Warning, the following episode contains adult language and screaming goats. Listener discretion is advised. The Pinball Network is online. Launching the Pinball Show. Thanks again for the ongoing support as a Pinball Show Club member. Enjoy this exclusive TPS content and make sure to visit the Pinball Show Club Discord to chat about the bonus material. Yeah, we are discussing in this exclusive content, Dennis, this week in pinball distribution. I think we might keep it as Twipty. You might as well, the Twipties. All right, so I try to stay busy as a pinball distributor. And a lot of people, maybe they know, maybe they don't know what goes into being a pinball dealer. essentially my responsibilities and the tasks that i complete each and every week are going to be different than other dealers as well i would guess so this is just a reflection upon myself as a pinball dealer and uh running day-to-day operations of my company this last week dennis is a it's i'm not just what what before we go into what what is your guess as to some of the things that a pinball dealer does each and every week? Probably has to maintain their 50 different wait lists that they decided to let everyone have with every made-up stupid theme. Man, that just wasn't a thing before me. I'm sorry to the industry for that. And so there's that. There's coordinating for replacement parts for people that are asking for things under warranty. Yes, yeah. That's a great job there, yeah. I imagine you spend a lot of time responding to people asking, do you know when I'm going to get X? that's a lot of customer questions that's a bulk of my my job yeah and then i also think and this one might be more unique to you than a lot of the other distributors but i i shouldn't you know speak too far out of turn you seem to do a lot of marketing like a lot of ads and stuff for games but i note it because it doesn't seem like the manufacturers spend that much time actually trying to promote their games nor are they providing it to us yes those are all those They're all created. So those are some main things that kind of stand out to me. And, of course, the standard, you know, coordinating the shipping of the products and all of that. You know, that is a lot of it. And I think the reason some of this came up as a topic of discussion is Greg always told me, now that he knows, Greg Bone, he runs our tech warranty department, if you want to call it that. He helps customers that have games that fuck up. But he was surprised by how much coordination of shipping goes into it. It's not just a drop shit. There's a lot to that. Even if right now we currently use a shipping broker that assists with, I submit to that shipping broker, hey, these games need to go out. Here's where they're going. they will then arrange for that shipping to be conducted and we'll get a bill of laden for that freight. They'll send it to me. I'll attach that to the game. Shipping company comes to our dock to pick up game. It's got to have it on there, sign off on it. It goes. But, yeah, there's a lot to that. Something gets messed up in shipping. But there are a lot of things we do. So I can't speak to our tech side as much because we do warranty. We do so well when it comes to backing up customers with if things are going wrong, whether it's walking them through tech problems, submitting warranties for issues, buying a part that a customer needs that's outside of warranty. A lot of it goes into ordering parts and making sure those come in and invoicing and stuff like that. so bird's eye view uh my buddy greg bone does a lot of the the tech warranty stuff but still we have usually a morning meeting where he tells me which uh customers are requesting what and gives me a rundown as to what is going wrong with that and we troubleshoot together sometimes if he hasn't seen a certain issue so we'll do that and then i work with nicole who does our billing my wife she does accessory shipping as well so if somebody orders something from our website it needs to be shipped out as an accessory, she will take care of that as well as billing. So QuickBooks billing or credit card or e-commerce, she'll do that billing. I knew she did a lot of your billing. I didn't realize you had started on a demarcation of labor on if it's an accessory versus a game. Yep, we have. And those ship different freight or games. And then we usually utilize UPS or USPS, but UPS mainly for shipping accessories or parts or whatever. So she deals with all of that. So I kind of oversee them and make sure that those departments are functioning as well. And then I take on marketing, sales, shipping. And then Tim, my father works full-time with us, nickname is Timbo, he runs our shop. So he is there at the shop waiting for shipping companies to drop off games, preparing games to be going back out. That's why John Youssi listener us flipping out pinball do much more in the pre-owned arena now is because I have somebody that is working at the shop that can properly pack and prepare those games pre-owned. Because he'll almost pack them kind of like they were as a Stern game. He keeps all the Stern stuff whenever we do a white glove delivery or something. He keep all of that stuff including the box and he try to pack it up in the same way We got a bander that then bands them to pallets and stuff So sometimes when you order a used game