Misadventures of a Retail Game Guy: Episode 3

Written by Coldguy

Tuesday, 14 October 2008 00:46

All right, this is what you all have been waiting for my very first day working in the shop! Again names have been altered what what I am saying is 100% true.

Welcome to Retail how may I help you?

Well here I am, first day on the job. Now what? Well for one I was not placed in the system (doh) so I had to do something that I was well accustomed to, being the pitch man. Now for those who do not know, the pitch man is someone who convinces you that not only is what you have is awesome, but you have to get it right now. Today it was not a game or system, but rather the store itself. I had to bait people to come in, check it out, and tell them what makes us different from the guys upstairs. Now if you are faced with this situation the best thing to do is practice over and over again until you come with something you are conformable style and emotional level to get the buyer excited.

However this was not the case for me, I was thrown into this and thankfully my public speaking tips came in, and came in well. I have gotten so well at this that I became the go to greaser for other people, I warm them up, move on to the next person, while they work their skills to complete a sale. This tag teaming actually works well if you know what you were doing, which wasn't exactly the case.

The store has been opened for about 2 full days now, and one thing that we needed to do is guard the items, since they were not pulled out for storage. Ah this process is a pain in the ass for anyone who ever worked in retail, but I will briefly discuss how it works: first you arrange the games in alphabetical order by the system. Once that is done take the shelf and bring it back to the counter. Take the game out of the box, place it into a CD case, once there you then place it into the shelf and organize it again in alphabetical order. Once that is done you print a label, stick it on the case, and write "display only" on it. Return games to appropriate shelf and repeat for every game in the store. All the while keeping an eye on customers to make sure they do not lift them from the shelves.

Sucks doesn't it? Well it was made worse when the Owner told us she wanted every game to be resealed without the game in it, why I do not know. This process in itself is a pain to do, but I shall share it with you. Take the game, controller, whatever and place it on the table, pull out the plastic so it fits the item. Open the plastic up and place item between the two sheets as far to the corner as possible. Lower cutting arm without touching said arm so it can create a seal, if you touch said arm be prepared to be zapped across the room and get burnt. Lift arm once sealed and turn 90 degrees to seal again with cutting arm. Once you are done with that take the pro heater (yes that is the name of it) and blow heat onto plastic to shrink it to tight fit. Careful, if you do it to close you will make a hole and have to do the entire thing again and again until it is tight and complete.

Fun isn't it? Add on top of that dealing with customers coming into the store and the occasional purchase and you can quickly see it is something you are not going to get done in the near future. Speaking of customers we had a few good ones. One guy wanted to trade in his dreamcast and xbox for credit. We did and all the employees looked at each other and thought of the same thing: DVD player! Another wanted to trade in his gamecube, I went into the system to see how much a gamecube would be traded in for, this system does not categorizes gamecubes by system. What it does is forces you to enter the "color" of the system and then tells you to look for the system. Who ever programed it that way deserves a kick in the balls.

We also had the import guy come to the store. You know him, he likes fighting games, a lot. He goes to PlayAsia and get them imported, plays them until he masters the game, and then moves on to the next one. We got about 5 dreamcast titles that were "common" in japan that day, we bought them for about $5 bucks each. Now we then looked up the price of said games and it turns out they are around $25-$40 bucks each. This should go to any importer that if you want to sell an import game, find another import gamer to buy them off of you, make a lot more money that way.

Things were winding down and that was the end of day one. Tune in next time where I talk about day 2 of my job, and you can learn the joy of disc resurfacing!

This article was done by Coldguy

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