Confessions of a Game Store Clerk

[Richter Belmount]

Lmao^

[agbulls]

I had a similar conversation with people on many occasions.

My all time #1 favorite request from a customer when I was a store manager:

"Hi, I'm looking for the Nintendo Playboy."

[slip81]

What I though was so funny was the ammount of employees who thought that playing games at work was okay, and then getting mad when the can't do it.

Um, you have a job buddy, no buisiness will pay you to goof off. I work at a book store, I'm not allowed to read when it's slow.

[Push Upstairs]

Lmao^

I wish I was joking.

When people on here get on their rant about how bad employees are I just sit back and remember all the stupid crap and dumb customers I had to deal with. For every bad employee there are at least 20-30 bad customers.


Out of all the stuff that happened in my brief tenure as a video game employee there is only one I feel bad about (and it wasn't anything I did)

This older guy (40's-early 50's) would come in with his adorable daughter (maybe 5-6) and she would ask him simple questions...nothing anywhere near annoying and he would act all short tempered with her and borderline scream at her. I saw him like 3-4 times and he was always like that to his daughter. Sad really.

This is also the guy who wanted me to show him every single kid game in our Playstation collection and was mad we didn't have them organized by rating instead of alphabetically. Oddly, he was never short tempered with me.

[Nature Boy]

The only thing about that I didn't like was the self-righteous chest beating about how bad they all have it. I could say the same about every retail job I've ever had, and that's why I got out. (Yeah, I know they were asked to talk about it. Still, some of the interviewees seemed to have a better perspective than others.)

Exactly what I was thinking. You know, I worked retail for 7 or so years until I got an office job after university, and while I felt the same way about customers some time (I worked in a hobby store for part of that 7 years so some of the 'babysitting' and other complaints are definitily familiar), it was still *way* better, in my opinion, than the restaurant business (which I had lasted all of 3 months in prior to that 7 years).

It's a job that you don't actually require a lot of skills to do, and it's better than others (as a matter of opinion). So I don't feel sorry for you in that respect one iota.

[exit]

A couple of quotes that I found interesting

"We also hold systems that people want until an ad breaks. Every other week or so, we sit on about 40 Wiis but keep telling customers that we don't have any. They cannot be sold until the ads come out."

That's the same for Wal-Mart as well. Last week we had about 30+ Wii's in stock, but we couldn't sell them until that Sunday. God forbid that you tell a customer that information, I've done it twice and each time I spent 20 minutes hearing them bitch. I guess I'm too honest for my own good sometimes.

[Push Upstairs]

We held PS2 systems (post launch) all the time back when I worked at Best Buy.

Nothing new about saying you are out when you actually have some in.

[Wolfgunblood Garopa]

Ok, then would you only buy clothing from a store where the clothes are kept out of reach of the customers? People trying on clothing might actually affect your use of the clothing- it might have been stretched or torn, or stained, or smelly.

As much as you may want it to be, the clothing store analogy is just not applicable to this discussion. But to answer the question, I have no problem buying clothing off the rack in spite of the fact that other people may have touched it or tried it on, because when I get home I put newly bought clothes into a machine that washes them. And... clothing is not my hobby.

Now, I can completely understand if you are buying a game as a collector's item that you want to leave sealed, but if you are going to play the game anyway, what does it matter? How does it actually affect your use of the game?

Poofta! put it brilliantly in another thread:
"what pisses me off about conditions, is when people call it 'new' when its not. its opened? fuck you its not new. new means factory sealed. if you opened it, it aint new. i dont care if you ever played it or if everything is still there. its aint new! if the shrinkwrap fell off, its no longer new."

Is what I'm being sold at full retail price 'new'? If I'm buying a new game at a retail store, and that retail store is charging me full retail price for the 'new' game, it had better be factory wrapped, with no unwrapping or handling of the insides of the box/case.

And to answer the question of "how it affects my use of the game"... Ignoring the obvious possibility that the opened contents of the 'new' game are mishandled (see geneshifter's post above), I look at this as a question of principle: If you handle your business with integrity, and you care about how you spend your money, the point should never be reached where that question has any relevance.

If you accept gutted games as new, worst case scenario: you are getting taken. Best case: you are not being treated respectfully, as a patron of the store, and most definitely, as a gamer. This is not good.

I think it's important for a gamer to get his/her new game as 'NEW'. How many young gamers out there go into an Gamestop/EB excited to spend their money to experience the joys of going home and ripping open a brand new game, only to have to settle on a gutted 'new' game (because it's 'the last one' of course...), and getting home only to feel disappointed about the purchase? This is far, far beyond unacceptable.

