February 1994: Winter Clearance

Our location was one of four "outlet" stores for the company. Meaning in addition to keeping an inventory of regular items we also carried clearance items shipped to us from other stores. February was usually the time when this happened; the malls were ghost towns in the frigid weather while everyone paid off their Christmas purchases. Other stores would be sent a list of items they were to round-up and send our way.

Boxes and boxes of junk would pour into our already cramped store, twenty on a bad day. It was like stumbling across a giant garage sale of d-list software. There were a lot of Amiga and even some Apple II games; those were always difficult to sell. Luckily, we were given some discretion in regards to pricing. For example, there were two Super Nintendo games we had to price at a cool $1 to get rid off.

We had some bins in the front of the store that we crammed all these outlet titles into. Games we had 20+ copies of (like Seal Team) we made into giant pyramids. Being a high-traffic location, these items sold fast. Everything that came in during February and March was gone by summer.

I consider this to be one of the fun things about the job. Opening these boxes felt a little like Christmas, each one was a surprise. It seems like all the EBGames/Gamestops stock the exact same selection nowadays. Back in the mid-nineties they made an effort to customize the inventory at each location based on the local market. For example, our store carried a wider selection of portable games than others (because of the aforementioned Navy Base). We were also one of the last locations in the company to carry Macintosh software. Other stores did well with productivity software and were stocked almost like an Egghead. As the recipient of the outlet inventory we witnessed this first-hand. No two shipments were alike except for a few titles that were uniformly overstocked at all locations. The elements of surprise and variety made a potentially unpleasant experience fun. During February and March just about any kind of activity was appreciated.

In early 1994 Elbo tried a new policy, raising pricing across the board and dropping all price-matching policies. The exact phrase they used in the announcement to employees was "we will achieve a Software ETC. level". I don't know why that phrase is burned into my brain 12 years later, probably because it's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. It referred to our top competitor whose prices were 10-15% higher than ours on average. In a moment of folly the executives at Elbo looked at Software ETC., a company that we were handily beating, and thought "let's be more like them". This experiment didn't last long, 2-3 months at the most. We lost customers and employee morale until Elbo did a 180 on this policy.

In the frigid days of early 1994 we also started receiving the shareware version of Doom. Much like the MS-DOS 6.2.x upgrades, we received a counter display that held tiny boxes of 3.5" disks containing the first episodes of Doom. For a mere $5 gamers could try the first gory episode of what would be a legendary game. Yeah, it was available for free online but keep in mind this was 1994 when internet connections were rare and slow. These little packages were the perfect distribution system for Doom. Customers were unsure if their computer hardware could run the 3D game, for $5 it was worth the gamble. If they enjoyed the game (and almost everyone did) they could order the full version from the included form. It would be several months before a full retail version surfaced. Soon after that we would carry dozens of cheaply packaged CDs containing hundreds, or even thousands, of .wad files scraped off FTP sites. The rip-offs came pouring in too. A seemingly countless array of wanna-be 3D shooters clogged up the shelves, and shortly thereafter, the clearance bins.