JJ Games shutting down

[Nesmaster | 402]

JJGames.com is closed. Thank you for 20 years of business.

JJGames.com website will sell video games again in the near future, but under different ownership.

[Lincoln | 230]

Oh you're serious. WTF. So going out of business is just more bullshit. He's selling it, not closing up shop. What an ass.

[a3quit4s | 4,096]

Someone could have made him an offer after they saw he was closing up?

[RH | 4,903]

32 minutes ago, a3quit4s said:

Someone could have made him an offer after they saw he was closing up?

Yes, exactly.  I mean... it's been a dream of mine for a long time to own a game shop and I would have tried if it wasn't that this place is saturated with them.  I considered reaching out to the guy for half a second, only to have reality hit and realize that, no, I can't move to Florida to assume an existing business and there's no way I could move his inventory and setup a new company in a reasonable (read profitable) time frame.

[captmorgandrinker | 1,649]

19 minutes ago, RH said:

Yes, exactly.  I mean... it's been a dream of mine for a long time to own a game shop and I would have tried if it wasn't that this place is saturated with them.  I considered reaching out to the guy for half a second, only to have reality hit and realize that, no, I can't move to Florida to assume an existing business and there's no way I could move his inventory and setup a new company in a reasonable (read profitable) time frame.

Glad you didn't because he was in Colorado.

[Lincoln | 230]

1 hour ago, a3quit4s said:

Someone could have made him an offer after they saw he was closing up?

You're right that could be the case.

Did he end up clearing out his inventory? I forgot to check the last couple days but based on others' comments it sounds like a lot of prices never got anywhere reasonable.

[TDIRunner | 2,734]

I had been keeping an eye on the prices and was waiting for them to get a little lower before making a big purchase of PS1 games I'm missing.  I noticed that the inventory was getting lower each day as I saw several games I was interested in disappear.  I just didn't find that most of the stuff got down to my buying level before it was gone so I never got a chance to make a purchase.  

[MiamiSlice | 3,091]

40 minutes ago, Lincoln said:

You're right that could be the case.

Did he end up clearing out his inventory? I forgot to check the last couple days but based on others' comments it sounds like a lot of prices never got anywhere reasonable.

He kept doing these sales which he would keep emailing about where stuff was like 10% off... 

19 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

I had been keeping an eye on the prices and was waiting for them to get a little lower before making a big purchase of PS1 games I'm missing.  I noticed that the inventory was getting lower each day as I saw several games I was interested in disappear.  I just didn't find that most of the stuff got down to my buying level before it was gone so I never got a chance to make a purchase.  

Apparently someone out there thought his prices were good. I don't get it. They were usually still higher than eBay. 

[TDIRunner | 2,734]

11 minutes ago, MiamiSlice said:

Apparently someone out there thought his prices were good. I don't get it. They were usually still higher than eBay. 

Some prices were ok.  I missed out on a cheap Crash Bandicoot CE that I didn't buy out of pure laziness.  I planned to go back to it the next day and sure enough it was gone.  

[RH | 4,903]

1 hour ago, captmorgandrinker said:

Glad you didn't because he was in Colorado.

Lol, I must be thinking of Lukie which they are basically the same thing.  One of those big online, used games shops is there.  Colorado is "worse".

[RH | 4,903]

13 minutes ago, MiamiSlice said:

He kept doing these sales which he would keep emailing about where stuff was like 10% off... 

Apparently someone out there thought his prices were good. I don't get it. They were usually still higher than eBay. 

Someone posted and email he had received from them where he explained his pricing.  TL;DR: He's big and he can use demand/stock to float prices.  Honestly, it sounds like he had a reasonable system for pricing.  Paired with the fact that he supposedly had reasonable prices for shipping internationally, international buyers would pay the premium to get there games.

It's easy to throw shade at a guy who seems to be over pricing his stuff, but at the end of the day he was a business, probably sitting on tens of thousand (if not hundreds of thousands) of games and at that point, you take what you can get and you can use your own mechanism to determine price.  And your prices are correct, so long as you're moving inventory at those rates.

[Bonanza125 | 55]

10 minutes ago, MiamiSlice said:

Apparently someone out there thought his prices were good. I don't get it. They were usually still higher than eBay. 

Some people avoid Ebay all together. They also had a huge inventory so in some cases the convenience is better to buy multiple games at once compared to multiple sellers on Ebay.  

[RH | 4,903]

Let's also not forget that you can't beat having photos to see the games, and a no-questions-asked return policy. I've never had to make a return to JJ Games the couple of times I used them, but I have made liberal use of Lukie Games return policy since they don't offer photos.  Does JJ pay for shipping on returns?

[TDIRunner | 2,734]

I don't believe that I ever bought anything from JJ over the years, but regardless they still made it 20 years using the pricing strategy that they used.  And I would argue that the closing or selling of the business is more related to the market itself than his pricing strategy.  

[Lincoln | 230]

So tin foil hat time: he had a buyer for the property lined up ahead of time, used the "going out of business" sale to unload the excess filler titles, and marked up all the good stuff since he could get solid value on those from the new buyer if they didn't sell on the store. 