[Griking]

Concerning the Gamestop opened but new game arguement; I have two problems with this practice. One as has ben mentioned before is that I just don't agree that an opened product is new any more. the other problem that I have (that is different from the clothing example) is that Gamestop sells used games for less than they sell new copies of the same game. If the game has been opened then I expect to pay the used price. Clothing stores don't have two different prices for an item.

[TurboGenesis]

Quick take on the "new" games thing.

(not taking a side) A good analogy would be buying a new car. When you take delivery of your new car, it WILL have miles on it. Something in the neighborhood of 10-50 miles on the odometer. No way around it. It has to be driven off the end of the line, into the rail yard, onto the train, off the train, onto a convoy and finally into location at your dealership. It is likely that 5-10 people will have driven your brand new car when you sign the papers.

On the games front, they hate to do it, but they can (and should) take 10% off your game that has been opened. It will ring up as 'Open and/or Shopwo' on the receipt. I have had to do this a couple of times and if they won't do it, I roll eyes, sigh, walk right out the door with out saying another word. Let them cancel that transaction. I'll go to the next place.

On reserves (at GSEB)- WTF is the point!?! Just go and try to reserve The Red Star.

When the game finally comes out and you waltz on in there and they don't have any? WTF!
games clerk "should have resreved buddy!"
disgruntled customer "you wouldn't let me dumb nutz!"

[jcalder8]

Quick take on the "new" games thing.

(not taking a side) A good analogy would be buying a new car. When you take delivery of your new car, it WILL have miles on it. Something in the neighborhood of 10-50 miles on the odometer. No way around it. It has to be driven off the end of the line, into the rail yard, onto the train, off the train, onto a convoy and finally into location at your dealership. It is likely that 5-10 people will have driven your brand new car when you sign the papers.

I was going to post almost the same thing. All retail jobs have their pain in the ass customers. My wife works at Starbucks and there are some real anal people who come in there but for my time and stress level I'd much rather work at a video game store.

[RPG_Fanatic]

well I agree with most of what I read except where the employee actually thought pre-orders were good for the customer. lol

Let me get this right ...let me give you $5 down on a game that you don't even have a hard release date on. Um yeah I can garentee a copy here huh. Well I can garentee I can walk into any other retail store around here on release day and buy it. 99% of the time the only thing that a pre-order does is 1) let the company gauge interest in a title(good for the company) and 2) let the company put your $5 with all the other suckers..whoops I mean customers...$5 and make 8 months of interest on it.(also good for the company). That is granted the release date doesn't get pushed a 6th time and you don't have to wait another 2 months.

Don't get me wrong, if I had a retail store, I'd want to do pre-orders too. You can garentee you're gonna sell X amount of copies, and you can so free loan money.

In todays video game market there's no reason at all to pre-order a disc game. IT WILL BE EVERYWHERE for a long time, and if you somehow happen to miss a psuedo-rare game that ends up going for $80 on ebay, I can garentee you're better off paying th $80 price tag once than paying for every piece of crap coming out that you think will dissapear quick because odds are it won't.

I agree me and my friend went to EB's he wanted to buy guitar hero II for the 360 and they said "did you reserve it?" we said no and they said sorry you have to reserve it to get any game on the day it comes out so we went to best buy and they had a shit load of them.

[Trebuken]

Everything that theses employees are asked to do is being derived from research data. All retailers are using data collected by only a couple of organizations, and thus they often react in the same way. What the employees are asked to do always relates to increasing revenue, or improving customer service. The new kick is trying to make retail workers be more productive without any compensation to the employee. Gamestore employyes (WALMART) need to unionize...

Anyways, was anyone else offended by this part of the article:

#5: My least favorite type is what I call an "LC," which stands for "Lonely Collector." Usually this is a 30+ year-old single dude who asks you for the rarest game or whatever, which of course we never have, and then talks to you about it for ages. They sometimes ask if you were into whatever it was they collected, but your answer didn't matter. They talk to you about it anyway, for an embarrassingly long amount of time. It's so awkward having to say, "Well, I'd better get back to work..." when your job should be talking to them, had they not made it so creepy.

That hurts...

[JSN]

In addition to all that’s been said about GameStop’s reservation ‘scam’, I can add another huge reason the corporate folks like to push them; unclaimed reservations.

Back when they used hardcopy paper reservation slips, anything still unclaimed three months after a games release was to be turned over to the DM. Now I’m sure any customer wanting to re-claim that reserve could, but not many would or did.

I ran a ~$2M store, and every 6 months would turn in around $2000 in unclaimed reserves (I always tried to re-contact these people first). Being in a town with a huge college student population may have given my store an exceptionally higher rate of unclaimed reserves, but I wouldn’t count on it. Multiply that by every store GS has... that’s a lot of free money going right into their bank accounts.

