Too Lazy to Fail

I am in an abusive, manipulative, on-again off-again relationship with Facebook. Not everyone has the problem-set that I have, but combined with a lack of self-control and discipline, it is a very real obstacle for me. There’s a fix, but it’s not without cost.

Facebook is, first of all, a time suck. It has frequently been the first thing I checked in the morning, and the last thing I checked at night. I have compulsively checked it, sometimes reading all of my notifications and closing the app only to open it again to check my notifications before realizing that I am acting like a crazy person.

I frequently do not like who I am on Facebook. Facebook brings out my worst affirmation and attention-seeking behavior. Any time I crack a joke, or see something adorable, or do something that I think is impressive, my first instinct frequently is to document it on Facebook. This isn’t healthy. I sometimes joke with my wife when I see her taking a photo of something that “this ought to be worth at least… twelve likes.”

I do not like who my friends are on Facebook. I don’t mean that I didn’t like the people. I like them plenty. What I mean is that everybody responds to the pleasures and pressures of Facebook differently, and some become dramatically different people with the distance and barrier of a keyboard or phone between them and the rest of the world. It isn’t the only issue, but I think I only have to say “2016 Election” for most of you to know exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Almost all reason, patience, and love vanished on my Facebook feed on both sides from August 2016 to January 2017.

I tried to moderate this in my immediate sphere of influence with an annual event I called Frienderdome, where I posted ridiculous, over-the-top callouts in hopes of showcasing how ridiculous my behavior and that of everyone else was on social media. Nobody got the joke. They just cheered me on while I was mean on the internet, and the worst part was that I really enjoyed the attention. I rarely lost anyone during this event, because brutal behavior is what everyone is used to, anyway, and nobody wants to wimp out when the pain can be perceived as a test.

So over the last several years I came to hate Facebook, but I was restrained from leaving by my business. I needed a Facebook account to manage communications with my millennial employees, to administer the store’s page and ad accounts, and to communicate with what I consider to be my very tiny actual-peer group.

On August 18th of 2017, my affection for Facebook was at a particularly low point, and I woke up early with a thought: What if I just unfriended everybody? It was an immediately appealing idea, and a few hours later, I culled everyone. My wife wanted me to unfriend her last. I made a short public post explaining my decision and left it up for anyone who navigated to my profile. I created a copy-paste template to use in responding to messages from concerned users, explaining that I was okay, but that I’d decided to set some boundaries between myself and social media.

I kept Facebook itself, with Messenger, the business tools, Events, and Groups. The only change I made was to drop my friend count to zero.

Facebook gets really confused when you remove all Friends from your account. A zero-friend account is assumed to only happen when an account is brand new, so despite having an eight-year-old Facebook account, every morning I got a set of “Welcome to Facebook” items in my feed. I had to close more intrusive tutorial pop-ups on the desktop site about once a week.

Because Facebook assumes that you will never want to friend someone that you’ve previously unfriended, the suggested friends algorithm gets thrown for a loop when you unfriend everyone you ever loved. I’ve come to believe that, in addition to never suggesting that you friend former friends, it also filters out friends-of-friends even if you’ve never unfriended them. For the first few weeks I only got suggestions for what I think are friends-of-friends-of-friends who I’d never unfriended. This was an interesting set of users for me that was comprised mostly of people who hate my guts, either from my former pool of fellow police officers, or from the pool of game industry retailers and publishers, or local gamers and people involved with my competitors. Imagine a suggestion list of ten people composed entirely of your worst enemies. After a time this cleared up and Facebook just started suggesting that I friend fairly obvious fake sexbot-type users.

Groups became one of the few places on Facebook where I seemed to exist to others, but having no friends complicated matters there, too. You have to be friends with someone to invite them to a group. There was frequently confusion as users saw my temporary friend request, saw that I had no other friends, and assumed I was an automated malicious bot impersonating their buddy.

