Why we opened a shop with no shop in it

People ask where the shop is. There is not one. There is a shelf, a phone and a bike, and that was a decision rather than a shortcut.

A shopfront would have cost us the shelf

Rent in this city is the first thing that eats a small business, and it gets paid whether or not anybody walks in. We did the sum early. A room on a street we could afford would have taken the money that currently sits on the shelf as stock.

Given the choice between somewhere to stand and more games to sell, we took the games. It means we can carry a title that sells twice a year, which is exactly the sort of box somebody is delighted to find and no shop with rent to pay would ever risk.

It moves the problem, though

The trouble with having nowhere to walk into is that you are asking a stranger to trust you over the internet. That is a real thing to ask, and we did not want to pretend otherwise.

Two things are built the way they are for that reason alone.

• Nothing is paid up front. You hand the courier cash when the box is in your hands, and you can say no at the door.
• We ring you before anything is sent. Every order, every time. It is a nuisance and we are not giving it up.

If you have ever bought something online here and then spent a week wondering whether it was real, you already know why both of those exist.

The game nights are the shopfront

The other half of the answer is that we do have somewhere to meet people. It just does not have a till in it.

The game nights are free, there is somebody teaching on each table, and nobody has ever been asked to buy anything. If you want to see a game before you own it, that is where to do it, and it is better than a shelf anyway. The game is already open and somebody is already explaining it.