By late 1983, the gaming side had become so large, that I decided to split the business into two shops. As it turned out, doubling rents at the old location made it more reasonable to stay with a single shop, so only a few months later, the entire stock was in a single, albeit significantly larger, shop. Finding new premises was not very difficult. However, getting out of the contract for the old before normal termination date turned out to be much more difficult than I expected, partly due to a declining business market, but eventually there was someone who wanted to move in, and that the landlord would accept. This went well, and being in the shop worked well for my programming efforts.
Economic realities have a way of messing up plans.
Shops were closing in the recessive crunch of declining business and spiraling rents 1991-92. Atari started closing down. I had orders for large batches of TT030 machines for large companies, and Atari could not deliver. Times were tough, and frustrating. The shop was packed down, and although I retained a mail-order customer base for the Atari products, I figured that without a shop the book side was dead.