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.
