Play N Trade

[Some Stupid Japanese Name]

Speaking from a little bit of experience, it's really, REALLY hard to keep an indy shop going. Mark up on new games is terribly pathetic and unless you have a distributor in your area 95% of the time you can't get games the day they release. Meanwhile, every Walmart, Target, Bestbuy, Circuit City, Toys R Us, and what have you gets them on time. Your distributor gets them that day, and then you have to pay for overnight shipping so that you can get them the next day which eats into your already pathetic mark up.
The only saving grace are your used games. We generally offer 50% of what we resell them for, which most of the time blows away what Gamestop offers for games, and generally undercut their used prices by $5-$10.
We carry everything from Atari 2600 to PS3, and though most of our sales are generated from PS2 era and newer stuff, we do sell a lot of classic stuff. The problem though is with ebay and craigslist, we don't get as much of that stuff as we used to. Or rather we don't get as much of the stuff people are actually looking for. In times past, a guy would bring in say some SNES stuff. It would mostly be junk, but maybe he'd have some Mario, Zelda, RPGs stuff like that. Guaranteed sellers. The sales of that stuff would cover what you paid out for his common crap that would sit on the shelf forever. Now, they sell the good stuff online, and just bring in the leftover crap.
We've branched out a bit and started carrying licensed merchandise. Everything from Mario toothbrushes to steering wheel covers. The stuff sells like gangbusters around the holidays, and we have a 100% markup on it.

[Timber]

I've been working in the industry (indy shops) for about the past 10 years. I know how things work and I know how to make a decent profit on things. It's just that almost all the stores around here are doing things ass backwards and failing at it, hard. Most of them offer trade that's negligibly higher than GS and only price their games $2-$5 less than GS. If I had the start-up capital I'd open up a spot tomorrow (I know a perfect location in the area too).

Licensed merchandise has always been something I wanted to carry and I could never get any of the owners I was working for to carry them. If I ever do get things up and going I'll be hitting you up for a decent distributor on the stuff.