Of course, the real cost is in loss of connection to and coordination with other people, and the cost is greater than it would be if you went back in time to a pre-Facebook era, because people depend on social media to the exclusion of other forms of communication. You’re going to miss announcements about life events. You will lose connection with childhood friends. You’ll miss opportunities for social get-togethers, and traveling friends will sail through your town without stopping to have lunch.

Still, misanthropy strikes deep, and into your life it will creep. You might have missed your uncle’s announcement about his dog dying because you unfollowed him after a series of political posts. You probably didn’t have that much in common with your childhood friend, now a dentist who doesn’t believe in washing his hands. You hate parties, and who has time for lunch, anyway?

The cost of disengagement is high. It’s probably too high. In November while on a retreat with friends I was talked into adding Facebook friends again. I carefully selected who from my previous list would make it. I ended up with about 80 friends, down from 130 before my experiment and close to 500 at the peak in 2015. Of the 80-ish current friends, about a third are people with whom I authentically want to connect. Another third are people I love but don’t particularly want to spend time with, and the remaining third are people I’m friends with out of obligation, like family members and church friends. If you think this sounds like I’m immediately veering back into dissatisfaction with Facebook, you’re right.

This week I unfriended two long-term friends following their posts in response to the recent school shooting. Their posts were not designed to change minds but to berate those holding different viewpoints. The posts of those who nominally agree with me on that particular subject aren’t much more productive. On the walls of my more friend-count-rich friends, I’ve been called a unpatriotic scumbag by right-leaning people and a Bible-thumping fascist by left-leaning people. There may be people who thrive amid this sort of discourse, but I’m not one of them. Those arguments are not actionable or beneficial in the same way that most news stories are not actionable or beneficial.

I’m totally open to the possibility that I’m doing it wrong, have the wrong friends, am just fundamentally a broken human being, or all three, but I’m having a very hard time believing that I’m alone. Facebook is essential. Facebook is useful. Facebook is fun. Facebook is a waste of time. Facebook is counterproductive. Facebook is agony. I’m going to give myself a week to decide if I’m going back to a zero-friend account.

At a fundamental level, your business consists of the following:

• A location.
• Some goods or services offered.
• Policies and practices that you have instituted and/or allowed to continue.
• Decisions you have made either as exceptions to the above policies and practices, or as expedients when a situation outside of the routine requires them.

Your business is a machine for which you, the owner, are solely responsible.

The distinction between things that are inside of the machine and things that operate outside the machine is important.

In a conversation on a friend’s social media feed, someone gave the anecdote of a toxic player saying something very cruel at the end of a card game tournament. My friend’s friend said that when the owner was told about this, he stated, “I can’t kick him out. He buys two booster boxes every set.” Do the math on a customer like this, and you’ll find that if they drive away ONE customer who would have bought three or four booster packs per week, then it’s a bad deal for the business. The store owner in this story kept an unpleasant jerk in his community so that he could lose money.

Another anecdote involved a female sports team trying out a new bar and being driven away by a leering regular who made inappropriate advances. The owner cited the long-term relationship with the customer, as if misbehaving somewhere long enough excuses misbehavior. The sports team picked another bar and meets there weekly. What did the owner give up to save a bad customer? How many times was this allowed to happen?

Your customers may offer suggestions or make requests, but in a healthy organization, they should operate outside the machine. Even their own personal habits in proximity to your business will set the tone for the entire operation if you allow it. They will not be grateful that you turn a blind eye to their misbehavior, and you will gain little or nothing in return for your misguided long-term tolerance. How many times have you over-invested trust and favors into what turned out to be a mediocre customer, only to have them vanish (or worse, become an advocate for your competition) without even saying goodbye? Good, bad, regular, and infrequent customers all come and go.

The machine offers customers functionality in that your business should be offering a carefully-considered value proposition. If they accept that proposition, they are welcomed and appreciated at the business. If they reject that proposition, then they can go eat rocks. They get to interact with the machine, but they don’t get to make changes to the operation, add parts, remove parts, or stand nearby and throw pennies into the gears.

