Tariffs, Discord, and Reddit, Oh My!

As always, we begin with a disclaimer.

Everything you read on this website is the personal opinion of John Stephens, the author. It may not reflect the thoughts, ideas, opinions, or belief systems of GAMA, any member of the GAMA staff, or any other member of the GAMA Board of Directors. It may not reflect the opinions of Mr. Stephens family, his business partners, or the government and flag he swears allegiance to.

On with the show!

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I would like to see the tariffs handled, where we all pass those costs along pretty transparently, and then it ends up with the consumer seeing a new sticker on every product that has a price increase.

It's not a flawless plan, I knew the flaws when I pitched it (that each tier would be taking increased risk on the product was not lost on me), but I wanted to not profit on those tariffs, because it felt dirty to do so. I did want to make sure that people understood why the price of an item went up. The first board game in the store where we've had to actually deal with this issue is the most recent restock of Final Girl.

So it was finally time to decide what the answer was. Were we going to silently just move the prices upwards and live with it? Were we going to put a smiling Trump face sticker on that shit with an "I did that" caption and a pointing finger like some morons did with gas prices in the past?

(Side note, I believe that Presidents have very little effect on gas prices, whereas tariffs are something they directly impact, so it would have made more sense to put those stickers on here.)

Ultimately we decided that the cartoon-character, orange-painted, reality TV dude, takes up too much space in our brains already, and we would not directly reference his name or face on the price changes. People are already overwhelmed dealing with the bullshit, and while they're in the store they deserve that safe space that we've worked hard to build over the last sixteen years.

So we chose to put a simple sticker near the price tag that just tells you how much the price has gone up, and why. You can see what we chose to do in the pictures.

This is one of those things I figured we'd do, write a brief statement about, hang a couple of signs, and then move on with life. Our regulars would see the signs, get a little sad because the real world is further invading our fantasy space, and then we'd move on. We wrote the blog post, shared it on our Discord, and moved on with life.

Today, it was discovered that someone has shared it on Reddit in r/boardgames, and when I found this out I was mildly terrified. This resulted in my trying to figure out what people were saying and doing about our notice.

The Discord post was up for about 24 hours at that point, so I grabbed a screen shot, and it seems like the responses have been positive. The Discord server still has almost 1900 people, more than 1,500 of whom were active in the last 30 days. People didn't leave in droves, people didn't yell at us on Discord, so despite me being terrified that we're on Reddit, I clicked the link I was sent and took a look...

And Reddit wasn't yelling at us either. I didn't need a bottle of wine while I was reading about my little store on Reddit! Yay Reddit!

Yay humanity!

Since we all spend so much time talking about these tariffs I just wanted you to see how we chose to handle them, and then when the world gave me a chance to see how they would react to our decision, I decided to share that with you too.

(Would I have shared it if the world had been terrible to us, maybe, but I guess we wont't know.)

Also, it was brought to my attention that BoardGameWire.com has linked to this blog in a couple of article about Site Selection Committee. I'd like to thank them for sharing, so thanks folks at BoardGameWire.

Next week, barring something absolutely terrible happening, I want to talk to you the effect of economic downturn on entertainment dollars, something I've been researching for a decade now. It's a real barn-burner, so let's not set anything else on fire so I can publish that next week.

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