Last fall (pre-election), my husband and I bought a local game store. The original owner had run the game store successfully for decades and wanted to retire. He sold us the business for basically the cost of his remaining stock. It was an amount we had in our savings account – still an investment, but we didn’t go into debt for it. We took over the lease on the retail space. The store had weathered the 08 recession and Covid and was still profitable. The profits weren’t massive but enough to comfortably raise our family on. The store has a lot of regular customers and is locally beloved. We thought buying a profitable business with an established customer base was a good bet.

Then the tariffs hit. We aren’t sure we’re even going to be able to keep the bread-and-butter products in stock. It’s a disaster. We figure we have two choices at this point: 1) Liquidate the current stock, break the lease, take the L, and cringe at the expensive lesson learned or 2) Pivot the store away from a strict retail shop to a gaming cafe model where consumables are the main product sold. This would require further investment to buy the necessary equipment to run it as a cafe, which may save the business, or it could drive us into debt if the gamble doesn’t pay off.

Obviously we made this business move at the absolute worst time. What’s the best thing to do now?