Why do I ever go to an EB Games, or a Gamestop? Every time I walk in to one, I leave either wanting to burn the store down, or strangle the people working there. There’s really two things wrong with every specialty game shop I’ve been to, save for Network Video, in Burlingame, CA, and to a lesser extent, the EB in the Emeryville Bay Street mall.
1.) The people: The people who staff these stores tend to be relatively young, and the main qualification for working in one of these stores is that they’re gamers, to some extent or another. They’re often unkempt, sloppy, have no sense of professionalism. A greeting is more likely to be, “What up?” than “Welcome!” The cashier might have a really sloppy haircut, be talking to someone on their personal phone while checking you out, or be “DOING THE DEW!!!!” while talking to you. If you want to talk about reinforcing the image that gamers are basically illiterate morons, you really need to look no further than game store employees to get a sense of why the public at large has the image they do.
On top of lax (now there’s a kind word) presentation, there’s also this sense that a huge percentage of game store employees are power-hungry cretins. They’re just as happy to say, “We don’t have that,” and look at you like you’re an idiot for asking of a GAME STORE has a particular GAME. HOLY COW. For some idiot reason, I go to the EB in Oakland when maybe, just maybe they’re (in theory) more likely to have something than the Emeryville Best Buy. But I’ve NEVER found anything there that the Best Buy didn’t either have earlier, more of, or cheaper. But there’s some weird tic that I have that says, “Hey, this is a specialty game shop! Maybe they have games that the big-box retailer won’t!” Ha. Sigh. Weep. But the inventory thing’s not the real problem. It’s that the employees are fundamentally bureaucrats, who revel in whatever red tape they can throw in your way. Walk into a Starbucks, and ask the person behind the counter something. You’ll get a cheerful smile, and some useful information. Maybe they don’t have what you want, but they’ll try to suggest something. You want something a little different than normal? Great!
I’m not a fan of Starbucks, in theory, but in practice, they’re really quite good about creating an environment where you feel positively toward the whole experience. EB seems to be determined to do the exact opposite of that, and make your experience as painful, frustrating, and irritating as possible by letting their employees be smug, barely competant jackasses.
And that’s all pretty obvious. Walk into almost any game store, and you’ll see some only marginally literate moron telling someone’s mom she’s an idiot for not knowing the difference between Devil May Cry and Devil Kings. Whatever. But the second thing really started to get to me today.
2.) Organization: The organization of game stores sucks. The organization of every game section of every major retailer (and minor retailer) sucks. Why? Because they’re almost always alphabetized, and unless you know exactly what you want, you’ll never find anything that way.
What you want, I think, is for all the *STOCK* to be alphabetized – the stuff that’s kept away from the consumer, so that the employees can find it quickly. Anyone comes in and asks, “Do you have Game X?” they can look it up immediately, and make sure they have phyiscal stock on hand by finding it instantly.
But in terms of browsing? I have almost no desire to look through a store alphabetically. I also, frankly, have almost no desire to look at game box covers. They’re essentially meaningless, and when faced with a thousand game box covers, browsing through covers is absolutely horrific.
What would I suggest? I don’t really have any great ideas – I think part of what you’d need to do is take into consideration who walks into a store, without knowing what they want to buy already. That’d be parents, who are probably looking for a specific age range, or a game that is similar to another game. So, organization by genre or rating would probably be useful. I’d also keep the number of titles on display WAY down. Maybe have on the display shelves games that were released in the last two months only. This way, you don’t get the fatigue of walking in and being faced with a thousand really visually noisy game boxes to look through, only to not be able to tell WTF is going on.
I’d have hardware running a lot of the major new releases, so that people could see them. I’d have a library of commonly-requested games that can be easily swapped (by an employee) into a system, so that the consumer can try them out before buying. I’d have places to sit, and watch trailers/videos of existing games, or if you wanted to peruse a library of magazines/reviews, or what have you to make an informed decision, do that. I’d have at least one internet-connected computer, so that consumers could check out GameRankings or something, for reviews, or so that employees could make informed recommendations to people who come in with questions.
Of course, all this would cost a lot of money, and hiring competant, experienced retail employees who see something like this not as a part-time shit job, but as a career, at salaries that attract good people, in a location that’s attractive, accessible, and *feels* more upscale than your generic strip mall nonsense… I doubt you could really compete with the Wal-Marts of the world. But I’d like to think that if you got parents who don’t have time to understand every game that Little Timmy plays to *trust* your recommendations, and for them to feel like they’ve made a reliably well-informed decision, that maybe they’d support a store like that.
Maybe not, but the bigger thing is that honestly, I just wish I didn’t hate specialty game stores as much as I do.
