It All Makes Sense Now

In the past when I've asked for EB gift certificates for Christmas, birthdays and lunar festivals, I often listen to a tirade about how bad it is to go into the stores to get them. Now, I have nothing against EB. I tend to make friends with the managers of my local EB and most of the time the day staff are actually people who like to chat about games AND provide good customer service unlike the evening staff which tends to consist of teenagers and college students who just want to sit around and stare at the walls.

That said, a lot of the corporate policies drive me nuts. Not nuts enough to never shop there again, but they are annoying. Penny Arcade has a great strip up today that shows how anomalous these practices are when taken out of the videogame store context and applied elsewhere.

As Tycho says in his post,

Try to imagine another shop working this way, and you may find your mind's normal operation interrupted. There is, of course, one other business that operates in this fashion: a pawn shop. All they need is a couple firearms and a sketchy mofo, and the illusion will be complete.

I've been particularly annoyed in my ongoing search for the Guitar Hero wireless controller. It seems that everyone else is seeing them in Best Buys and Future Shops around the country, but EB says they're not even going to be available until mid-January. I still like getting my games at EB because they tend to have rare games that you just never see at Walmart or other non-game specific stores, but even that is becoming less and less the case.

Heck, I'm just going to post his whole rant about it.

Emerging from the dim cavern of the Electronics Boutique into the fully lit mall, I blinked several times and tried to adjust. A single, determined bat still clung to my sleeve. I shook him off, as gently as he allowed, and tried to remember why I shopped for games in a place covered in lichen.

There have been numerous instances over this densely packed holiday season where I would be rebuffed by dedicated gaming retailers for not preordering popular games, only to go across the street to Best Buy (a store I utterly detest) where a young woman simply opens a locked case, and inside this case is a stack of Dead Risings (or whatever) twenty deep. At no point was I required to thumb-wrestle a cashier, bow my head in contrition, or leave the store empty-handed.

I could never make sense of it, until my last visit. When it comes to the management of a business, as long as people are not shot, drugged, or enslaved in the course of its standard operation I understand that a certain amount of ruthlessness and treachery may enter in. I put together the idea that they pushed pre-orders to the extent that it allowed them to truly refine their margins. That may be a part of it, but I think it's a side-effect: I think they sell just enough product to maintain their fabulously lucrative used business, and no more. No other theory resonates so completely. I love the store I go to, because the men and women who operate it are genuine enthusiasts with an encyclopedic knowledge of the medium. But the corporation's strange aversion to new product has made them a poor choice for the true, day one devotee. They tend to buy new, they don't need a disc cleaner, and they often eschew strategy guides - opting instead for online assistance. It's the worst sort of customer for their model.

Man, I wish I could write as well as that guy.