For most of my working life, I've been in some form of retail. I worked at a card shop and grocery store in high school. I worked at a big box hardware retailer in college. I spent nearly a decade after college working at Walgreens.

I've learned a lot of lessons in retail, many of which only apply to Magic in the abstract. But many more apply in such obvious ways that it's amazing we miss them.

Customer Service

Customer service is not all about being helpful. You may think that customer service is a store employee asking you "Can I help you find anything?" or "Can I take your order?" in a soothing tone, but it's much more than that. Whether you're trading out of your binder or selling out of a booth, you're playing the role of retailer. What can you do to make that trade?

Understand what your customer is looking for, even if they don't.

If Jim-Bob comes up to you asking for a Siege Rhino, they may be finishing a deck or they might just be starting to build it. Suggesting other cards or asking what else they need can immediately increase the size of the transaction, increasing your profit. Need Abzan Charm? Sorin, Solemn Visitor? Opening that dialogue and making it clear you're willing to sell or trade whatever they're looking for immediately puts you in a position to help both people reach their goals. Retail empires have been built on up-selling to customers.

Be approachable and noncombative.

How many times have you argued with a stranger over the value of a card? And how many of you have people that you're always willing, even eager, to trade with? It's because those folks are not a hassle to deal with.

If you establish yourself as a person that is a pleasure to deal with, people are more likely to want to work with you. Every store has that guy that nobody wants to trade with, just like each of us has had terrible experiences at retail stores or restaurants and never go back.

"Being nice" doesn't mean you can't get value. But as you establish relationships with other traders or customers, they become more willing to give you a little extra rather than deal with the other guy.

Removing Friction

You may have heard of Amazon.com. Amazon has brought a number of things to the forefront of modern sales techniques, but most prominent is their desire to remove the friction that slows down transactions.

In industry studies, you'll hear about an insane number of online shopping carts that go unpurchased. You may have even seen these abandoned shopping carts in brick and mortar retailers. Too often, it's more of a hassle to finish a transaction than it's worth. By removing even just a couple clicks in the checkout process, Amazon has increased profits tremendously.

Whether you're selling or trading, the faster you're able to "close a trade" or make a sale, the faster you can move on to the next one. Spending too much time looking up cards and ensuring that a trade is "exactly equal" takes time. You're often better off just leaving that dollar or two on the table and completing the trade rather than investing more time and coming up empty handed because neither you nor your customer would budge on your prices.

Your trade or sale is never completed until it's completed. As long as those cards are sitting on the table, there is a chance your customer will walk away.

Paying the Rent

"There are no Dollar Stores on Rodeo Drive"

This is a concept many in retail don't understand, especially at the LGS level.

Think of it like this: every inch of your store has a cost associated with it. If you're renting a 2,000 square foot retail establishment for $4,000 a month, then each square foot of that place has to generate an average of $2 in profit per month just to "pay the rent." Your trade binder is no different.

Whaaaaaaat?

What types of cards are you trying to trade for? If you're looking to trade for Gitaxian Probes and Delver of Secrets, then you'll have no problem achieving your goals with a binder full of Abzan Charms and Electrolyzes. If you're in the business of acquiring dual lands, you're going to want to make sure that binder is stocked with a higher level of merchandise.

Some analogies to explain this better:

• You don't go to a Kia dealership to buy a luxury car.
• You don't go to a fancy steak house to eat fried chicken.
• You don't go an art museum to see anime.

I'm not saying your binder, booth, or store should never have "cheap" cards in it, but it's hard to pay $4,000 a month in rent simply selling bottles of Mountain Dew and Snickers bars, and its hard to trade for dual lands with a binder full of draft scraps. There is no reason to sell something that will net you $1 profit when you could sell something else in that same space for a $2 profit.

The other element of this concept is that certain pages of your binder will simply be seen more than others. You often want high impact cards in the first few pages of your binder, special interest stuff in the middle, and "clearance" in the back.

Some people just aren't going to look through your entire binder and are not going to go all the way to the back on a second or third pass. Putting your hot movers up front along with the higher priced cards you're looking to get rid of will increase the likelihood of those cards being sold or traded. Putting special interest cards in the middle section of your binder allows them to get more exposure as people flip back and forth past them.

There are a number of cards that I'm not actively looking for but would have no reservations trading for if I came across them. Increasing my chances of finding them in your binder increases your chances of getting rid of them. Putting your "crap" in the back of the binder is a concession to the fact that not much is going to move from that location no matter what you put there, so no sense in tying up poor real estate with expensive tenants.

Visual Merchandising

One of the most surprising "tricks" I learned in my years of retail was a real lesson in human psychology. I would spend a decent amount of time creating an elaborate and visually appealing display and people wouldn't buy anything from it. I couldn't figure out why nobody was buying the merchandise--it was a prominent location, a great price, and a popular item. Why weren't they buying?

People don't like disturbing order. The world is full of chaos and nobody wants to be the person to introduce chaos to something that's organized. I went to my boss with my question and he showed me a simple trick: simply take a couple off the shelf. That's it.

Nobody is going to ask you to buy a booster pack when all you have is sealed boxes. Similarly, you may have noticed that nobody wants to "break up your playset" by trading for cards that you visually have four of on a page.

If you're fine with breaking up playsets to trade away, try putting a fourth copy of a card on a different page, you'll notice people are much more likely to ask about those cards than they were before.

Managing Your Stockroom

For many years I worked in management at Walgreens. Middle management at the store level resulted in working for a number of different general managers at a number of locations.

Each of them all had their own strengths and weaknesses, but the best all said the same thing: "door to the floor" -- a term that applied to every piece of merchandise that came in the back door.

Very little merchandise sells from the stock room. Seems like a simple concept right?

It's very unlikely that you'll always have all of your cards with you, so prioritizing your traveling inventory space to cards that will sell or trade quickly gives you more opportunities to sell or trade those cards. Sure, there is probably a guy somewhere that really wants your copy of Legacy Weapon, but how often do you run into that guy?

The other side of this coin is understanding that there is no profit in having inventory. Only profit in selling it.

It doesn't matter if you have "pretty much every card at home". Constantly bringing merchandise from your metaphorical (or literal) stockroom to your metaphorical (or literal) sales floor is critically important.

Applying Lessons

Identifying parallels and properly translating those parallels is akin to "porting over" a favorite deck from Legacy to Modern.

Whether you're in retail, finance, or manufacturing, there is a good chance you can apply lessons from other aspects of your life and career to your MTG Finance experience.

What do you do and what lessons can you bring to the table?