Really, bro?

Just had a guy get mad at me because we would "only" give him $397 for his PS4 if he traded it to us towards buying an Xbox One.

UM, THAT'S WHAT YOU PAID FOR IT IN THE FIRST PLACE, DIPSHIT! 

People, man. 

Every single next-gen customer

"I GOT THIS XBOX ONE BUT THERE AREN'T ANY GAMES FOR IT"

"Actually, there are two dozen-"

"THERE AREN'T ANY GAMES FOR IT"

Saturday night customers

"He looks like a lost, stoned Wolverine." - Free-Shirt

Real-time blog update

Someone is in here right now talking about an older relative she has whose hair is so long that she has to "fish hair out of her butt" every morning.

I don't know what that means, and I'm not going to ask.

Help.

Retail solidarity

I am at the airport. I realized I don't have any earbuds, so I stopped into one of the stores to get some. They were doing a fundraiser where you could buy a phone card to send to soldiers overseas.

"Sure," I said. "That sounds nice." The register jockey was surprised and delighted.

"I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR SO LONG FOR SOMEONE TO SAY YES," she said.

There is nothing more disheartening than soliciting donations at a retailer. We were doing one dollar donations for a research hospital over Christmas, and while the company did raise a lot of money, many people would throw a fit and shout things like "THAT HOSPITAL SHOULD GIVE *ME* A DOLLAR." Umm... why? For being an asshole? Not everyone has a dollar to spare, but that doesn't mean you have to be a jerk to cancer patients.

Speaking of jerks, the guy in front of me at Starbucks just now made the "IF IT DOESN'T SCAN IT MUST BE FREE LOL" joke.

Fuck that guy.

I'm tired of explaining how electronics work to people

So, some dude was complaining about some game that's on PS4 but not PS3 blah blah blah yawn.

"MAN, THEY'RE JUST TRYING TO FORCE YOU TO BUY THE NEW SYSTEM."

"Well, no one wants to develop for an outdated system." I didn't go out of my way this time to explain the concepts of "resource management" and "marketability," like I have to for the Wiiple.

"THE PS3 WAS BRAND NEW LAST YEAR!"

False.

"The PS3 came out in 2006."

"WELL, WE JUST GOT OURS IN 2010."

I should note here that 2010 was not "last year."

"HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT'LL BE BEFORE THERE'S A PS5? TWO YEARS?"

Nor is it two years ago.

At this point, I've started just walking away from people who want to whine at me about the PS4. In particular, the whiners about backwards compatibility.

Hey, guess what, whiners! Sony tried making a backwards compatible current-gen system. It's called the first generation PS3. You know why they took it out? Because sales for the first-gen PS3 were terrible, because the system was too expensive. If they had made a backwards-compatible PS4, you'd be in here right now complaining at me about how for that price, a gaming system should come with a car.

If you want to play PS3 games, keep your PS3. I mean, I have six systems hooked up to my TV, and I turned out ok.

...

Why is everybody looking at me like that? 

Bravely Default is here!

HOORAY!

A picture of my cat, posed with my copy of Bravely Default. She's very photogenic.

Everyone at the store has been playing the Bravely Default demo for weeks, because we're those sorts of people. We've also been telling everyone to pre-order it, because both Nintendo handheld releases and JRPG* releases in general are usually a nightmare of underavailability.

I still have lingering trauma from the Fire Emblem: Awakening release.

Anyway, I wasn't working today, so I made a super special trip to the store to pick up my reserved copy. Sure enough, the store was already sold out, because we only got enough copies to cover our reserves. As I was standing in the store, a frumpy JRPG nerd stomped up to the register.

"DO YOU HAVE BRAVELY DEFAULT!?"

"No," said bossbro. "We can order it for you, or you can download it from the eShop."

Frumpy JRPG nerd stomped his way back out of the store.

What follows is an open message to my fellow JRPG people:

Hey, ladies and dudes. You know how every time a new JRPG comes out, none of the stores have it in stock? That's because demand for these games is super low.

STOP WHINING ABOUT IT AND DO SOMETHING INSTEAD.

The stock that stores order for low-demand games is directly based on the number of reserves they get for it. My store was the only one of my chain in the entire district that got any copies of the new Project Diva game, because we were the only store that had reserves on it.