from us it kind of looks like a brand game So he does all of that. But I usually go out there once a day, once every other day, to either take pictures of new games that come in, work on new games that have come in, or meet customers out there if I need to, et cetera, or work with him on stuff. He also does traveling to different cities, picking up games, dropping off games, setting up games, whatever. So I'm kind of managing all of those inner workings. So some of the things I did this last week, Dennis, we took in a trade. An individual wanted an Elton John CE. So he drove in to us and traded in an Avengers premium, Stern premium, and Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles premium towards an Elton John CE. So that was pretty cool. Would you have made that trade? Elton John's CE, bring it in the box for a used Avengers Premium and Turtles Premium. No. That'd be tough, wouldn't it? Yeah, well, the thing is, and I need more time on Elton John, but actually, I mean, unless I had – here's the thing. I'm already full up on room. And I like Elton John more than I like Avengers and way more than Turtles. So, no, I wouldn't have done the trade. A lot of my job is, and I don't know if other dealers are like this, is customer and client interactions and communication. I get, and I probably get more than most dealers, but anywhere from 50 to 100, probably about 50. I get like 50 messages a day on how much is this game? What does this feature mean? what would a trade look like how much is shipping here like customer questions i would say messages in total 50 to 100 a day easy but oh wow different yes it is and that's why a lot of people that see me working i'm working i usually start about 6 6 30 in the morning and i try to like chill out by five chilling out meaning not being in my office working but i'm still responding to messages I get messages at 2 in the morning, and it's via email, Facebook Messenger, Pennside, text. There's like five or six forms of. Now, you mute that, right? You're not actually going to answer that, too. I've never muted my phone. No. Oh, wow. Because if I don't respond. How do you live? As a quick aside, just so, because I didn't bring this up on the main episode. I didn't want to bore people, but I had a big presentation thing for our staff on Friday. And at 2.40 a.m., I received a call because we have an emergency, a 24-hour emergency public health line, and I take shifts on it. So I was on call. And so it's one of the few things I allow to punch through my Do Not Disturb. Wow, 2.30 in the morning. They called me at 2.39 a.m. I called the person back, and they had me on the phone for 30 minutes because they were pretty scared. So I was just walking through a lot of stuff. I didn't realize you were on call like that. It was something that wasn't the case when I was first hired. They were in discussions about it because we had an incident in the county involving a – and it was on the weekend. So there wasn't really a good way for them to tell us. Wow. So we spooled up, and we use an answering service. So they do a basic screening. But if it's anything that gets designated through the answering service as meeting our script conditions of an emergency, then they don't just email. Like I got an email today about something that got called in that was not an emergency but went through the emergency line. But if it is an emergency, whoever's on call gets the first phone call, and it actually goes down a phone tree and keeps calling people until it reaches. We got like eight of us who are on rotation. So I've been doing the last couple weeks because I took some other people's shifts because they were on vacation. But anyway, I couldn't give action. My day was ruined by doing that because I was a mess because I don't normally try and work. Yeah, that's more emergent on call. I don't have emergent. Because as a clinical psychologist, I used to take rotation on being on call where I would have to actually travel to local hospital ERs or state hospital, nursing home, whatever it may be, to basically doing an evaluation on a person's, not competency, but their ability to keep themselves safe. So if they were a danger to themselves or others, I'd have to further hospitalize them into a psychiatric facility. So I had to do that after hours, like 3 o'clock in the morning, wake up, get ready real quick, go down to the ER, and that was no fun. But that was a very tense kind of thing to have to do. Well, you may be more used to it then. Now it's like if I don't get to it within an hour, I don't get to it. But we do get a lot of messages. And customers being customers, that's what I would do as well. If I'm interested in something, I'm asking questions about it. Can I ask you another question? Yeah. What's your most common form of communication from customers and potential customers? Is it text, email, or phone? I can say with definition that it's not phone. I figured that would be the least. I get people angry. I mean, some of these listeners have been on the side of being upset with me because they would call me. And if you don't leave a voicemail, I can't. If I answered all of my phone calls in a given day my wife used to not believe this Now she tells people this because she knows all too well Our company would be a fourth of the size it is I cannot efficiently, I could not answer a