Haha yea.... it's a total shit show. If you check out the Gamers page on Facebook there are a bunch of unprofessional posts, even before this, there are promotional posts with poor spelling and grammar and stuff. It's just a terrible way to run a business. They supposedly were about to open a few more new stores too but, idk... it's pretty wild. Gamers needs to just go away. There are a few great stores here who cover the bases anyway.

It's been like this for the last decade in my area. New store opens up, a few months or years later...closes down. Cycle repeats. My area has gone through about 20+ retro gaming stores in the last 7 or 8 years since I started actively collecting. Opening a retro game store is just a rough and volatile business these days.

When did they reopen?   From your last post in here, it looked like their goose was already cooked.
 

I haven't actually noticed anything.

My area has had largely the same stores for years. One chain went away, but one of the stores remains. It's a place I actively avoid due to some bad issues with them.

The rest are fine. They've actually had MORE games in lately. For awhile there they were bone stock at two of their locations, but once the market started dying off now they've started streaming back into the stores. I actually saw 2 Gigawings the last time I went to saw the least of what they had. Their prices are pretty good except for high selling items(like Super Metroid) while items that sell less(like gigawing) are market value. When collecting games was really big they struggled a bit to get in trades as most collectors were hoarding.

Good question.

It's a long story. I'll try to tell it as I best understand.

So, original Gamers closed cause they couldn't pay the bank. After a month or two, it was announced that "Gameroom" from Lincoln would be re-opening one Gamers location in Omaha, to liquidate the stock for the bank to help cover what Gamers owed the bank. After that liquidation, the location would become a Gameroom. This was good because people could use their store credit they thought they were screwed out of when they closed. 

So the owner of Gameroom and this other guy, David Mitchell, teamed up for this task. However it came out that David was a bigot, and there are videos of him using homophobic slurs on youtube streams, etc stuff like that.  This caused some issues and Gameroom and David decided to split ways after the liquidation was complete. So Gameroom stayed at the one location, and David took the Gamers name (must have gotten the ok from the bank or something) and re-opened in one of the other old locations.

So then, they started fueding. Gamers and Gameroom and it was all this petty stuff like putting yard signs in the others front lawn, shit like that. Real sad stuff. So then I guess after that came all this theft and stuff. It's all really crazy and full of drama.

That's the short version but yea. haha.

Even GameStop isn't immune; the company announced today they are closing 200 stores globally.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/art...

Game stores in MA have been pretty stable. The state lost a few stores between 2016-2018, but I haven't heard of any closures in awhile. We haven't had any new stores open in awhile either, just the same small group of stores maintaining in their area.

My area went from a great place with a good amount of variety to mostly depressing. A few years ago we had multiple stores that did second hand games, a few local chains, a few national too. One of them was taken down by the Gamestop roll over of Rhino games so that's its own deal. But a few years ago the couple of half price books in our area here formerly priced for the area and you could get stuff pretty cheap or at worst for half price. The company started going with a new national system and it wrecked the entire area completely for deal finding as their values for trade in went down for cash as they don't do credit, and their prices stared going off high ebay bin values. The trade-in though didn't drop at first so it was still healthy so all the other stores in town that were cheap even on the good stuff we knew had value 5 years ago got picked clean of everything but the common stuff because it was easy to drive around town and make a buck before they adjusted that. In that time the larger chain lost a store or two, the smaller local chain went under on a slow bleed trying to full modern full retail which gamestop being around helped nothing. The various one off places all died and the old larger chain fixed prices to match or be worse than half price so you can't really buy there anymore unless they make a mistake.

My area also doesn't get much at all in thrifts, since you can get easy cash and get something fun in return much goes either to half price or online, so they've always been spotty. The garage sales dried up, the flea markets starting well ebay sells this, and I think you can paint a picture from that. Basically get lucky or wait on a coupon or holiday sale day at half price is about it now which is just sad.