Two years in, Magpie and Crow is a downtown fixture

Three hundred people turned up to the soft opening. Some of them drove two hours. For a shop selling used Super Nintendo cartridges on Wait Avenue, that is not a normal first day.

Magpie and Crow is a retro video game and collectibles shop in downtown Wake Forest, run by co-owners Alec Featherstone and Adele Edwards. It opened in September 2023 and marked two years in business last fall, which in independent retail is the point where you stop being a new business and start being a fixture.

What is on the shelves

Hundreds of games across console generations, going back to Sega Master System and running through Super Nintendo and PlayStation 1. Arcade cabinets on the floor. Then the wider haul: comic books, trading cards, tabletop games, cassettes, CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs, manga and anime.

The part that separates this from a chain is how the stock is sourced. None of it is bulk-ordered from a distributor. The owners buy it themselves, largely at weekend garage sales, and curate what makes the shelf. That is slower and less predictable than ordering a pallet, and it is the reason the inventory is worth a drive. A distributor sends everybody the same forty titles. A garage sale route through eastern Wake County sends you whatever the county happened to own.

The room is the product

Featherstone and Edwards built the space to feel like a specific memory rather than a store. Wood-panelled walls, vintage furnishings. Edwards described the intent plainly to Indy Week: “We wanted it to feel like your grandma’s basement.”

Featherstone’s description of what they are running is a “geeky, nerdy YMCA,” which is a better summary of the business model than anything on the shelves. The retail pays the rent. The reason people come back is that it is somewhere to be.

That shows up in the programming. Video game tournaments. Dungeons & Dragons sessions. Seminars on keeping old hardware alive, which is a genuine problem once a console passes thirty and the capacitors start going. A rotating monthly display for local artists. The arcade cabinets double as donation boxes for local nonprofits, so the quarters go somewhere.

What to know before your first visit

If you are bringing a kid, the arcade cabinets are the easiest entry point and they take quarters that go to charity, so bring some. If you are hunting a specific title, call ahead rather than driving over, because the stock turns on whatever came in that week and there is no central database saying what is on the shelf.

If you have a box of this stuff in an attic, ask before you take it to the dump. The owners do their own sourcing, so a shop like this is the natural first call. Worth knowing: the controllers, cables and power supplies people throw out are often the hard part of getting a thirty-year-old console running again, and they are worth more than sellers expect.

Why retro games work here and not everywhere

Retro gaming retail is a hard category. The margins are thin, the inventory is finite and getting scarcer, and the internet will sell the same cartridge to anybody with a credit card. Shops that survive tend to do it by being a place rather than a supplier.

Wake Forest is a reasonable place to try it. The town skews toward families with school-age kids, and the parents in that bracket are the exact cohort that grew up on the consoles being sold. A shop that lets a forty-year-old show a ten-year-old how a cartridge works is selling nostalgia to one of them and novelty to the other, in the same transaction. That is a durable proposition in a way that a trend-driven shop is not.

It also helps that downtown Wake Forest has enough other reasons to be there. The Town of Wake Forest’s permit record shows The Planted Bean on South White Street, Railway Smoke and Beverage a few doors along, and The Hideaway around on East Roosevelt. A Saturday can absorb all of them.

One detail to check

The shop’s listed address is 145 Wait Ave. The town’s permit record also shows Magpie and Crow at 143 Wait Ave, permitted in April this year. Adjacent numbers on the same street usually means a second unit rather than a move, but the two addresses are both in circulation and we have not confirmed which door to use. Go to 145 and look for the sign.

Where it fits in town

Wake Forest has added a lot of retail this year, most of it in two clusters: the Rogers Branch Road corridor out by Heritage, and the older downtown blocks. We mapped both in our look at the 44 new businesses that opened here in 2026. Magpie and Crow predates that wave by two years, which makes it something more useful than a new opening. It is evidence that the downtown independent model works here, and a good part of the reason other owners have been willing to sign leases on the same blocks since.

Two years in, the shop has also become a reference point for people arguing about what downtown should be. Wake Forest, like every town its size in the Triangle, has a live debate about whether its centre should chase visitors or serve the people already here. A retro game shop that draws drivers from two hours away while also hosting a weeknight D&D table is quietly doing both, which is a more useful answer than either side of that argument usually produces.

Our read: the anniversary matters more than the opening did. Anybody can draw 300 people to a launch. Still being there at year two, with the same two owners doing their own buying, is the harder number.