phone call and talk to people because each phone call, in essence, is at least a half an hour just because that's just what it becomes. Whereas, yeah, email, text, and messenger are my primary. Those are Ed Boon, Ed Boon, Ed Boon. I mean, I can respond lickety-split with those things. But a lot of people, rightfully so, they want to discuss things. They want to talk about things. They want to get my take on things. So I have a cue for that, for calling people back. But, yeah, it's not as efficient of means. But I'm happy to talk on the phone. But it takes a little bit longer for me to do those. Or if it's something Nicole can handle or Greg can handle, they'll call them back. So, yeah, communication and answering messages is probably my number one thing as a dealer. So, yeah, we took a trade in this week. Other things we did, I had a first-time pinball buyer come in, and they purchased the pre-owned Godzilla Premium we had. So what a way to get your first pinball machine, a Godzilla Premium. So they did not mess that up. They did their research. But we have their Equinox, and we go put the game in, and it wouldn't fit, Dennis. The game didn't fit, and they drove five hours. Five hours. I mean, that's something that I could see a new person wouldn't think of, or maybe they had read the wrong measurement or something and thought something. Yeah, they asked the length of the machine, and I went out to the shop and even something like that. Like, shit, go all the way over to the shop, measure. Or actually, it was in my gamer. But still, go out there, measure it. It takes time. But I measured it. And length-wise, they asked about length and that fit, I guess, but they didn't ask about the height. Some of these newer vehicles, these games don't want to go into this. They're kind of shallow. So what do you do if they don't fit? Well, we tried taking off the little shroud that covers the power cord in the back of a stern, so it sticks up a little bit, took that off. Still wouldn't go without tearing up the liner of their Equinox. So needless to say, we pulled that son of a bitch back out, took the head off of it. It's about five plugs and two bolts and slid the head in, took pictures and said, you know what? You want to know what being a pinball hobbyist is? You're about to learn really quick when you go. Because I was like, how are you getting this out? Because I was walking him through how to set up properly a pinball machine and all that. And he didn't even have a dolly. And I was like, oh, shit. Okay, well, it's going to be a lot lighter now that you don't have the head attached to the body. So, yeah, did that. we received some very very large bills this week like holy shit kind of bills from Stern Pinball Chicago Gaming Company because we had our John Wick LEs come in and a new batch of Pulp Fiction SEs come in and some of those people if they haven't paid yet we're still paying the bill so that's why it's so important for us whenever somebody purchases a game from us or commits to buying a game that's why there's non-refundable deposits because I'm ordering based on what I think I need. And then push comes to shove, and they're like, well, I don't know if I want this game anymore. I'm like, shit, okay. So yeah, there's a lot of that. But two really big bills came in. I spoke with Barrels of Fun Pinball this week, talked about production schedule and our next batch of Labyrinths, which is coming sooner than I thought too. And it's not to say that they've caught up, because remember they were about a month behind from their original projections, But they're giving me games two or three weeks before I thought I was going to get some. So that was pretty fantastic to hear. Timbo, remember he runs our shop. He traveled to Louisville this week. This week was Louisville run. And this coming week, he's going to Indianapolis Monday. And then the rest of the week, possibly Louisville, Nashville, and Chicago. We've got a Chicago run to make. I like to go on those, but time is not going to allow it. We shipped off some John Wick premiums this week. We unloaded a bunch. I unloaded a bunch of John Wick LEs because the truck picked them up from Stern. This is kind of interesting to people. So there are some dealers that utilize a warehouse up in Chicago. They put their games, their inventory up there off-site, states away. They put their inventory up there, and that warehouse management will manage their inventory and ship games in and out through consultation with the company that's renting out their space. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. So they pay them probably a monthly fee to use storage space there. And the benefits would be that I believe it's much cheaper to ship from Chicago to a place, the warehouse in Chicago, than it is to ship all the way. Let's say you're in Connecticut. Let's say you're in California. is as a dealer, you ship them all the way to Connecticut, and then you store them, which takes time and money, and then you ship them all the way back out somewhere else. So they just kind of cut out that one shipment. They can't sit at Stearns. They've got to sit somewhere. So some dealers do that. I do not do that. I don't feel comfortable doing that. Why? It's just a comfort? I don't want hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory sitting off-site or I don't have access