[megamaniaman]

Everything that theses employees are asked to do is being derived from research data. All retailers are using data collected by only a couple of organizations, and thus they often react in the same way. What the employees are asked to do always relates to increasing revenue, or improving customer service. The new kick is trying to make retail workers be more productive without any compensation to the employee. Gamestore employyes (WALMART) need to unionize...

Anyways, was anyone else offended by this part of the article:

#5: My least favorite type is what I call an "LC," which stands for "Lonely Collector." Usually this is a 30+ year-old single dude who asks you for the rarest game or whatever, which of course we never have, and then talks to you about it for ages. They sometimes ask if you were into whatever it was they collected, but your answer didn't matter. They talk to you about it anyway, for an embarrassingly long amount of time. It's so awkward having to say, "Well, I'd better get back to work..." when your job should be talking to them, had they not made it so creepy.

That hurts...

Yeah I am right there with you. What I got from this article was that most of these employees are smug bastards who look down at the customer and come to work to chat with their fellow employees and ignore the customer.

[kainemaxwell]

My FYE does the same gutting thing with games. I hate trying to explain to them that it is the last copy and we gut it for security reasons. Even when they complain I go out of my way to write on the receipt it was the last copy/gutted in case there is an issue with their title.

[Captain Wrong]

What I though was so funny was the ammount of employees who thought that playing games at work was okay, and then getting mad when the can't do it.

Um, you have a job buddy, no buisiness will pay you to goof off. I work at a book store, I'm not allowed to read when it's slow.

Yeah, that was the other thing that made me wanna do a Dr. Evil "boo frickin-hoo". I mean, did they really think they'd get paid to play games all day? Are there people that ignorant to not realize there are a lot of other things that go on at stores other than just helping customers?

And JSN confirmed a hunch I've always had about the reservations. Really, that's about the biggest scam they have going, IMHO. The one dude in the article may have drank the Kool-Aid, but reservations don't actually help the consumer in anyway. Helps the company a lot, though.

[djbeatmongrel]

i enjoyed the article alot.

Two things i will share my point of veiw on as a GS employee are reserves and gutted/opened new copies.

When it comes to reserves, known AAA sequels for reserve really aren't worth it most of the time if you plan on getting it on the day of release. Sometimes there are shortages upon initial release so it is a double edged sword. If you are sure you are going to frequent a location and get a game on release, the reserve doesnt hurt IMO.

I will say you should reserve niche titles when ever possible (2d fighters/arcade style games/quirky japanese titles). These are games you are going to want to stay on top of, most recent example being Chulip and the soon to be released Raiden III. Reserving games like this lets companies know there is more of a demand for titles like this and will demand a larger print run.

On the subject of opened new games. Stores that follow precedure mindfully should have safe unmarked product availible if you happen to get the gut copies. Given the volume of games we sell, the few employees staffed at any given time, and the high possibilty of theft; the gut process is probably the safest thing we can do to without having LP (loss prevention) issues. As a collector I know that virginal tearing of the factory shrink is a cherished feeling but you have to see corporate has to watch their ass from the few bad seeds.

[hezeuschrist]

Or, Gamestop could pony up a few pennies a week for display insert art like the major rental chains do. There's no need for them to gut anything, when i worked at Game Rush we had display inserts for EVERYTHING. You need to fill a shelf with display copies? Grab some empty amorays and stuff them with for-display-only inserts.

They're simply too cheap to do it. It's a positive business practice in the eyes of the customer and they simply don't give a shit to go that distance.

[FantasiaWHT]

I'm trying to think of another retail situation where the most valuable part of the product is taken out of its packaging, and the packaging is left accessible to the customer. Usually it's the other way around - opened/demo electronics is the first thing I think of.

I'll grant that there are mishandling issues, and if a disc is scratched up, then yes, the customer would deserve a discount. If it had been used as a demo (or used for any purpose) then it should be sold at the used price (it can't be actually sold as used, because that would result in a huge loss for the store - shrinking out a new game and adding a new one).

But a new game is one that hasn't been used, not one that hasn't been handled. When there's no use and no damage to the disc, what's the customer losing? The 1/2-cent worth of plastic?

Granted, it's going to tick some people off, but one of the maxims of retail is to put the product into the customers' hands. They are much more likely to buy something they've touched and observed themselves. New games aren't gutted to piss customers off, they're gutted because that allows the customer to see every game the store has up close. The gain from that is so much more than the loss from the rare customer who feels they have lost something of value if a game has been opened.