[Musings of a Game Store Owner] Scheduling

TheDude is in charge of stuff, and I am in charge of people. That's usually how things work out at our store, and for the most part, I am pretty happy with this arrangement. I don't want to keep the names of reps from 10 different companies straight nor do I want to work the percentages to find out if ordering from company J instead of company B is a better deal.

I do all the interviewing and hiring when we have openings. I get to decide whether someone is a good fit for our little band of misfits, or if they are just cool to hang out with but not someone we want to work with. We pretty much only hire people we know, and the people we know are gamers.

Once we hire someone, we get to fit them onto our schedule. Now, in case no one has told you this, it's true: coordinating gamers is like herding cats.

I get the fun task of filling almost 90 hours of schedule with people in such a way that we're always covered and we make money. This isn't easy even with a regular situation where random people that apply for the job get scheduled whatever.  We make it complicated because we want people to work for us for a long time. We don't want to fire people, so we try to give them reasonable schedules along with an ok work environment.

I get to be Superman by wrenching all KINDS of requests and idiosyncrasies into our schedule and still stay open.

Three of my four staffers have other jobs and one of them is in grad school. I keep their other schedules in mind when writing the schedule. I also have two staffers that have days they would strongly prefer not to work, and I try to accommodate those preferences. I also get to throw in theDude himself, who has his own preferences and needs, and I TRY to make sure everyone is happy.

For a while we had a nice little groove, and scheduling was pretty much a case of copying last month and adding days or adjusting a request for a change and then DONE. However, between TheDude asking for a specific day off and a new semester for our grad school person, our schedule went to hell fast.

I had to do a lot of restructuring, finagling and rewriting before I came up with something that SORT of worked. It didn't take long before someone threw a monkey wrench into the pile and changed things again, and I got to rewrite the schedule again.

Writing the schedule takes a lot more than putting a warm body into a time slot at our store.  I try to consider what games are being played so I can put someone who enjoys that crowd in that slot, as well as play to my employee's strengths. If we're having a 40K tournament, I want someone on site who knows the Grimdark well and can laugh and joke with the players. I've found this kind of tailoring makes a difference and helps sales as well as atmosphere, and the staffer likes it when they are having fun at work too.

I'd like to think we're back at a 'happy place' with the March schedule, but as always, I won't know until we actually work it.