We had one reserve. We got two copies. The second one sold to a walk-in on launch day, and I haven't seen another copy since.

And don't give me any of that crap about "WELL, I WASN'T PLANNING ON GETTING IT" or "WELL, I'M JUST MAKING AN IMPULSE BUY." If you went out to buy it on the release day, then it wasn't "an impulse buy," and you are a dirty, dirty liar.

If you want more Japanese games to come to the United States, and in greater numbers, you need to commit to buying them on launch day.

Now, I know not everyone can afford to buy launch-day games. This rant is not for you. This rant is for the swarm of people I see every launch day who refuse to commit even one day ahead of time to buying a game on day one, even though they were clearly planning on doing so anyway, and complain when we don't have a pile of extra copies waiting for them.

Every retailer does pre-orders now, as do the manufacturers, typically. It's not like you don't still have a choice of whom to give your money dollars to. Most places (Amazon, StameGop) don't charge extra for pre-orders, either.

PRE-ORDER YOUR SHIT instead of complaining to me about lack of availability, for a market the manufacturers didn't know existed. With the onset of downloadable games, manufacturers have basically no reason to print physical copies at all outside of consumer demand. It's still hard to find physical copies of Fire Emblem, a year after launch. Hakuoki: Memories of the Shinsengumi barely had a physical launch at all.

I'm sure Bravely Default will be the same way. 

*Today, someone asked me what "JRPG" stands for, and I said "Japanese RPG." Then Ladyboss stepped in and added "...role-playing game." I forgot to translate that part. Whoooops.

Reading is fundamental

In my store, we have an "Under $10" section for the Xbox 360 games. Unfortunately, we have too many busted old 360 games, so the wall section filled up and overflowed into what we in the biz refer to as a "dump bin."

A guy was standing in the middle of the Under $10 section, right in between the dump bin and the wall.

"Hey," he yelled. "Do you have an "Under $10" section?"

"You're standing on top of it," I said. "You're literally surrounded by it."

"Oh." He looked down, and immediately grabbed Defiance, of all things. "Is this game any good?"

"....no."

New blog catchphrase

Found this gem on the Facebooks today:

[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A Facebook conversation with pictures, names, and places blocked out.

A: When did killing dragons go from this [screenshot from Super Mario World] to this [screenshot from Skyrim]?

B: [A], those are dinosaurs... Do u even lore bro ] 

DO U EVEN LORE BRO.

NO FINER WORDS HAVE EVER BEEN WRITTEN IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

I finally have a quick retort for when literally anybody tries to argue with me about Zelda minutiae.

"Wait, so there's actually a Zelda timeline?"

"Do u even lore, bro?"

"So, it is always the same Link, or what?"

"I said, do u even lore, bro?"

"Well, the Zelda has to be the same, right?"

"UMM DO U EVEN LORE BRO."

If I weren't too lazy to find and paste a gold star graphic onto the image up there, B would be getting our first-ever Greetings from the Shallow End of the Video Game Industry gold star.

B, you are an internet hero.

PS4s: An Ongoing Saga

The only thing more annoying than the swarm of PS4 people calling when we don't have any PS4s is the swarm of people calling when we do have PS4s in stock.

Allow me to explain.

None of these people can afford to buy a fucking PS4. You tell them we have some, and it's always:

"Oh, how much does it cost?"

Followed by one of two things:

"OMG THAT IS TOO EXPENSIVE FORGET IT"

or

"Do you think you'll have any when I get paid on [date]?"

WHY ARE YOU CALLING AROUND ASKING FOR A PS4 IF YOU'RE NOT PLANNING ON BUYING ONE TODAY!?

STOP WASTING EVERYONE'S TIME.

Whoops!

I accidentally opened the store two minutes early.

Don't tell the public I've gone soft.

Tablets

It is semi-widely known that selling electronics is not profitable at all, mostly because huge swaths of The Public are technologically illiterate, and as such, either return everything they buy because it "doesn't work" or just become high-maintenance thorns in the retailer's side. Tablets generally can't be resold after they've been returned, so unless the manufacturer has a deal allowing the retailer to return returned tablets, the retailer just has to eat a several-hundred-dollar loss.

