Dollar General Location
I am slowly working on a book about our business The Game Capital, and how it got started. This is only a rough draft since it is still a work in progress, but I decided to share some pieces from it here while I am writing!
Dollar General
The Dollar General down the road from us announced it was closing. All of its shelving and racks were being sold. Jeff decided to wander through and see if there was anything we might want for our store. He sent some pictures from Dollar General to some of the staff and jokingly (I believe) suggested we look into getting the place once Dollar General vacated.
After getting my hopes up with the other building, I didn’t want to put too much thought into another potential place.
Eventually, all that was left of Dollar General was the sign on the outside of the building. At this point, Jeff had put some real thought into possibly taking over that space. He’d found the listing for the space online and crunched numbers for how much it would cost.
It actually seemed like it was possible, according to his numbers.
We arranged a time to go and see the inside of the place with the landlords.
Plenty of Space
It was huge. I hadn’t ever been inside the building while it was Dollar General. I wasn’t expecting it to look so big. I couldn’t visualize what it had looked like before, but you could clearly tell where shelving and registers had been. The floor was pretty gross and it was slightly cleaner in the areas that had been previously covered by shelving and counters.
It was basically a large square of space that could be customized to our needs. Plenty of space for large group events and growing retail. Beyond the back wall of the space was a small (compared to the rest of the space) warehouse. We could very easily have the storefront and our warehouse under one roof. This meant we could always have Jeff and all of the staff under one roof!
Along with the warehouse space in the back, there were also TWO bathrooms! This wouldn’t be nearly as exciting if we hadn’t had so many issues with the shared bathroom situation at our first location.
Not only was this space perfect to tailor to our own needs, but it was part of a mini-mall that included Papa Johns next door, Anytime Fitness, a liquor store, and some other small businesses. All businesses that would get a lot of attention to our store.
Visibility
One of the best parts about the location was that it sat at an intersection that is almost always busy during the day, so we would get tons of exposure just from being there. Huge upgrade from our small blink-and-you’ll-miss-it location on a one-way street.
We had been at our first location for over 2 years and we still regularly got customers coming in and asking us how long we had been there and if we were new. We also had plenty of people enter our store thinking we were one of our building’s neighbors, Game Trade. We always knew the moment they walked in the door and had a confused look. Then the “where are your video games?” question would come, and we would send them a few doors down.
This would not be as much of a problem at the old Dollar General space. We still expected to be confused with Game Trade over the phone and for people to be confused about where Dollar General went, at least for a little while.
Parking
Another very necessary upgrade we would get with this new space is a huge parking lot! Sure, we shared it with other businesses, but there was still plenty of space.
The parking lot at our first location was incredibly small with tiny spaces at the back of our building. It certainly didn’t help that the school district offices that occupied the second story of the building took up most of the spaces during the day, and even more spaces on nights when they had board meetings.
When we walked out of the building that day, we all had really high hopes. This space checked off so many boxes for us, it was hard not to get excited.
Proposal & Floor Plan
Jeff started writing out a proposal for the landlords’ consideration. While he worked on that, Cody and I started working on possible floor layout plans. It seemed too early to be thinking about a floor plan without knowing that we would get the space. But, if we ended up getting the space, we would want to be moved into it by Christmas 2019. That meant that we would need to have construction on a build-out happen as soon as the ink was dry on a lease. We needed to be prepared.
We went through several different configurations. We wanted to incorporate several different rooms into the build-out, including:
Staff break room/kitchenette
Streaming room/Office for Jeff
Office for Administrative members (myself and Cody at the time)
Online order processing room
2 Rentable rooms for birthday parties, D&D games, etc.
After Jeff submitted our proposal, one of the landlords actually came to our store to go over things in person. Apparently, the proposal Jeff wrote was quite wordy and confused the potential landlords. It was a really good sign that they were considering our offer, despite Jeff’s confusing proposal.