Inside the machine, the decision about who turns the gears is important.

You may have employees who are empowered to make changes to the way you do business, or who are trusted to make decisions when you’re not around. Regardless of the independence with which those employees operate, they serve at your pleasure, so they’re unquestionably part of the machine.

I have allowed bad employees to stay too long because I cared for them. By the time they were gone, they had done real damage to my business. They were a part of the machine as they should be, but I allowed them to turn the gears in ways I would not have chosen. As employees, they are parts of the machine, and malfunctioning parts should be corrected or replaced. As people, their time spent in jobs that were not suitable for them was not a net positive in their lives, and the seemingly cruel early firing would have been a mercy to them in the long run.

Examine every part of the machine.

I see posts from business owners all the time in which they state that they’ve HAD IT with a vendor or supplier. Six months later, they are still grumbling. They have taken for granted that certain parts belong in the machine. If a product line isn’t performing, reduce its footprint or kick it out. If an entire segment of your business is costing you money, make a plan to improve it or get rid of it. It’s better to lose a part of your business that you love than to allow your entire business to fail because of it.

If the problems are annoying but do not threaten the operation of the machine, then learn to love the Dirtbag Dividend. It may be that there are mitigations to the problems that part of your business is experiencing. Friction is a problem in machinery, and even if it’s perfectly designed, it will probably still need oiling to function correctly.

If you spot a gear in the machine that works against the others, spins uselessly, or doesn’t spin at all, it’s your responsibility to change or remove it. The successful operation of the machine is more important than your idea of how it was supposed to operate.

Protect the machine.

If you step away from the machine and it manages to produce the desired result, then you have rolled the dice and won. A rudderless ship may occasionally travel someplace useful, but usually not. The most beneficial decision you can make for the operation of the machine on which you’ve bet these years of your short life is that you will approach as many aspects of your business as possible with intentionality and presence. I think that we have a tendency to wish that difficult decisions would go away, and that frequently manifests in delaying decisions until an outcome is already decided. Choosing to not turn a gear when its position is changing is still a choice. Deciding to step away and let things sort themselves out is a decision. Give some thought to which parts of your business could use your hands on the gears this week.

Warning: There are some brutally offensive words used in this blog post.

It’s late 2017. Celebrities and politicians are dropping like flies as it is suddenly realized that the rich no longer have comfortable control over the popular narrative and the public recoils against the abuses of people who have never been told no. It’s a bad time to be lecherous, and I believe that the shockwaves are spreading beyond Hollywood and Washington. Like a lot of outrage-driven social changes, this one built up pressure quietly but is now spreading so quickly and comprehensively that we’re not sure how we missed it before.

It’s on the national news, it’s happening in Magic, and now it’s happening at my little store.

In November we expanded, opening a small dedicated game space attached to our retail operation that is easily the nicest place to play for hundreds of miles in any direction. Our in-town clubhouse competitor closed up weeks later. I like to think that they saw our game space and immediately decided to close in despair, but they were on the ropes already and it may have just been the month when the money and patience ran out. Either way, they’re gone, and we suddenly were faced with the prospect of their tiny customer base joining ours.

My managers and I had meetings on the topic of how we were going to handle this. We’d been watching from the sidelines as some truly egregious things happened over there, and though we disagreed about how to approach it, we all agreed that the market had spoken and we didn’t want our store to become any more like theirs. We agreed that all current store bans would stay in place, and that we would ban the most-recent owning partners from the play space in response to their tolerance of vile behavior and their unprofessional conduct in the local market.

I figured that I’d never have to deal with it because those guys hated my guts anyway, but less than a week later one of them was in my store asking about playing. I had him banned, and the floodgates opened. The rage I witnessed in local social media was everything that I’d feared and worse. Nearly every player on our “give them one more chance” list blew it within hours. There was one word in particular that kept being used about my staff and I both in regional groups and in screenshots of other groups that I received later: Snowflake. It’s an interesting insult when applied to a lifelong conservative-turned-libertarian who attends a Baptist church, but here I am.

