The Business: The Collapse Continues To Reduce Things To Rubble

Again, the Outside Forces are telling you that Conventional Play is done.

Game Stores deal entirely in luxury goods. Furthermore, they deal in good that are no longer preferred by Normies en masse.

Yet even the retail stores that cater to them--Gamestop, et. al.--are failing vs. online storefronts such as Steam and Good Old Games. Do you honestly think that Tabletop will do better? No, it won't, and it isn't; Diamond's collapse was the big alarm that the retail element of the commercial sector and all these reports of non-gaming retail collapsing ought to be telling you that Your Favorite Game Store is on the chopping block.

Don't think that used stores will do better; they'll just take longer to die, but even so they too are selling more and more online and shipping to buyers than selling locally to their neighbors. With online retailers like Amazon able to serve more and more people living further and further out at faster and faster speeds, the long-running (like over 20 years now) trend of people treating retail as a showroom before buying online is now the norm and it ain't changing.

Only the most regulated market niches--cars, guns, etc.--will still have retail presences by 2030 at this rate. Service retail businesses will be dominated by services that can't benefit from geopolitical arbitrage, be it small fry like lawn care to big ones like banking (and yes, banking will still have local branches), because everything else will move to where it's cheapest to operate from.

Your store is not immune. If it's hasn't yet, expect it to die in the next few years.

No, online storefronts are not immune either. This retrenchment in the economy means that action retreats to established positions, so that means the one with the biggest Network Effect wins here; Amazon wins, ultimately, and proximately Walmart and Target will win- and DriveThru may yet endure, but don't count on it, especially for real product vs. digital stuff you can get via Captain Harlock. Only publisher-run storefronts remain viable otherwise (e.g. Palladium's direct sale storefront.)

So no, your Endless Product Slop cannot survive. Stop now before someone ends up doing a profile video on a channel like this about how you lost it all trying. Only WOTC can tank this within the hobby for certain, and a couple Also-Rans will squeek through, but everyone else either dies or goes non-commercial henceforth because there's no money in it anymore.