December 1992: The First Noel



I fully expected the month of December to be incredibly busy, yet I underestimated. On weekends the mall was swamped to the point where shoppers could barely move. Pure madness. We were sent a second cash register for the month, however we only had one credit card machine which led to some occasional problems. We had three people crammed behind the counter most of the day, two ringing-up items and the third bagging or tending to last second questions. Even with this arrangement there was a continuous line from about 11:00 AM-5:00 PM. We had two employees on the floor helping customers find what they were looking for. As a seasonal worker that was me, maybe they figured I couldn't resist the temptation presented by the hundreds of dollars in cash the register held. That's when I really learned that most of our Christmas shoppers had no idea what they were looking for:

Of course when you're selling items at a furious rate you have to restock at an equally furious rate. Roughly 10 boxes of fresh merchandise came into our tiny store every day in December. It was pretty much always left for the night shift (AKA "me") to unpack and stock. Some days the boxes would just be left open for customers to pick through.



One surprising seller (to me at least) was Mario Paint. It looked like a program for kids but customers of all ages bought it. The bundled mouse was a selling point for many. There was talk that Nintendo was going to release a host of games that supported it. It made some people feel like they were playing a PC game without shelling out $1,000 for one I guess. What really sold it was the cross-demographic appeal though. I've wondered why the Nintendo DS is so successful. It's larger than a Game Boy Advance and not drastically more powerful. Technically speaking it's light years behind the PSP (being the most technically advanced handheld doesn't guarantee success, just ask Atari). I never could grasp why it's a huge seller until I looked back at Mario Paint. Nintendo's just always had a knack for developing titles that appeal to a broader range than traditional gamers. Parents with young kids would buy it for them. Girlfriends/wives of gamers would buy it for themselves. 14-35 year old males can only buy so many games, Nintendo has been wise to target everyone else.

Probably the worst part of working in December was trying to take a lunch break. We were pretty good about scheduling breaks for when we had adequate staff. However, the 30 minute limit was strongly enforced. Just making it to the food court and standing in line took about 20. One day we decided to forego breaks and just send someone (by which I mean "me" again) to get about 40 burgers from White Castle that we'd leave in the backroom. Without getting into graphic detail, that was a bad idea. We ending up skipping a lot of lunches and going out after work to places like Denny's or Baker's Square. We'd eat, drink too much coffee, complain about the day, and joke around with the other retail jockeys loitering there.

There's a myth that's constantly reinforced in the media about the day after Thanksgiving being the busiest retail day of the year. In reality, it's the last Saturday before Christmas. However, at Elbo the day after Christmas was typically our busiest of the year. Not "busiest" in the sense of having the highest sales (these figures are skewed by major system or game releases), but "busiest" in the sense that we had the most customers needing help that day. There were a number of reasons for this trend.

Parents frequently bought systems without games. They'd go to check out and we'd ask "This doesn't come with any games, did you want to pick one up while you're here?" The reply was almost universally "This $100 system doesn't have a game?! They can buy that with their own money." Sure enough, on the 26th kids came rushing into Elbo looking to blow their Christmas cash on games.

Some customers, or at least their kids, had TVs with old coaxial connections. If they got a system for Christmas that had A/V hookups they were stuck. They'd come in the next day to get the adapter they needed. They were usually mad at the idea of having to drop another $20 and took it out verbally on us (as though we actively conspired against them). They were even madder when we didn't have any in stock which was typically the case after ~11:00 on the 26th.

By the end of the day on the 26th we were cleaned out of accessories and popular games. Controllers, even those shoddily made generic ones, went quickly. Kids who received Mike Ditka's Action Football exchanged it for John Madden. Nearly everyone who got a gift certificate redeemed it. When the gate closed at 9:00 the shelves inside were nearly bare.