“Don’t quit your day job.”

That’s the kind of unsolicited advice you hear all the time levied against a hack post-teenage angst infected poet or some cut-rate bar band cranking out Stone Temple Pilots covers in some scummy dive. But nobody bothered to impart that nugget of wisdom to the Barrister. He left behind a successful law career to be the hands-on manager of operations at Atlanta Game Factory and that decision turned out to be one of the biggest mistakes that we, as a company, allowed to happen.

Don’t get me wrong—I would have jumped at the opportunity to run the place from day one but for one thing…I wasn’t the majority shareholder and for another I was in the middle of a fairly prestigious research fellowship that at that time seemed to offer a much more promising future than hawking copies of MUNCHKIN to Georgia Tech students. I also realized that the business just couldn’t support the kind of astronomical salary I would have required to maintain my standard of living at that time- somewhere in the neighborhood of $30k. Dollar Bill was occupied with his own business so it seemed pretty logical at the time to let the Barrister take the reigns of what was to prove to be a cart being pulled by awfully sluggish horses. What the Barrister didn’t understand is that they just needed a little love to get moving- and for him to stop bleeding the business dry to pay himself a salary that was greater than our monthly sales.

So in those first few weeks, it was the Barrister doing all the heavy lifting, so to speak. He’d go in at 11am every day to open the store and promptly shut down at 8pm, staying later on Fridays and Saturdays just to catch the few waifs and strays who may have noticed the sign on the way to class. There were a few people coming into the store at that time, mostly to make a circuit walk through the store and back out the door once they either realized that “Games” didn’t mean video games or that our prices were full retail and uncompetitive with the online discounters I’d come in almost every day after work to try to kick-start some in-store gaming and stir up activity beyond watching STAR BLAZERS with the Barrister on the in-store TV, occassionaly getting up to grab a bag of chips or a soda from our wholesale club-stocked snack counter. There’s no doubt that there was a feeling that maybe we had wasted our time and money.

It wasn’t long before realized that we were going to have hire some employees so we let the Barrister handle all that and of course a “Now Hiring” sign brought in all sorts of prospective employees, most of whom had never had a job before and many of which probably still don’t some four years later. One of the kids he hired turned out to be a thief; another was hired solely, I’m convinced, for her bra size and three of them turned out to be Atlanta Game Factory Heroes. And my good friends.

Of course, hiring that many employees even for just 3-4 hours a day was pretty costly- particularly on top of what the Barrister was effectively paying himself out of his own investment. Since he lived almost an hour and a half away and had a new baby, it was necessary to have employees to cover at least the bulk of the nights and weekends, although in retrospect it was another big mistake Dollar Bill and I shouldn’t have allowed to happen.

We should have stepped up to work the store more, not only to relieve the Barrister but also to have more hands-on management of what was going on there. With all of our profits going to payroll and other overhead costs, the financial situation was worsened by his shockingly frequent spending sprees on company money. He bought this fancy coffee machine that I have to admit I absolutely loved. He bought and had framed several Frank Frazetta prints that again, I have to admit I absolutely loved although why he chose every one in the catalog with a nude woman on it for a retail store is beyond me. He’d buy new staplers, scissors, and pretty much anything you can get out of a Uline catalog. We wound up with a heat laminator and more storage bins and containers than I ever hope to see again. He was like a college kid with a parent’s credit card, buying unessential “toys” that were tapping too deeply into our budget. The problem was that we weren’t even averaging over $200 a day in sales.

What was worse than his careless expenditures and his over-reliance on hired help was that his majority share seemed to foster in him a sense of tyranny, a petulant insistence on doing things his way that gave the store a creepy used car lot atmosphere and a lack of street-level credibility. He wasn’t inexperienced- he had managed a video game store some years before- but he definitely didn’t know the product, the audience, or the concept of the Friendly Local Game Store. There were already signs of his unchecked greed starting to show through as well. Dollar Bill and I had fought him tooth and nail in favor of having everything at internet-competitive pricing but lost. Our snacks and drinks were marked up to almost movie theater prices- sodas we paid twenty five cents for were price tagged at $1.50- often with the price tag stickered over a price printed on the label. Once I watched him approach the sale of a copy of TICKET TO RIDE to a newbie gamer like selling a timeshare, practically hustling a man and his wife into putting down $45 for a game that I knew wasn’t at all what they were looking for.

In retrospect, I think that some of the Barrister’s actions and ideas stemmed from his desire to somehow legitimize what he had invested in as a “serious” business. I think he really believed that what he was doing was laying the groundwork for a HobbyTown-style franchise brand name and every move had to look serious. But I also think that he was never really comfortable with the game store environment or with geek culture in general because he was just too entrenched in the idea of the American middle-of-the-road mainstream at the end of the day. He felt embarrassed that he was selling DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS products, although he had a history with the game himself. He’d dress in khakis, dress shirt, and a tie for work. The posters we received from publishers were forbidden since they made the store look too “nerdy.”