My painting journey

So running a store was the best 13 years of my life, sort of!!!  The job was great, the stress was not.  Self-employment is a two-edged sword!  I dealt with GW before they did direct sales, and after (more on that later).  I closed due to a myriad of reasons (more on that too!).
GW was a mixed bag.  I went through a series of reps there, some awful, some good, and a few GREAT ones.  GW as a business partner was good to me, BUT I was a top selling store during my day,  I turned my GW inventory over 2-4 times a year.  I had a 40 foot wall of GW stuff.  I had all the blisters and box sets they sold on my shelves, at least 2 deep, if not 4+ deep on units.  I had the US Bitz Wagon come up many times, my store event pictures were used in WD and other flyers too.  I had all the US tours come my way (Epitome of Evil, the Dark Angel event. etc.).  I had reps come up and US Sales head John Matthews come and play games against my tournament winners.  They even flew me out in 2001 for the re-appearance at the Game Trade show in Vegas.  Ha, now that I write this- I had a pretty good relationship with them.
The closure issue is multi-layered.  I was dumb enough to open in a low population state, Maine has about 1.3 million people- of which most are older to elderly.  I also was located in a military town.  When the Iraq war called up a ton of reservists in Maine, I lost a significant number of 18-34 year old males, who are your bread and butter in this business.  Shortly after that, World of Warcraft took over.  I would have gamers get up and leave tournaments to go home and play in 20-40 person raids.  A year later and the Military announced they would be closing the base in my town, so there went 17 million out of the local economy.  At this point, I am married with 2 small kids and would have survived these headwinds- but my family would not.  So, I chose to close.  Took me a better part of a year to make that decision.  It's hard to choose to fail.
However, I game on!!!!