit?

What's your time worth?