PLAY N TRADE: Video Game Franchise Played Out?

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• Now no more confusion, just facts, they ended 2008 with 245 stores and the website states ended 2009 with 233, now with fifty openings in 2009 that means over 60 closed. IIf it is looks, acts and smells like a duck, it is a duck.

  http://www.corp.ca.gov/ENF/list/p/PlayNTrade.asp

• Where to begin,

  The franchise is basically a pyramid scheme. Corporate gets rich, while the franchisees suffer. I noticed one poster blames the early franchisees for their stores failing. Yeah that’s a great idea, lets blame the people like me who put their money, blood, sweat and tears into their stores and not the people who designed the business model that we follow. I was promised, directly from the founder Ron Simpson, that we would have direct buying from all vendors after 100 stores were open. Still don’t have it years later. Where is he now?

  He was just the first in the musical chairs of PNT CEO's who all have the same policy, "I don’t know what the other CEO was doing but things will be different now." Then we have the completely useless area reps. My store hasn’t been visited or called by a rep in over 6 months. My rep has never owned a PlayNTrade or worked at any type of multimedia retailer. Excellent choice PNT! Last time he was in I asked him who the current PNT CEO was and he said he had no idea. I asked him what Roger Lloyd's current duties were, he was COO at the time I do believe, and he had no idea who that was. With his vast expertise he did recommend that I spend an additional $40,000 in store improvements.

  Evidently even though we pay our dues every month we are persona non grata with PNT. I tried to call for franchisee support last month five times and left four messages over a two day period with no reply. Then I decided to call the number for people who are interested in buying a PlayNTrade. I informed the gentleman who answered that I already had one and needed to speak to someone in franchise support. He was kind enough to redirect my call to the same number I had been calling the previous two days where it met with an immediate answer after one ring. Previously I got no answer after fifty rings. Good job investing in that caller ID PNT, hats off to you!!!

  After we decided to close down after several years of business we were greeted with a prompt letter from PNT threatening us with legal and credit repercussions if we did not fill out certain paper work immediately promising not to sue them among other things. Thanks again PNT for your appreciation of our years of service and money that you took.

  All that being said I will acknowledge that mistakes were made on our end. However I can honestly say that if we had run the store perfectly we would still have gone out of business. The model is flawed, and our biggest mistake was not recognizing that upfront. We instead believed the promises of Mr. Simpson. Just because the Video Game industry is one of the fastest growing industries in America doesn’t mean that owning one is easy, and it’s even tougher with dead weight like PNT on your back.

  Financial issues aside this whole ordeal has been particularly disconcerting from a conceptual standpoint. PlayNTrade, the way I envisioned it, was the anti-GameStop. It was supposed to be a store that catered to the customer’s desires and was able to deliver the type of customer service impossible in a bureaucratic quagmire like GameStop or any of the other chain retailers. We could make promises and offer prices that they never could; all we needed was to be allowed to compete on a semi-level playing field with them. I was the most ardent PNT supporter at first because of this, but, as you have probably noticed, I have sense become extremely disillusioned. I could go on for hours but I think you get the idea. I'd be happy to answer any questions [del.]

  Sincerely,
  A PNT Franchisee

• Disillusioned- What state were you in, and what was the percentage of new to used? Are many play N Trades profitable.

• I'd rather not get into specifics on this forum for fear of attempted reprisals from PNT. It seems sticking it to their franchisees for not towing the corporate line is one of the few things they excel at. I thought I could reply via email but it seems that is not allowed in this forum.

  I will say this. As much as PlayNTrade is touted as a great opportunity to make tremendous amounts of money. Isn't it odd that both Ron Simpson(PNT Founder) and Roger Lloyd (One of the original store owners, Former PNT CEO and current corporate officer) have sold all their stores, and none of the current corporate officers own any stores. Just check out the Walpole Massachusetts store and all the stores in Colorado. You wont see Simpson or Lloyd listed as owners anymore. I guess they know a couple of things we don't. After all it seems to me that owning your own store would give you a great and almost indispensable way of staying in touch with the problems and needs of your franchisees. If its such a profitable endeavor any prudent person would keep it open and simply delegate day to day responsibilities so as not to take up any of your valuable corporate time. I guess they knew when to cut and run.

  To put it bluntly, when a CEO sells all of his stock in a Fortune 500 company, we all know what that means. So what is the logical conclusion when our corporate officers sell their stores. I know that corporate is talking about starting up a few so called corporate stores, but there is a big difference between that and having a personal stake in your company.

