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Life Behind The Counter
MTV Games has a run-down on a blog that relates what it is like behind a videogame store counter. The blog, DayintheLifeofVideogames relates the best and worst moments from their unique perspective on the games industry. From the article: "So pity the game store employee anxious to sell apples to people shopping for oranges. 'I die a little bit inside each time,' Post said. 'I think people are afraid to take a chance.' He gets just that close to getting people to buy the good stuff, but he said that if people haven't seen a TV commercial for a game, it's very hard to sell them on it. And cheer Post and Whitman for their acts of retail kindness, like warning customers buying EA's recent 'NFL Head Coach' that it doesn't actually let people play football. 'I warned two people, and both of them said, 'I'm glad you told me. I don't want it now,' ' Post said. 'You want to make the sale, but you don't want the guy to go home and say, 'That guy doesn't even know what he's talking about.'" It would be against the scriptures not to mention the most holy of holy books at this juncture. Yay, though I walk through the shadow of the non-believers, always do I keep the Acts of Gord in my mind.
How does the customer know whether the salesman is giving him good advice or just trying to push some POS game for other reasons, like higher profit margins or pressure from management?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Another advantage of Steam: Many games have playable demos you can try before you buy. Many other good games do too. This used to be much more common, such as Duke Nukem 1,2 3. And yes, they promise that there will be a demo version of Duke Nukem Forever as soon as it comes out... (swear to you)
Shareware isn't dead, it has just evolved. Anything that you make worth selling should be worth letting someone try out for an hour or two (or a chapter or two) first.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The point that hits hardest is the one thing a lot of the Gamestop/EB managers seem to get wrong. If people wanted cheap, they'd go to Walmart. But they come into the GAMES store for the large selection of games, and the assumption that people behind the counter know what's good and what's not. If someone asks for a recommendation and you go for the easy sale, and recommend a piece of crap game, you'll come off looking like a tool and people won't come back to your store anymore. "The guy at the store told me my son would like this game, but it sucked. That guy didn't know what he was talking about. Screw that, I'll just go to Best Buy next time." But if you recommend a great game, people might come back next week or next month and buy another, and another. Or maybe if you're really lucky they'll recommend your store to their friends.
I am a semi-regular at an EB Games in Portland, Oregon. I reluctantly use them to purchase new PC games on release day mainly out of convinience- it is on my drive home from work. My wife and I refer to the store as 'Rust Proofing' due to their excessive hard-sell of the extended warranty on every object in the store. There have been many times where I have had to repeatedly insist that no, I don't want to insure my DVD/CDs as I am very careful with them and have never once had a scratched disc.
I have long since abandoned trying to ask questions of the staff that stray from their script as they seem determined to veer me back into their needlesly complicated Wii pre-preorder down payment plan or DS cartridge insurance.
This blogger sounds more self-aware than the robo-teens at my local EB. I must imagine that the pressure from management to sell their high profit rust proofing is pretty intense. Couple that with the high ratio of mouth breathing junior high kids, and it has got to be a thoroughly maddening and soul crushing job.
I worked in a gamestop for a year and a half (granted a few years back but still) and I don't feel like these guys at all. Sure it might be a lot different if you actually own the store but...
For a context the year I worked included the GC/360 release year.
For a simple sales monkey the gig was pretty straight forward. For most of the year the load was pretty light and generally we had a lot of free time to just tidy up the store, chat, or just play the video game demos. Around Christmas (especially after) was busy and we always had a line an a sea of stuff to package for resale behind the counter but that was really the worst of it.
The only things that we had to do (at the time) was push the subscriptions to game informer, which in all actuality was/is a pretty good magizene (I still get an issue for free somehow as part of a subscription) and try to sell warrenties/strategy guides. Fortunetly our boss was pretty lax and we really only had to push the subscriptions.
Overall the crowd was also a good mix. Sure you got a lot of guys coming in and many buying Madden, GTA, etc but we also had a fair amount of females (mostly buying for someone else), parent/children, and the 'hardcore' crowd looking for the rare/older stuff or the cult hits.
People in generally were pretty receptive to our advice. We always made sure to warn parents about M rated games and many of them seemed pretty grateful to know about it (though their kids weren't) and often gave some recommendation. If you try to force a game on someone they're going to think you're full of it usually but being able to offer advice or recommend a game similiar to another game usually ended up with most people leaving with a decent game.
To me it kinda sounds like the people with the blog are more of the type of gamer who focuses on the genre pushing, artistic style , or in generally the type of games that usually don't make mainstream but are what makes gaming worth it for most of us. I enjoy the games as well but I feel like you have to understand they're not for everyone and games are about fun. Plenty and plenty of people buy and play Madden and have a blast why should you try to dissuade them from that*.
There's also a good chance that working there will be one of the best (not pay wise) job's I'll ever had. It was a blast.
*Other than the fact that EA is a terrible company.
I was at the counter and this woman that I presume was the mother of two small children, a boy and a girl, came into the store to look around.
The boy wanted a specific game and the mother was asking me about it. Her daughter was running around being a little shit, intentionally knocking things off of the shelves and talking far too loudly. The mother was in mid sentence, she reached out and caught the little girl by her pony tail spanked her twice on the bottom and sat her down on the floor without breaking the cadence in her speaking or breaking eye-contact with me.
It kind of went something like this...
"So, is this a an action game, a puzzle game or a " --Catch, WHACK WHACK, plop-- " strategy game?"
I wanted to thank her, because it was going to be me that had to pick up all of the things that the little girl had knocked onto the floor.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I too, like many Slashdot readers probably, have spent some time working at a games shop. I worked for a year at a local shop in a relatively small city in Iowa (150k pop. or so). http://www.videogamedepot.com/
I worked this year during about the exact midpoint of the current gen's lifetime, when the PS2 was pulling away, though you had some great releases on GC like Viewtiful Joe, and Soul Calibur II (the GC version sold WAY more than the other 2) and the Xbox was actually starting to sell. We had a large collection of used "classic" games as well as quite a large selection of imports. We had movies, anime, all the usual game store stuff. Unfortunately, most of our import sales were online sales, and since then the online business of the store has declined dramatically.
Being a gamer, and quite a geek, I was of course excited to sell the people the games I liked, and got rather dissapointed on the days when all we would see were a few people looking for the new Madden, etc. But I did make a point of knowing about even these games, even though I hadn't really played much of them. I learned a lot from my co-workers' experiences as well, and became quite a bit more knowledgable about video games than I was before.
The best part about it was the fact that we had a policy to tell it like it is. We never lied, but we never said "buy that" or "don't buy that" without a reason either. It's just a matter of understanding what your customer is looking for, and making your best effort to sell them exactly what they want to play, even if you don't like it. In other words, don't try to dissuade people on entire genres, but rather on the worst games of each genre.
Did I like working there? Heck yes! Was it rediculously annoying at times? Oh yeah. Would I do it again? Maybe, but not long term.
One other thing I found to be very different in my experience was the last section about playing less since working there. My game playing habits increased tenfold while working at VGD, largely due to the discount I received.