Now, somewhere like The Apple Store that's selling their own products can afford to also have tech support and how-to classes- services that are built in to the iPad's high price. Somewhere like Target or Wal-Mart, however, has no post-sale tech support for tablets.

My store falls in the "no support for tablets" category, and people are trying to return them as defective all the time.

The most dramatic example of this is my new best friend Kindle Lady, who has returned no fewer than four Kindles in the past two weeks.

My store sells refurbished Kindles. Kindle Lady ordered four of them for her kids from our website. She of course bought the cheapest model, because she either didn't know there was more than one model of Kindle, or didn't read any of the product descriptions.

She got sent original-model Kindles, and came into the store all flustered because she wanted "the ones with the cameras on them."

"Ok," we said. "That's the Kindle Fire HD, and costs more money."

"That's fine. Oh, and these two won't hold a charge." It didn't matter that she said they were broken because she was returning them anyway, so we did the swap and ordered two Kindle Fire HDs to be sent to her house.

She came back in a week.

"THEY SENT ME ANOTHER BROKEN TABLET," she said. "IT WON'T CHARGE AT ALL." At this point, I'm wondering whether she's just handing them off to her kids and assuming they don't work when the kids can't figure them out. So after doing her exchange- corporate gave her a $20 off coupon for her "trouble"- I plugged in the Kindle.

It powered on and prompted me to set up an account. So, she was telling the truth that she / her kid couldn't get it to turn on, but the issue was simply that the battery was dead and she hadn't let it charge enough.

Luckily, my store only sells used tablets, so the functional ones she returned can just be repackaged and resold. If we'd been selling them new, however, the company would have either lost several hundred dollars outright because this woman didn't know anything about Kindles, or simply denied all her returns, resulting in an angry customer trolling the internet about how terrible we are, which she's probably doing anyway, because we totally ruined Christmas. 

Short version: I hate selling consumer electronics.

No receipt, no refund... an ongoing saga

My store doesn't do cash refunds without a receipt. Period. If you cannot prove that you bought the item with cash, then you don't get cash back. I really don't understand how this is so difficult for everyone, especially since many of these people buy things with THE FULL INTENTION of returning them a few days later, so why wouldn't you keep the damn receipt!? But I digress.

Some lady came in a couple days after Christmas trying to get cash back for a game. We gave her the usual spiel about how we can't do cash refunds without a receipt, but she was welcome to exchange it for another game. Things escalated quickly.

"WELL, THIS IS SOME GREAT FUCKING CUSTOMER SERVICE," she screamed as she flounced to the door.

"I'M GOING TO TEAR APART MY HOUSE AND FIND THAT RECEIPT AND MAKE YOU GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK."

"Please do," said the Veteran. "If you have the receipt, there's no problem."

"MERRY CHRISTMAS," she yelled, and then- wait for it- she broke the door.

She slammed the door so hard that it broke.

Fortunately, the glass wasn't broken, just the pump that stops it from slamming shut. We only had to suffer through one or two days of the door slamming every time someone used it before it was fixed.

Unfortunately, she never did show up with the receipt, so we never got to go all "Oh heeey, we have you on camera breaking our door! This is me calling the cops! MERRY CHRISTMAS LOL!"

And really, since when does "customer service" entail giving free cash to random members of the public? Need I remind everybody, again, that Buying Stuff is not the same as Putting Your Money In The Bank? And that you don't get to withdraw Money from your Stuff whenever you want?

WHY.

Lies and the lying liars who lie

I don't believe a single customer has ever told me the truth. I've collected four particularly egregious examples from the past month, and combined them into one sexy mega-post, with a numbered list.

I'm basically amazing.

Parental controls?

A mom asked me if it were possible to turn off the swearing in Grand Theft Auto V.

"Um, it might be," I said. "But that's kind of like tossing your coffee onto a bonfire."

I AM ALIVE

As a direct result of THE CHRISTMASPOCALYPSE, I have not blogged for almost a month. But never fear! I survived Christmas, am close to surviving the Christmas returns period, and am very much alive.

Also, I graduated from college, so I'm Bachelor Blog Lady now. 

Luckily, lots of entertaining things happened while I was away, so prepare yourself for a bunch of hilarious blog posts. Hooray!

BLOG LADY OUT