Robots for hire: This Toronto startup is making automation accessible to small businesses
In early 2022, Kris Fekete, an entrepreneur from Newmarket, found himself with a problem he’d never anticipated: he had too many Magic cards and didn’t know what to do with them. Fekete is the co-owner of Enter the Battlefield, a store that specializes in collectible card games — the kind for which players strategically build their own decks, purchase by purchase, much as an army amasses an arsenal.
The store looks like a German beer hall, with rows of trestle tables where people congregate, custom decks in hand, to play Pokemon, Flesh and Blood, Yu-Gi-Oh and, of course, Magic: The Gathering, the original collectible game. “Magic is our bread and butter,” says Fekete. “It makes up 60 per cent of our business.” In the main room, merchandise lines shelves and display cases off to the side of the gaming area. “It can be expensive to rent space to play these games,” Fekete adds. “But we invite people for free.” The hope is that if players come in, they’ll buy stuff, too.
The market for cards is like the market for used LPs. Customers sell items in exchange for cash or store credit. And the trade is brisk — too brisk, Fekete has learned, for his small staff to keep pace. In the back of the store, there’s a secondary space where Fekete keeps the backlog of unsorted Magic cards — an estimated 3 to 5 million — in shoeboxes stacked floor to ceiling.
But what to do with them? Magic cards, Fekete explains, are an esoteric currency. There are upwards of 20,000 unique cards in existence, and while most sell for mere pennies, some are worth tens of thousands of dollars. He could liquidate the collection to a wholesale distributor, but he’d be getting a fraction of its worth. He could hire an employee to sift through them, but human labour is so expensive it’s barely worth the cost. “This is the bane of my existence,” he says, gesturing to the boxes. Read More...
