Hey all, Nick here with updates on the state of the store, a heads up on our upcoming holiday schedule, and a few updates regarding a number of things underway here at Phoenix with regards to our events. I’ve packaged all of this together as one kinda big FYI post, so please feel free to skip down to whatever parts are relevant to you. Thank you for reading, and for being a part of the community here at Phoenix!

State of the Store

I’m gonna be honest with you - 2024 has been a helluva year. The store is doing well (one of its best years yet), and at the same time I think I can speak for multiple members of my team when I say that this year has felt unrelenting. Between the increasing foot traffic, increasing use of our community space, and other personal matters we pretty much all feel like we could all use a bit of a break to catch our footing and prepare for 2025. That said, we’ve got a plan, and we’ll be taking that time later this month (see our holiday hours below).

Looking back at this year, I think the single biggest accomplishment that the entire team can stand behind is the unionization and subsequent negotiations that took place in order to get the team's collective bargaining agreement finalized and ratified. The process started mid-December of 2023 and took until early September to be finished and voted on. I appreciate the team for their patience with my business partners and I as we navigated the language of the agreement. Not gonna lie, there was a fair amount of very fast learning that the three of us had to do in pretty short order at times and it was pretty stressful all around, but we got there in the end. We’ve hammered out an agreement that all parties are on board with that includes raises, reimbursement for health care and vacation time, with more to revisit in a few years when renewal rolls around.

I personally do look back at this year and feel a little guilty. I was looking out at 2024 with a little bit of ambition. This was gonna be there year where I really knuckled down and got out ahead of things. Planned events well ahead of time. Found time to do cool Magic tournaments like team trios (I’ve heard you and I still want to do this!!!). Scheduled a bunch of nifty comic events like more signings and such. A lot of that had to fall by the wayside just because the time required to plan and implement things had to be re-allocated in light of everything ramping up. Still, I’m coming back to them now that things are starting to clear up and looking towards 2025 to reclaim some of that energy. I’m already planning January and even February’s events as we speak.

And it would be impossible to recap 2024 if I didn’t mention the election. I don’t know what comes next, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a lot worried about some of the economic and social policies being talked about in the halls of power right now. To that end, I’m putting some intent out there that in the coming year I personally plan to find ways to empower more queer and marginalized voices to be heard. We can’t afford to be silent right now, and standing up for ourselves is more important than ever. The store has always been a safe space for marginalized people to meet up and organize. It’s time to rededicate and reaffirm that with our events and policies.

Holiday Hours

Okay, reflection, rumination, and looking forward aside, let’s talk about the next few weeks. As I mentioned at the top of the article, we’re going to be taking the last week of the year and the first week of the new year for some abridged hours. Similar to what we did back in 2023, the store is going to have the following revised hours between December 22, 2024  and January 4, 2025 :

• Saturdays / Sundays - 10 AM - 8 PM
• Monday - Friday - 11 AM - 8 PM
• December 25 - Closed
• January 1 - Closed

As a result, we are clearing our calendar of all of our week night events during those two weeks. If you’re planning to use the store space, that’s still 100% okay! Just be aware that we’ll be closing early during those dates. If you’re a visual person like me, here’s a quick info-graphic thingy to help:

Space Use / Event Policy Updates

As we’ve already touched on earlier, 2024 was a really busy year for the store. One of the ways in which we felt that increase was through the use of our tables and community space. A couple of years ago, you could swing through on a week night and usually find a table or two most nights of the week. Now, you’d be hard-pressed to find a week night where we aren’t pushing full capacity and sometimes over capacity (I’m looking at you with love Wednesday night commander nights). This has led to some unfortunate instances where people have shown up, expecting a table and had to be told “sorry, there just isn’t one here for you right now,” and other instances where groups who want to make use of the store on a regular and ongoing basis have had a hard time finding room to grow. 

These issues have given us cause to reconsider our general space use policy, what events get listed on our website calendar (and thus get given priority on space use), and how to deal with the leftover tables not used by the events. We’ve got a plan on how to address the largest issues, and we’ll be getting into all of that later this month. But I can tell you this - starting in January, we’ll be instituting a system for table reservations, so that folks who want to make sure there’s space waiting for them can be assured of just that.

And that’s all I’ve got for now! We’ll be back in about a week with our January look aheads for comics. In two weeks you can get a first look at our table reservation system, and in three weeks we’ll have our revised event and table use policy rolled out.