Danger is his middle name

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A Facebook conversation with pictures, names, and places blocked out. The author's fake middle name is Danger. "Quick question. Is it mandatory for every [name of store redacted] location to have at least one hot girl working there?"]

The brief answer to your question, good sir, is AW HELL NO. 

To give a more detailed answer: it's people like you who make my job difficult. At least once a day, some invariably male person asks me if I even play video games. (Answer: Yes.) Dudes ask me about my relationship status so often that I have an elaborate made-up boyfriend cover story in place, so I won't ever have to explain that I'm both single and totally not interested. (Someone asked me once what my boyfriend's job was. My fake boyfriend has a fake job.) Grown-ass men tell me LAFF RIOT stories about how bad their girlfriends / wives / random acquaintances who might be women / so on suck at video games, and then stand there and wait for me to laugh along with them. (Hahahaha nope.) Little boys stand right in front of me and tell their parents that they don't want to talk to me because "girls don't know anything about video games."

The implication in complaints like this is that the "hot girl" (READ: female employee) wasn't hired because of her knowledge and qualifications, but because "gamers" (READ: lowest-common-denominator douchebros who sometimes play video games) like "hot girls." Either the "hot girl" is taking the job from a "gamer," or she's there to trick "gamers" into spending more money.  

Our store management, self included, is majority women. (And our part-time chick is a lesbian, so good luck with that, bros! Ask her about her boyfriend's job.) We've all been working at the store for years, and we weren't hired on as tokens. Diversity in the staff down at the shallow end is important for any retailer, because women and other assorted non-bro types have money to spend, too. And yet, even if no women, gay men, anti-sexists, or gender rebels ever in the history of ever bought any games for themselves, if video game stores really did go ahead and hire otherwise unqualified female models to jockey their registers, it would still hurt their sales. 

Why?

A large chunk of the people shelling out all that money for those video games for the coveted men and boys age 12-to-21 set... are their moms.

WHOOPS FOR YOU!