A couple people in my family actually run a PNT and there's is much more enjoyable than the local gamestops. They're pricing structure is very similar to gamestop with respect to used stuff. New stuff is the same pretty much anywhere. They have a very loyal following of kids who are in there 7 days a week for hours at a time, hanging out, playing games and whatnot, and when they get the money to buy games they get them there. I'm on the outside looking in as I am not personally active in the company, but I'm close enough to the situation to see that it's a tough road opening up a PNT. Margins are very very slim. Best Buy and GameStop buy theoretically hundreds of thousands of copies of some of the more popular games and probably get better pricing on them than PNT. PNT buys new games wholesale for $50-55 for $60 retail games. So after paying credit card fees and franchisee fees, it's almost a wash to sell a new game, you maybe make a few bucks. It's an even uglier story on the consoles, as the mark up is a similar $5-10 and the credit card and royalty fees are even higher. So really, all the money comes from used games, which are generally marked up 75-100%. That equates to a lot of used games every day/week/month/year etc. to pay your lease/staff/expenses and still turn a profit. It's why if you do enough research you will see a lot of PNT's fold. My family seems to be doing OK, but they run a tight ship and run very lean as far as staff, and customer service wise they are fantastic. Treat people with respect, know the games, etc. The real way to make money doing something like that seems to be volume. If you run one store that clears $30,000 a year after taxes and expenses, you are living a meager life. If you own 10 stores with the same small overall margins, you are doing quite well for yourself. This is why come Black Friday you see Best Buy and GameStop have a couple brand new games on sale for $30 or $40, huge volume of business can soak up the losses they take selling those games at those prices and they want to get you in the door to buy multiple things. The average PNT owner likely couldn't afford eat those types of losses unless they owned a large number of stores. My family's store is a great store. Much larger selection than at GameStop, about 10 big LCD tv's with all sorts of new and retro games running, tons of cool video game swag/decor all over. It's a great experience, but as each are privately owned/operated, ymmv. There's nothing to stop you from being successful opening a store yourself but the amount of time, money and effort you put into it. Having a good selection and a friendly, knowledgeable staff will automatically put you legs up on gamestop 362 days out of the year (save for black friday weekend) because PNT's do retro games, fix discs and consoles, have a better try before you buy policy, and generally have way more playable machines on the floor than any gamestop i've been in.
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