[michaelt]

Selling on consignment can be an absolutely great deal for shops, under the right conditions.

If I'm a lego trader and I buy your set for $900 hoping to sell it later for $1000, in the meantime that's $900 I can't invest in anything else. And maybe I guessed the set's value wrong and I end up unloading it for $800, taking a loss.

On the other hand, if I agree to sell that same set on consignment? Zero capital outlay, zero risk of me taking a loss - just some shelf space and admin work.

[nine_k]

> just some shelf space

Unless the store owns its building and has too little inventory to cover the shelves, the cost of not filling the shelves with the right goods is quite serious. In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".

[tikhonj]

This is definitely not uniform. I worked on inventory management at Target, and stores had quite a lot of shelf space—to the point where we'd hold large amounts of cheap, non-perishable stuff like cat litter because, well, we had the space for it.

Stores also wanted to look full. We actually had parameters in our inventory management logic to increase inventory just for presentation reasons. If inventory is expensive, having some free, quality inventory can be valuable in and of itself even if it moves slowly.

[sgerenser]

Bricks and Minifigs stores are like 2000 square feet, much different than a Target. Their overhead per square foot is almost certainly far higher than Target.

[plorg]

On the other hand, every BAMF I've ever been in had more open space than any of the other businesses it shared a strip mall with.

[mcv]

If you have no shelf space, of course you can refuse the consignment. And this was a really big one, but the shop was initially very happy with it. Advertised widely with it. Brought in more shelves to display it all. From what I understand, it was a very large part of what was for sale in that shop.

[hdndjsbbs]

I run a niche retail store and there are two sides to this.

Most of our business is selling low-price, entry-level products. There's a 80-20 distribution of people getting into the hobby versus people upgrading after a couple years. Consequently most of our floor space and inventory is devoted to high margin, quick turnover, entry-level products.

In my experience the floor space is less of an issue for high end products than the capital expenditure to bring in the inventory. On the consignment side we only take products aimed at the remaining 20%. These are specialty items we wouldn't have in regular stock. It's a win-win because we don't have to deploy capital to bring the product in-store, but we do have space to showcase some higher end used product.

[tetha]

Also, from the customer side, people ask at the higher end, don't they? Beyond a certain level, it's more of a search and a quest than just browsing. So you mainly have to show that you have connections for certain things. Why does this sound like drugs now?

I know this from a few friends who are deep into tabletop and boardgames, and they would regularly work with the one or two small stores around to get some special, expensive item (to help keep the shop afloat).

[hdndjsbbs]

Yeah, in my experience the people who want niche stuff are willing to work with you and have a "high touch" experience. Where the people who want entry-level stuff want turn-key, sane defaults.

The annoying thing is people with lots of money and no experience who want the special expensive thing but they want it now and they don't know what options they want. I'm sure other fields are good at separating fools and their money but niche hobby retail isn't the Audi dealership, we're not just trying to upsell you for fun.

[thaumasiotes]

> In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".

However, in this particular case, the legos were initially displayed as a customer attraction, and then kept in storage. Presumably there's still some inventory cost in storage, but the shelves are clear.

>> The collection will be on display in the store's party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere.

[dghlsakjg]

But the shelf space is part of it either way... It's not like consignment stores take everything offered. Most of them are incredibly selective.

[Nevermark]

You only take on consignment product you deem sellable. A value judgment made for anything in the store.

But instead of costs = (product purchase + shelf space), the costs are only (self space).

So "just some shelf space" is correct in fact and implication.

[sgerenser]

My wife owns a retail business where some part of their sales is consignment. Taking anything in with only a 10% consignment fee would be laughable, there’s no way that’s a money making deal when you account for all the overhead of a small retail store. My suspicion is the original store owner made a bad consignment deal to sell the Star Wars stuff with only a 10% commission and the new owner didn’t want to live up to it. Of course, at that point they should have just given it all back, but it turns out they’d rather be evil.

[thaumasiotes]

The videos identify the consignment fee as 35%, not 10%.

[sgerenser]

I head them say 35% at some point later in the videos, but they definitely said 10% first, so I’m not sure which is correct.

[Barbing]

Much better deal for a diamond ring than a giant kayak, then. Gotta pay rent to sit on the shelf!