Anyone wanna take bets on how close to truth that is?

[TDIRunner | 2,734]

7 minutes ago, Lincoln said:

So tin foil hat time: he had a buyer for the property lined up ahead of time, used the "going out of business" sale to unload the excess filler titles, and marked up all the good stuff since he could get solid value on those from the new buyer if they didn't sell on the store. 

Anyone wanna take bets on how close to truth that is?

I kind of doubt it, but even if that's what happened, I'm not sure I see a problem.  No one is forced to buy anything.  Some people got some good deals.  What's the issue?

[WhyNotZoidberg | 585]

1 minute ago, TDIRunner said:

I kind of doubt it, but even if that's what happened, I'm not sure I see a problem.  No one is forced to buy anything.  Some people got some good deals.  What's the issue?

Sir.

You're making a scene.

[Ted Playa | 17]

I always messaged JJ on NA, he hooked up below Price Charting prices everytime for me, and the games were always in good shape.

In terms of major resellers, he far surpassed Lukie and DK, in terms of service, from my experience. I won't buy from those two.

Sorry to see him tap out. Hopefully he has other work.

Edited January 22, 2020 by Ted Playa

[arch_8ngel | 1,597]

1 hour ago, Lincoln said:

So tin foil hat time: he had a buyer for the property lined up ahead of time, used the "going out of business" sale to unload the excess filler titles, and marked up all the good stuff since he could get solid value on those from the new buyer if they didn't sell on the store. 

Anyone wanna take bets on how close to truth that is?

I'll double-down on that with the fact that he was an early-adopter of accepting Bitcoin on his storefront back when it was worth a lot less than it is today.

If he took the chance and kept it in crypto, he might have done well on it.

Edited January 22, 2020 by arch_8ngel

[Lincoln | 230]

1 hour ago, TDIRunner said:

I kind of doubt it, but even if that's what happened, I'm not sure I see a problem.  No one is forced to buy anything.  Some people got some good deals.  What's the issue?

The dishonesty of it mostly. Stating that prices would be lowered until everything was gone. 

To be clear I have no proof that's what happened, I just hold a slightly negative impression of him for reasons I'm not sure I could enumerate. The most salient though would be he never presented himself as a collector, only as someone trying to extract money from collectors. 

[TDIRunner | 2,734]

5 minutes ago, Lincoln said:

The dishonesty of it mostly. Stating that prices would be lowered until everything was gone. 

Most likely he took the deal that made him the most money before shutting the doors or transferring ownership.  In other words, he did what all of us would have done in that situation.  Selling every single game until they were gone would have taken months if not years even with the ever droping prices, which means he would be making less and less money will continuing to run his business which costs money.

Again, I'm a little disappointed because I was waiting for prices to drop a lot more before buying some big lots, but I can't get angry about what he did.

[RH | 4,903]

2 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

Again, I'm a little disappointed because I was waiting for prices to drop a lot more before buying some big lots, but I can't get angry about what he did.

Yeah, ditto.  I was building up a HUGE cart currently valued at hundred of bucks, and probably would have pushed well past $1,000 in commons and uncommons in great shape.  All the while, I was planning on waiting until the "end", when everything was hopefully discounted in the 25% or less FMV range.  Of course, I knew that a bunch of stuff would have fallen off of my cart, but you can't beat getting stuff at 25-30% the going rate on eBay, if you can make that happen.  Even if it finally ends up being 10-20 common NES/SNES carts.

[Lincoln | 230]

3 minutes ago, TDIRunner said:

Most likely he took the deal that made him the most money before shutting the doors or transferring ownership.  In other words, he did what all of us would have done in that situation.  Selling every single game until they were gone would have taken months if not years even with the ever droping prices, which means he would be making less and less money will continuing to run his business which costs money.

Again, I'm a little disappointed because I was waiting for prices to drop a lot more before buying some big lots, but I can't get angry about what he did.

Right, I get that and agree that is the rational thing we'd all do. And I wouldn't take issue with that as long as it was presented that way up front, rather than "everything goes but not really"

[TDIRunner | 2,734]

Just now, Lincoln said:

Right, I get that and agree that is the rational thing we'd all do. And I wouldn't take issue with that as long as it was presented that way up front, rather than "everything goes but not really"

That's assuming that he knew about it up front which is what I doubt.  It would have been nice if he could have posted a warning saying that he had a buyer and everyone has 24 hours to make their final purchases, but that could also have an impact in the final sale price of the website.  For me it wouldn't have mattered since the prices weren't low enough on anything I was interested in to make one last purchase.  

[RH | 4,903]

The reason why I don't agree with that theory is that it doesn't make business sense.  If you want to sell your shop, why take the time for the last month to stack the order book?  Plus, if I was the buyer and we had a set purchase date, I'd be a bit angry if the guy had a major sale 2 weeks before the purchase and I'd probably back out. Legally, that type of stuff is usually built in acquisition contracts, so you can't do that.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that he intended to say "everything must go" but if a buyer showed up, he'd be willing to clear the order books and turn over the shop.  Otherwise, you're shooting the guy coming in, in the foot, and who would take that deal?