Changes at The Game Capital

Staff

Changes are happening at The Game Capital and they are happening FAST!

Just a few weeks ago, we had about 6 staff members, not including myself or Jeff. 

We now have 21 staff members (including myself and Jeff)!

Wow. That’s crazy.

And we are working on hiring a couple more!

COVID

I haven’t personally been to our store (or any store) for a couple of weeks now due to the high number of COVID cases in our area (WEAR A MASK!). Everyone wears masks at the store and we switched back to Curbside Pickup due to the high case number a couple of weeks ago. So, we are being as safe as possible at the store, but It’s just easier for me with my anxiety issues to give myself minimal exposure. Since I can do the majority of my work from home, I do.

HR

We hired a new Human Resources Manager (HR), a few weeks ago, which has made me feel more like a real business. Before that, Jeff, myself, and our Store Manager, “C”, did all of the hiring and firing of staff. 

We weren’t good at it.

At least I wasn’t.

It makes sense that we weren’t good at it, none of us have any experience whatsoever with HR. I am personally just not made to handle HR issues. It stressed me out and gave me a lot of anxiety.

So, it has been great so far to have an HR Manager. She was actually a customer of ours (more so her son) before working with us. So, the rest of the staff are somewhat familiar with her. Me, not so much, but that’s OK. 

When I do start going back to the store to work (no idea when that will be), I will be sharing an office with her. I used to share my office with C, but since COVID happened, neither of us was using the room.

Online

There has been a huge shift in priorities at The Game Capital. Pre-COVID, our focus was on holding events and being an event space/hangout for customers. We sold some things online through Amazon and TCGPlayer.com, but the majority of sales happened in-store. 

Now, we have no events and we don’t plan to hold any events in the near future. We are doing business Curbside Only from the store, otherwise, the majority of our sales happen online now.

With all of the changes, I have had to grapple with what my role in the company is. 

When quarantine started, I worked on getting all of our inventory on our online store, shopthegamecapital.com, which hadn’t existed before. Well, it existed, but we didn’t use it. I was getting all of the inventory to show up on the website, then having to add images, categories, item details, etc. I am STILL working on that. And we keep adding new inventory, so that makes it even harder to try and catch up.

Website

Based on some staff discussions that happened today, it sounds like we are going to look into having a local professional company design a brand new website for us.

I really, really, really hope that the images I added will transfer over. Really. Because adding those images is what I have spent the most time doing since quarantine. If those don’t transfer over….it will suck. Really, really suck. 

Lucky

But I don’t want too complain much, because we are an incredibly lucky business right now. Thanks to online sales, we are doing well. If we had to depend on just locals like restaurants and other businesses have to, we would not be doing well at all. 

It has been a really scary, confusing, and frustrating time. But, hopefully, we can come out of this even better than we were before!

Also, I encourage everyone to Support Small Business!