This sounds like the beginnings of a consumer-friendly game specialty mega-empire! 😀 I am only half-joking. It’s clear that it’s an industry that’s growing and is becoming more mainstream, with the problems that you pointed out.
Being able to, as a parent, go into a game store and have it be sort of like an Apple store, where they have tons of (relatively) friendly people who can answer your various questions with hands-on demos of almost everything they carry (harder to do with software but certainly possible to do with the hardware) would be fantastic. Someone like my mom or sister, who honestly cares about the content of games that my little brother plays, but doesn’t have an inclination to become a full-time game expert, should be able to walk into a store, tell the store personnel which games he already likes, how old he is, how comfortable she feels with certain levels of language/violence/sexual depiction, and get a couple of recommendations for at least two price brackets (reduced price and regular price) *without* being made to feel embarrassed or cheap or unhip or in any way condescended to.
It’s no wonder so many parents blindly fall prey to exaggerated depictions of the various games because if they aren’t full-time gamers, their only sources for game informations are 1) media outlets, 2) game stores, and 3) other parents who are just as clueless.
Honestly, I’d love to see more people raise the bar for floor employees in general. I hardly ever walk in to a store to buy anything costing more than $30 if I didn’t already research the crap out of it and know for sure it’s what I want, because I know that once I’m in the store, I’m not going to get any additional knowledge from the floor staff. In fact, because of the lack of immediate internet access, I feel like I’m in an information vaccum.
Think of how so many people hate to go to a real store because of the people they have to deal with. It’s not because we are all anti-social, but because we don’t want to be “upsold” with needless warranties or useless accessories, or just go on the opinions of someone who doesn’t know any better than I do about what I want to buy, even though I don’t even work there.
“It’s clear that it’s an industry that’s growing and is becoming more mainstream, with the problems that you pointed out.”
Wow, that wasn’t a sentence.
I meant something like:
“It’s clear that it’s an industry that’s growing and is becoming more mainstream, which means that the problems that you pointed out are going to become problematic for more and more consumers.”
Aside from the organization by genre, what you describe sounds almost identical to the Playstation store in the Metreon, which, even though they only carry Sony titles, is actually quite awesome!
For me, I wish that game stores and gaming environments (such as arcades) had more cross-over.
Every game store should be like this one.
The Gord is a vengeful Gord. Love the Gord, fear the Gord.
–Alan
Well done!
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Retail ineptitude is really pretty easy to explain – you get what you pay for. EB Games employees suck, because EB pay is shit. Starbucks service is better, because they pay better. This is just one of many reason I choose to shop at places like CostCo (average employee wage of over $17 an hour), over places like Sam’s Club (less than $10).
It all boils down to corporate greed, and the only thing you can do is vote with your dollar. Don’t shop at those places, and make sure your 401k funds don’t invest in them either.
Unfortunately, since the profit margins on video games are so slim, I don’t see this situation improving any time soon. I don’t see anyone creating the CostCo of video games where employees are paid a decent wage. I think specialty video game shops are on their way out, to be honest.
I should probably elaborate on the bad pay = bad service.
It’s not necessarily that by paying a lower wage they’re only getting sub-par employees, it’s that no matter who they hire at that low wage, that person is not going to give a shit about the job. Why care about your job when there’s another job down the road that’ll pay you the exact same thing, or even $.10 an hour more?
Pay people a decent wage, and they’ll start to think twice before not showing up to work, because it’ll mean not being able to live in that nicer apartment, or buy any more nice things. I saw an interview with the founder/owner of CostCo once, and he said that he doesn’t need to spend a lot on marketing, because his employees are his best sales people. They love where they work, they shop there, and they tell their friends to shop there. Beter wages are better for everyone.
Games *definitely* need to be organized better. They do this with books, movies, and music… why not games?
However, there are a couple of issues with some of the suggestions you have made.
– Not showing box covers makes it even harder for a lot of people to make decisions. A lot of people tend to pick up a game based only on the fact that they noticed the cover art. If you take away that bit, it makes it harder for publishers to call attention to their games. And if you end up only showing the spine, publishers will merely resort to “sprucing up” the game spines, which will make it even worse than the cover art (since you’ll have many more titles lined up with crazy -ass spine designs).
– 2 months is nowhere nearly enough time for games to be on the shelf. You generally know whether or not your game will be a hit by the end of the second month (or, often times, by the end of the first 2 weeks), but moving games off the main shelf after the first two months will pretty much guarantee that smaller publishers/developers who rely on a steady stream of small sales will quickly be killed. And as a game store, you’d be stuck with tons of inventory, as people will start to only concentrate on new releases.
