You may know Jonathon Schweer as a math teacher here at Southeast, but he also has a second job. Schweer recently opened his own gaming store, the Pink Elephant.

“An idea I kind of always had but recently a lot of the game stores in town started doing bad business practices,” Schweer said. “So I started looking around at other shops to play games in and host events, and then I just decided with my wife I was just like, why don’t we just start our own shop, we have a lot of money saved up. It’s something we can do, we talked about it and decided let’s do it!”

Schweer opened his store in November of last year.

“We sell magic, The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, Dragon Ball Super, Digimon, My Hero Academia card game is releasing in May, so we pre-ordered pretty heavily for that, and we also have Dungeons and Dragons and some Star Wars Legion which is a miniature battle game.

There are plenty of difficulties in teacher and running a business. One of the main difficulties is time: you can’t be in both places at once.

“Luckily for this business, a lot of times people are coming to buy games at 5 o’ clock at night, so it’s pretty easy for me to teach during the day when school is out, at 3:30 I come down here. Some days when it’s not very busy I’ll bring my school laptop and I’ll be grading from the shop here and other days when it’s super busy, after everything is done I have to do some lesson planning, but it really helps the fact that this is kind of a night job and teaching is a day job.”

And of course we had to ask him…what’s up with the name?

“So originally we were going to call it The Break Room, but my wife wasn’t too excited about that,” Schweer said. “We were going to call it Rage Quit, which is kind of like a gaming reference when you flip the table over when you’re mad, … and I was thinking well I love the color pink and my wife, in her culture elephants are like a sacred animal and I was thinking something people would here and remember and I thought, ‘What about Pink Elephant?’ That’s something that’s unique to the business and you hear it and people think ‘oh yeah,’ so that connects to us.

Schweer says he’s found ways to use information from his store in the classroom, helping students see some real world math applications. If you’re interested in games, this is a place you’ll want to be.

Pink Elephant is currently located in 5120 E. Central Ave. Suite 2. Schweer is planning on moving to a larger location for more space for more tables, tournaments and events. He is also trying to start up a card game club at Southeast, and he mentioned that he wants students to get involved and try playing Star Wars Legion, which is a miniature battle game that he’s hoping to push a lot next year to high school level.