Alleycat Comics

Years ago, I was part owner of AlleyCat Comics and More, a small comic book store in Chattanooga, TN. It was a lot of fun, but ultimately underfunded I suppose.
I ended up moving away from Chattanooga and thus became a very small part of AlleyCat. It eventually went the wy of the dinosaur much to my chagrin.
AlleyCat as an organization still exists, however, and I have been talking to my previous partners about making AlleyCat the retail branch of GGE.
Why would I do this? Well, for one reason AlleyCat already has a god relationship with distributors. It would be nice to not have to start over with distributors. Also, the name, logo and mascot were really cool and I would like to use them again.
So why would you do this now? GGE doesn't have any products to sell? Are you opening a comic book store again? GGE doesn't have products to sell...yet. We will and when we do, I don't want to be scrambling to have our own outlet. I am not opening a comic book store...yet. I will within 2-3 years though. I want to get started planning it now rather than the way I did it last time. We went from planning to implementation in about 3 months and our lack of preparedness showed!
So what will be different this time? We will be more patient. We will be mroe careful about product mix. We will focus on delighting customers rather than making money off of them. We will travel to cons. We will have a stronger internet side of the business. We will set up our brick and mortar location as an event center. Brick and Mortar retail is weakening, but it is still a great place to meet and interact (and game)