• Well said. Even franchise salespeople too...if its so great...why don't they own one. A cook who won't eat his own cooking...maybe he knows he didn't wash his hands.

• Disillusioned,
  If you did get in the company when Ron Simpson and Roger Lloyd were with the company then you were one of the stores that was not screened properly (as they do now). There are a lot of stores who were not capitalized properly and there was no WAY they could make it on the resources offered to us through corporate and having the financial problems of being under capitalized. I have to admit when I got into owning a Play N Trade, I should never have had the ability of signing off on buying a store. Luckily I had plenty of retail and specifically video game retail experience, I knew where to put my store and how much I should be spending on everything ect. I only started my own store with 25k capital when it was recommended by corp as a minimum 50k capital (after initial inventory). After a struggle our first year we ended after all said and done with a 34k PROFIT. All bills paid all overhead covered all taxes paid I went home with that money in pocket and I still paid myself 40k on top of that for my yearly salary (I manage my store and pay myself this salary). I don't know how many of you know this already, but MOST retail stores do not make profit in their first year of business. Not all stores are doing bad, some stores are doing great, even the ones that came in at the HORRIBLE beginning.
  The New Corp office is doing a fantastic job getting things moving in a positive direction, granted it will still be too late to save some of the stores. The new build-out costs half what it cost me, the new tech package (computers for store POS ect.) costs literally half what it cost me, and works better. We are finally buying direct from developers (still has some problems to be worked out). We have a private forum for all store owners to talk amongst each other with NO hassle from corp. (though they may comment from time to time). We have a support team that (during the hours stated) have ALWAYS answered my questions, they may have had to get back to me if they didn't know the answer of course. I don't know if everyone expects the company to suddenly change overnight or something, but the company has been changing for the better for the 3-4 years I've been associated with them, and everything in the pipeline is looking up and up.
  I know this forum does not allow direct contact with the posters but if you need to talk to store owners, just call us, most of us you will find are not unhappy franchisees, and anyone getting in the program now has a HUGE advantage over me and disillusioned who got in when it wasn't as easy, or you could say was TOO easy to get in.
  Disillusion I'm sorry your store isn't working out as well as you wanted it to, I wish there was some way the admin could give you my personal info so I could get in touch and see if there is anything I could help you with if your store is still open when you read this.

  • "I wish there was some way the admin could give you my personal info..."

    There is. If two commenters want to exchange contact info, both can email the request to unhappyfranchisee[at]gmail.com and we will forward your contact info. Just use caution and care, as we have had plenty of posers initiating contact to find out true identities of anonymous commenters. That's one of the reasons we don't allow email addys to be posted.

• Ron Simpson and Roger Lloyd cost a lot of people a lot of money with there false promises, and you think its ok to just say "oh well they arent with the company now and its not current managements fault." Thats called passing the buck. What are you gonna say when these guys dont live up to their promises and the next CEO rotates in. I wouldn't be suprised to see PlayNTrade getting sued again in the near future. I can see that you are still drinking the corporate koolaid but mark my words PNT will go under within 5 years. They opened 50 stores in 2009 but over 60 closed. The 2007 Franchisee of the year is out of business. It's a matter of simple math.

  If you were at that waste of money in Las Vegas last year as I was you probably heard them mention corporate stores, and they also mentioned that we will own no part of them. They are going to let us pay for them though. PlayNTrade is basically making the franchisees be the beta testers for their future corporate stores. We pay all the money and work out all the kinks so when they go completely corporate everything runs smooth and they rake in all the profits. They dont give a shit how many franchises go under in the process. I guarantee you they have a plan to become solely a corporate entity like GameStop. In doing that they are taking away everything that made PNT better than GameStop, and if and when they try to go heads up they will get destroyed by GameStop.

  Incidentally I'm a millionaire in my other business so I have quite a bit of business knowledge. Godspeed to you if you think you can make your store work, but when PNT goes under remember you heard it here first.

• Does anyone know the status of Play N Trade's California registration that was revoked? Did they work things out with CA?

• I hope the guy that is offering for troubled franchisees to call him, lasts longer than the last guy on the board that bragged that his Michigan stores were so great, and that people should stop complaining and just call him, because his stores were top performering stores. To my understanding, he lost his stores, and at least one was auctioned off the dept of revenue. The excuse that the failed stores (60+) were just some "early mistakes" is an insult to the hard working men and women that worked their butt off and lost their life savings.

• I don't remember reading about the 2007 Franchisee of the year going out of business in the corporate news letter. I suppose thats one thing they dont want to brag about.