Grainger Games

» see graingergames.co.uk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The Grainger Market is a Victorian covered market in the middle of Newcastle upon Tyne, open since 1835, the kind of building where the butchers and the key cutters have been in the same units for decades. In 1997 Stephen Bowyer and his father took a stall in it and started buying and selling second-hand computer and console games. The company took its name from the building, which is why a chain that eventually reached Derby was called Grainger Games.

It incorporated in April 2001 and grew slowly for years. Thirteen stores by spring 2008 had become twenty-five by 2010, and then it stopped being careful. The fortieth opened in Liverpool in October 2010 and by August 2011 there were sixty-four, the estate having more than doubled in twelve months. Seven of them opened inside ten days in March 2011. MCV named it independent retailer of the year twice and called it the fastest-growing specialist games retailer in the country.

The model was the one the market stall had started with, scaled up: trade in your old discs, take the credit against something newer. The margins on that are thinner than they look, and it depends entirely on having stock on the shelf, which in turn depends entirely on suppliers being willing to ship you goods before you have paid for them.

Turnover was £51.1 million in the year to March 2016 and £48.7 million the year after, with the operating loss widening from £223,000 to £1.3 million. In January 2018 the company refinanced, securing new working capital facilities and registering a fresh charge at Companies House on the 24th.

~ the record ~

~ the credit line ~

On 20 March 2018 head office emailed staff to say credit was being cut and that talks with potential investors were underway. Customer pre-orders were canceled, including Far Cry 5, which was due out in a week. By the next day several suppliers had withdrawn their facilities. Bowyer's statement called it a shock to everyone and a significant operating challenge driven by factors outside the company's control.

That is the documented cause, and the version that circulated afterwards was a good deal broader. Over-reliance on pre-owned sales, the shift to digital downloads: the usual obituary for a games shop was written mostly by people outside the business. What the record shows is a retailer that had traded strongly through Christmas and refinanced in January. Eight weeks after that refinancing it could no longer buy stock.

~ two mornings ~

On 28 March twenty-one branches were told they would not be opening. On 29 March the remaining forty-six got the same instruction, and staff spent the day boxing stock for return to suppliers rather than selling it. Everyone was paid for hours worked up to 31 March, and then roughly four hundred people were out of work.

The website went with them. A capture from 24 February 2018 still shows a working store front; by 29 March the same address returns a page headed "Page not found", which is an oddly literal way for a shop chain to end. Administrators from RSM were appointed on 4 April in the Business and Property Courts in Leeds. The company was dissolved on 21 May 2020. Today the domain serves nothing but a default IIS welcome screen on somebody's unused web server.

~ a shop you had to live near ~

Grainger Games was a North East of England business that grew south without ever becoming national, and its whole proposition was physical: a counter with a member of staff behind it who would quote you a price for the disc in your bag. There was nothing in that to export. In Turkey the second-hand games economy of the same years ran through informal channels and individual shops, never through a chain with a brand and a loyalty card, so the model never had a Turkish equivalent to be compared against.

One piece did survive, sideways. Be More Geek, a merchandise format Grainger Games had been running as a separate fascia, was picked up by a former area manager and relaunched as its own shop in Newcastle in October 2018, growing to several branches across the North East. That company went into liquidation too.

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