And while I think the idea of having a game viewing area would be cool… you’re more than likely just going to have a bunch of kids sitting around, playing games and not buying anything (just look at Metreon… most people playing at the counter are kids just sitting there playing). Just having a row of TVs, for example, dedicated to showing off new games and trailers would be good.
That’s weird that you guys don’t have the viewing/playing areas. Most of the EB Games and GamesSpots in the area where converted from FunCoLands, which all had at least one of every new console running, and all you had to do is ask an emplolyee to switch games. If they didn’t have any used copies, they’d even open a new copy so that you could try it before buying.
Of course Hapacheese is 100% right, you just end up with a bunch of kids playing games all day and never leaving.
I totally agree about the payscale issue. It’s a pervasive problem in every sector. 😐 The minimum wage is ridiculously low as compared to the cost of living scale. Add to that the sense that the company/store does not have any upward mobility, and it’s always going to be a job employees aren’t invested in.
There are several small businesses out here that operate on the coop model, with profit sharing for every employee. I think that rocks.
In addition, I think another part of the problem is the general culture of apathy here. People generally think “they don’t pay me enough to care.” My experience is that those people will *never* make enough to care because they don’t care in the first place. Why would management promote them if they didn’t care about their work?
But, yeah… the kinds of people that would care also know that they can go and get better paying jobs for that very reason and end up working at retailers that pay better (In ‘n Out, Starbucks, etc).
I can’t say enough how much I empathically disagree with that last comment.
Let’s take the instance of me. It’s not to say that an instance of one disproves your views, but I hope to shed light on why I disagree and how I think it can extend to many low-paid workers.
First job out of college paid well over minimum wage, but even with a very frugal lifestyle, I was bouncing rent checks often enough the first year that I was constantly stressed out. I loved my job and worked like a dog. I loved my coworkers and team, the project I was working on, feeling like I was learning a lot. But the stress of my financial issues was getting to me, and I talked to my manager. He basically said, well we can’t pay you any more, period, no matter how well you work.
The fact that suddenly, he made upward mobility and eventual financial growth *in that particular job setting* made me get really dejected about the job and caused me to feel like my career was going nowhere. This led me to be very unmotivated at work and grow embittered toward my working environment, even though everything else was still exactly the same.
Feeling like you can’t make ends meet AND that you have no way to grow at the position you are at in the company is hugely demoralizing, no matter how fantastic and devoted a worker you are.
Imagine getting paid minimum wage and even though you are a great worker, your coworkers love you, you take extra shifts, etc., your company makes it clear that you won’t be becoming a manager anytime soon or getting extended (or any) benefits.
I haven’t been around anyone who’s had the attitude of “you can’t pay me enough to care”, only “they *don’t* pay me enough to care”. Sure, many people are greedy and unmotivated, but my guess is that a much bigger percentage of people are not that way and being made to feel like they can grow in their jobs and step up in the level of respect & salary will go a long way towards making for happier employees.
The examples of Starbucks, CostCo, our local coop-owned & operated bakeries, and In ‘n Out speak directly to that point.
Sure, as you point out, people who are motivated may move on to better employers, but it’s not like McDonald’s is going to go out of business for not having people to employ anymore. They treat people like crap because they know people turn over. They don’t provide benefits because they know it’s a first job for most kids and they don’t know any better and won’t insist on better. That’s why we get crap service.
I agree with Chad that we can do a part by not giving money to places that treat people like crap, which results in crappy customer service experiences for us anyway, and shopping & investing in labor-friendly companies.
I think it’s a sort of chicken-and-the-egg kind of argument. I’ve been fortunate enough to never work at a place where I was told that upward mobility (in salary or position) is not an option… but that didn’t stop the majority of my coworkers from being lazy and sometimes rude to customers (I’m talking my part time experiences in high school and college).
But, again, as I said earlier, this is all just my own personal experience (to echo your point: anecdote). Strangely enough, though, going back to my earlier example with Office Max, it was actually the graveyard shift that I found to be the hardest workers there. Perhaps it was because the only people working that shift were doing it because they really needed the job or whatnot, but when I was briefly transferred to normal shop hours before I quit, the difference was night and day (no pun intended… okay, just a little intended). People would simply not come in to work and then get mad at the management when they were questioned about it, they would steal from the store, and would actively be hostile toward customers. I simply didn’t understand it.
But then you take a look at part time workers in a country like Japan. I have *never* gone to a store in Japan and felt like the employees detested me. Part time workers make crap wages in Japan, too, but there is definitely a more pervasive culture of “take pride in your work.”