The intent behind calling somebody a snowflake is traditionally pejorative, but since I seem to always have it directed to me when I ask people to exercise a tiny bit of care in the name of human decency, I’m taking it back and claiming it as my own. Here are a few simple truths that I’ve accepted as part of Snowflake Life:

• When the word “nigger” is acceptable in your game store, you assure that not only will you lose every minority customer you have, but also a ton of them that you never knew you could have had. You’ll also lose anyone else who doesn’t want to select their friends and colleagues based on something as arbitrary as ancestry.
• When the word “faggot” is acceptable in your store, you not only drive away any openly-LGBT individuals you may have had, but you also inflict a pretty substantial amount of stress on closeted, questioning, or denying homosexuals in your community. The percentage of the general population that are in that group is between 2% and 4%, so I can almost guarantee that you cross paths with someone in this category, even if you don’t know it, and even if they don’t know it. All they know is that the slurs uttered in your store make them intensely uncomfortable. They’ll soon find a reason to spend their time and money elsewhere.
• When you allow your players to make casual jokes about rape, you are creating an environment that makes light of the sexual violence experienced by 20% of women. You will not find many women who will stick around for that particular brand of levity.

It’s not enough that a player not act this way in my store. If someone’s behavior in public or on social media is bad enough that word of it consistently gets back to me, they’ll find themselves unwelcome in my establishment. It’s been my experience after a long road of many mistakes that most toxic individuals are unable to compartmentalize their awfulness once they’re regular customers at a game store. I agree with them that it’s not my place to police anyone’s actions outside the store, but I do get to police the quality of player that we host here. If they can’t behave like human beings when in public, then I’m happy to let them play at whatever clubhouse opens next to receive them.

In stores that accept toxic behavior, this sort of bad player drives out the good. What remains? About 30% of the population, minus the gay ones, and minus the ones who are uncomfortable with awfulness? I’m in favor of making businesses welcoming to straight white males, given that I am one of them, but I want more. I want everyone’s money, and the best way to do that is to treat people like people. The bar is shockingly low, which is why I believe that it’s becoming socially acceptable to expel those who manage to slither under it.

Which brings me to the final Snowflake Life truth: The toxic players haven’t been missed, and the decent gamers who have been driven away from local game stores by toxic behavior are out there in greater numbers than I ever would have expected. After the ridiculous drama and my definitive responses on social media late last week, we had a raft of new players for Unstable weekend. Many of these were couples, most were already playing kitchen table Magic, and several commented to me that it was great to have a nice game store to frequent. Given that my store has been open nearly a decade without drawing these players in, I must assume that some combination of our new premium play space model and new insistence on humane behavior had something to do with this growth segment in the playerbase.

You may think that your toxic players are indispensable. You may rationalize their behavior as “rough around the edges” and plead that you can’t afford to lose them. I’m here to tell you that if Net Income is your goal, you can’t afford to keep them.

Come to the Snowflake Side. We have disposable income.

I’ve noticed a disturbing trend on social media as game stores have seen a general decline not at all helped by disappointing Magic releases: Store owners, maybe even some who have read this and other blogs, will acknowledge their clubhouse status and embrace it, telling their customers that they’re not in it for the money, but rather to serve the community and the local gamers. I wanted to talk to the owners of those stores.

While it’s always possible that this sort of statement is made out of some nefarious intent, I believe that it’s usually made to save face. The context is almost always that your store has fallen on hard times and needs help, or that your store is cutting corners in fixtures, cleanliness, or product selection. Maybe you’re doing something you’re not supposed to be doing, like selling promotional materials given to you by a game company, or maybe you’re not doing something you’re supposed to do, like collect sales tax or pay employees over the table.

