Time keeps on tickin'... tickin'... tickin'....

One thing that I am terrible at remembering to do each month is update the top 10 on our homepage (www.ebash.com).  I run a report from Smartlaunch to show me the top 20 (in case an employee cracks the top 10 who don’t count) gamers in both stores from December 1 until January 1.  I combine the records from both stores and rank them 1-10 based on time played.

These numbers are pretty accurate except that with our day pass customers we sometimes forget to log them into SmartLaunch when they are on console because their time automatically expires at the end of the day.  The PC users MUST login to SmartLaunch to access the game menus so they are almost always the highest users.

The top 10 for December looked like this:

As you can tell there are quite a few customers that spend some serious time playing each month at our stores.  ALL of these customers are VIP and use our inexpensive weekday pass prices (only $7.50 per day) so the funny thing is that they are not always our top customers based on money spent.

Looking at the list you can see the top 2 are quite a ways ahead of the general group in hours spent.  Creedalba (who is a great guy and always is asking to work for us but I have to tease him that if we hired him then the store would close without his business) spent at least an extra day over Dingo and Dingo spent an extra 2 days over Soupernoob from the Evansville store.

Aw... look at these little kiddies from a few years ago.

If the average time spent per day is 7 hours that would mean Creedabla was in our store 29 of the 31 days in December.  I know he misses at least a day per week so his average per day is probably more like 8 or 9 hours.  All of the guys in our top 10 visit our store at least 20 days of the month and that extends down to the top 30-40 in the Terre Haute store.

Our Terre Haute store in 7 years has built up a steady base of “regulars” that keep the store ticking.  On the slowest of slow days the Terre Haute store will still see a nice batch of customers because of these regulars while the Evansville store is still building that customer base.

I started thinking about all of this today because yesterday was one of those down days for both stores.  In Terre Haute yesterday we had 25 players in the store which is a terribly slow day for us, but the Evansville store only had 3 players the entire day.  It is funny how the days fluctuate in people in a similar pattern for both stores even though they are almost 200 miles apart.  The jumps are just more drastic for the Evansville store because they don’t have the core base to sustain it yet.

So when did we reach the point in the Terre Haute store that we could sustain with our core base of customers?  The funny thing is that the core base of customers for the store was actually more dedicated when we first opened.  Our core group was the ONLY people we had in the store.  It wasn’t until 2006 in our 3rd year that our core group was big enough to maintain the store.  That would lead me to believe that this year is the most important for our Evansville store to reach that promised land.

I would say that if you have 25 customers in your store on the WORST day you can remember then things are pretty good. 🙂