to. I want to put my hands on games. I want to see the box. I want to make sure they're fine. So we inventory all of our stuff. So any game that comes from Stern it coming to our place So typically it only takes a day or so to get picked up by FedEx from Stern sent to the nearest FedEx freight terminal transferred into a delivery truck FedEx and then they come to our dock and drop it off, vice versa, the other way around, if we need to ship out a game. But if you get enough games, which we did for John Wick LA, you get enough games, and you can rent out instead of having FedEx do it. I can actually rent a driver in a truck to fill up half of a truck and they come direct to me. They don't have to go to the terminal or anything. So that's what we did. We had some John Wick LA games as well as some other games. We didn't fill up that truck, Lord, no. But enough that financially it made more sense just to rent out the guy in the truck to go to CERN, pick up games, and bring them directly to me. And when they do that, it doesn't take a day or two. They're driving directly from there. They might eat a sandwich on the way, but they were going to arrive at 6 p.m. And Tim is off work at 4, so he wasn't going to be there. So I had to unload all of these John Wick LEs by myself, which would be fine, but it's just more work. but I had a pallet jack and it got jacked up and it got stuck, and then I had to use a dolly. So that was interesting. That was interesting. I had to unload all those damn John Wick LVs. But you did it. But they're shipping on Monday. So I have to coordinate shipping last week. I coordinated a lot of shipping, a lot of payments of Pulp Fiction SE after speaking with CGC and prepping for the John Wick LVs. They're going to be shipping out today, Monday. We have trade-in woes every single week. Games coming in not as described. this last week. What is it with people that if they're trading in an LE, LEs come with Invisiglass or Voodoo Glass, whatever the hell they're called. I get so many trade-ins, not as advertised. I'll come in and I'll be like, hey, where's the Invisiglass? Oh, that's how I got it. Well, yeah, but it's still not as described. That's a $300 loss for me. Or, hey, this mirrored back glass has a big chunk out of it. It's a brand new guy. How did that happen? oh that's how it came to me well damn it you have to disclose this kind of things so um you know there's always that shipping damage on games always worrying about that and then i'm also creating content this last week we did create content for foo fighters topper because i took an le on trade so i wanted to see what that topper is all about and some content and advertisement for looney tunes and john wick this last week so it's a lot there's other things as well but But, yeah, that's kind of what I do on a day-to-day basis. I start about 6, 630, and there's always issues. I'll have to bring up in subsequent little content sections, content episodes here, discussing individual issues that happen on maybe a customer's machine that Greg will see or a shipping problem that a game comes in and it's flipped over or things like that. I know that this next week, like I said, we've got John Wick Ellie's leaving, and I've got Chicago Gaming, Pulp Fiction's leaving their factory today, Monday, and they're shipping to me. I should get them by Tuesday, and then I'll have to turn around and ship three-fourths of them back out, and then I'll have to arrange delivery for Tim to deliver the other fourth of them to local metropolitan areas. And then he'll pick up games. We're picking up – this week we're picking up a Stargate, a Gottlieb Stargate on trade. Somebody's trading in a Gottlieb and a Stargate and some money for a John Wick premium. Shoot the pyramid. And then I'm also – oh, my God. This week I'm picking up on trade a home use only Ripley's Believe It or Not. Believe it or not. I haven't played that in years. You know, I haven't either. So I selfishly, this is bad business, man. I will trade in stuff that I want to play and give them a better trade offer than I'm supposed to. Just because I'm like, man, I like that. I wouldn't mind shooting around at the shrunken head a little bit. That might be fun. So we're taking in that. And what else am I bringing in? Ripley's and Amanda Pro. This is my selling off part of their collection. I got an Elvira 40th coming in, a Turtles Ellie. and a queen Ellie. Wait a minute. Already? A queen? So yeah, I've not owned a queen, so I'm kind of looking forward to that. So many things happening as a pinball dealer. Besides just drop shipping games. Yeah. All right, I guess people can give us some feedback at thepinballshowatgmail.com. Let us know if you have any interest in this type of content or more specifically, as Dennis had alluded to, what in particular into distribution you have interest in. And we'll try to discuss and answer any questions. I have a good one for the future, but I'm going to tell anyone until I see if they want to have this continue. Oh, very good. All right, I'll see you later, Dennis. All right. Y'all can turn off now. I'm going to go pay some big old stern bills. Oh. Yeah. Oh, no. I don't know if you need to do a bump of coke before going to the next part my allergies this is how business was done in the 80s that's right let me tell you Han, boobie I'm your white knight you