Somebody objects. This isn’t how things are supposed to be done! This is not what I expected from a business. Aren’t you trying to be successful? Your response, finally: “I’m not trying to be successful. I’m giving the people what they say they want for little or no personal benefit, so how about you lay off? I’m the good guy, here.”

I believe that in the moment, you are being sincere. Everyone is the protagonist in their own story, and it’s natural when confronted with one’s business’s failure to produce the intended results to draw the bulls-eye around the place their arrow landed. A place where people can play games for free is nominally a public good, so that’s what they’re going to do. With the way that our culture lionizes the impoverished small business owner, it’s a tempting out.

You know what your community needs? You.

I’m not even talking about the state of your store. More fundamentally: They need to have a store owner if they’re going to have a store.

If your community is going to have your services, you have to be fed. You have to be able to depend on the store to pay your bills. You have to be able to go to the doctor when you get sick. You have to have reliable transportation to work. You have to pay to some sort of a future to look forward to, unless you’re planning to live on Social Security and Medicare in your golden years.

But those are just your base needs. You can meet those by doing the game store gig part-time, or by partnering with several other folks and sharing the load.

After your base needs are met, your community needs your patience and your endurance, and those things cost money. Let me explain.

I have been applauded at anniversary events in my store. I had an employee tell me that I’m the best boss they’ve ever had. I’ve seen customers gasp in wonder at finding something in my store. I’ve flown first class to a trade show where people wanted to hear what I had to say. I got to have a schedule where I made my own hours and could leave the store in the hands of my amazing employees while I went on adventures. I drove a convertible through the Nevada desert in the springtime to go spend a week with a friend in the industry.

Those are amazing things. Those are the things people want when they talk about owning their own business. I would do those things for free.

I’ve worked 90 hours a week for three months right after purchasing the store. I’ve laid in bed at night and felt stabbing pains in the bottom of my feet, then gotten up for another twelve-hour day. I’ve sold personal possessions to have money for one of my Prereleases. I’ve gotten up at four in the morning to meet the police when the alarm went off. I’ve fired employees that I considered close friends, and been faced with the fact that they could have lasted if I’d trained them differently. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on products that turned out to be a mistake. I’ve scooped human waste off the floor and into the toilet because there was nobody else to do it. I’ve been generous to customers that I thought were my friends, only to have them transform into enemies later. I’ve been scammed, shamed, shunned, and vilified.

I could go on, but it would sound like whining, and that’s the last thing I’d want to do, because on the whole I’ve gotten a great deal and this business has been one of the best things to ever happen to me. My goal is to convince you there were moments in my ownership of this business when I would have walked away without the paycheck, or at least the promise of a future paycheck. Without that paycheck, you’ll walk away, too.

The pressures might be external, like a sick parent or a spouse who is tired of paying the bills alone. It might be internal, like a break-in at the store, your key employee leaving you with no notice, or a player revolt over a tournament ruling. There are going to be bad times, and they will wear on you, and you are going to want to quit. Most game stores, or at least game store owners, last less than three years. The previous owner of my business didn’t make it to three years. We have a local competitor that changed hands this year, and that store’s first owner didn’t make it to three years. Ask anyone that has been in this industry for any amount of time, and they’ll tell you that burning out and going home before their store has even found its feet is among game store retailers’ core competencies. There are exceptions, but they’re rare. The churn is real, and for every owner who closes up “to spend more time with family,” there’s at least one more who thinks that they’ll be different, and that they’ll finally be the ones to give the players what they want.

Break the cycle for the good of your players. Yes, even you, local competitor. If you want to provide a store for your community, you will need a paycheck. They are not likely to understand, but if you’re going to be there for them in year five, or year ten, you need to make some money. It’s nearly impossible to live a life devoted to totally selfless service. Most ministers draw a paycheck and almost every non-profit organization pays people to manage its affairs. If your aim is to provide a game store where your community can come together, then your first responsibility is making sure that your store has an owner who will have a reason to stay when things get tough.