I promised you guys some posts. There has been none, I know. My motivation to do things is at an all time low. The arcade won't be opening this month. Sad.

Out of the last 14 months the arcade has been closed for eight of them. I know other arcades, and venues in general, have had it even worse than this. Would be interesting to know how everyone is making ends meet.

My costs quadrupled with the new place. I had a rainy day fund, which I really wanted to hold on to, so I started selling from day one. I sold most things at cost, maybe a few hundred euros of profit. Margins aren't huge, and taxes account for 1/5 of the price.

Selling also meant I could upgrade some games to newer versions. It seemed like a really good idea at the time.

Two months later the State Treasury was like, hey guys, we'll subsidize your losses if they're more than 30%. Great! Except it's all calculated based on income. So basically they compare the income from a set period to the same one from the year before.

I had ticket sales in April and May '19, and I sold cabs in April and May '20. My income only dropped 20 something percent. Well, no money for me then.

There's also the double whammy of the fact that income did not equal profit in this case. Had I received subsidies, that would actually have been profit for me. Instead I just sold some things I had bought before and more or less made nothing.

So I then dipped in to my rainy day savings and coasted June and July '20. The arcade opened again at the end of July. No surprise to anyone the arcade really didn't get off to a flying start, and it was obvious I wasn't going to claw back the money I had spent the prior months.

August '20 was worse than August '19. I started selling cabs again in September. Two months later the State Treasury was, yo guys, we hear you, we'll help you out again. Same set of rules as the last time!

Well, everybody can already guess how that went for me.

14 months in to this and I have gotten sweet FA from the government. I did get some money from the city of Helsinki. The sum was completely negligible in the grand scheme of things, but I appreciate that the process wasn't completely stupid.

There's a third round of government subsidies coming up in two weeks. This time I've played by their rules and just sat on my ass, spent all of the arcade's savings and all of my personal ones as well. We'll see if I get screwed over by some technicality.

If that were to happen, I have to start thinking globally. I seem to have exhausted all of my selling options in Finland. The future of the arcade may or may not rest on if I can get decent shipping quotes to Europe.