The Super Nintendo would eventually build-up a solid library backed by a superior RPG selection.
It sold more consoles worldwide in its lifetime but (at the store I worked
at) the Genesis always sold more games. I'm hard-pressed to say which system I prefer. I've definitely played the Genesis more of
the two. However, the Super Nintendo has some outstanding titles like Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and Super Mario RPG
that can't be recreated on the Genesis.
The Game Boy was a popular system at our location. We were in the nearest shopping mall to a large Naval base. Before leaving
on a 6-month deployment at sea, Sailors would stock-up on Game Boy cartridges. I've picked up a new game for much, much
shorter trips than that. I'd been told that we were the top selling Game Boy location in the company, although I never
saw concrete numbers to prove it.
On my first day I experienced some new-guy hazing. There was a guy who worked at Elbo and the
house wares store across
the hall (those few career retailers who don't live with their parents work at least two jobs). When he saw a fresh face
behind the counter he decided to make a little prank call:
Caller: Yeah do you have Lotus 4-5-6?
Me: We have Lotus 1-2-3.
Caller: This is the sequel.
Me: Umm, no. We don't have that.
Little did I know, ~50% of the calls I would receive over the next five years wouldn't be much better.
One of the earliest lessons I learned is that many customers lived under the delusion
that retailers were secretly conspiring to prevent them from buying games.
This was an era where internet was not widely available. There was Prodigy and CompuServe but they were a
mere fraction the size of the current internet. As a result, a consumer's top sources for video game release
information were either magazines or calling the local game store. Magazine writers rushed to meet publishing
timelines resulting in wildly inaccurate stories. If we meager Elbo employees dared contradict this information
we were subject to scorn:
Caller: Hey, do you have [insert game title] in stock?
Me: No, that won’t be out for a few months.
Caller: LIAR! EGM SAYS IT’S COMING OUT TODAY!
Me: I think that’s incorrect.
Caller: NO! YOU’RE WRONG! EGM SAYS IT’S COMING OUT TODAY!
Me: I think your beef is really with EGM and not me.
Caller: ---- YOU!
Luckily the couple of months spent doing telemarketing built up my resistance to hostile phone conversations.
The day to day activities were easy to pick-up. Obviously a lot of time was spent helping customers and working the register.
Parents often had no idea what they were looking for. Their kids would ask for the newest Madden Football for the Genesis, by the
time they made it to Elbo they forgot the title and system. We had to try and
reconstruct what the original request was.
Besides helping customers, a good deal of time was spent unpacking boxes and putting price stickers on
merchandise. We'd receive
a few boxes a day from a centralized distribution center. Game hardware and major new releases would come straight from the vendor
but the majority of our stock came from the warehouse. In each box was a sheet of price stickers. We had to match up the stickers
to their corresponding item, not exactly rocket science. Nearly every day we received a list of price changes that was sent
through the register system. When the registers booted-up in the morning they'd print-off a list of price changes and company news.
Little strips of register paper weren't really the most effective way to communicate
but it got the job done. Hunting down items
to re-price ate up a chunk of time every day.
By far though, the activity that consumed most of our non-customer-service time was shrink wrapping. In the back of the store
we had a shrink wrap machine and heat gun. The shrink wrap machine had a spool of shrink wrap and an arm to cut the wrap.
To seal the wrap this arm had an incredibly hot coil that fused the wrap while cutting it. OK, I'm not really good at describing
this process but maybe you get the picture. The heat gun was a heavy, oversized hairdryer. First-degree burns
and fume-induced hallucinations were common.
Shrink wrapping was done for two reasons. The primary one was to create display cases. When a game arrived that didn't have a box
on the shelf we made a new display case for it. This involved removing the contents and storing them in a crude filing system in the backroom.
The empty box was shrink wrapped (or is it shrunk wrapped?) for display. When someone bought the last copy of a game we quickly
reassembled everything. The other use for shrink wrap was to restock returned items. Elbo had a very liberal return policy that let customers
return games within 10 days for any reason provided it was in new condition. This policy made us a free-rental store for some. We had a "no returns"
list behind the counter of customers who abused this policy. In general
it worked out well.
It was a courtesy to the regular customers who occasionally picked-up a dud.
Over time the return policy would be slowly chipped away at. The addition of
preowned games ultimately led to the death
of the return policy. If you didn't like a game it could be traded-in for a fraction of the original price but full refunds would vanish.
The old return policy made sense in a world with few rental stores and cartridge-based games,
with wide access to rentals and demo discs it doesn't anymore.
I enjoyed working at a busy shopping mall. I was, and still am to a point, a mallrat. There's just something fun about
being in an active shopping center with a wide assortment of shops. I'd probably adjust well to living in a city like Tokyo (other
than the whole not-being-able-to-speak-Japanese thing). Our store was located near a Gloria Jean's Coffee, since I was
a young caffeine addict that was great. I'd frequently take a break to go flirt with the girls at the counter and score a free coffee
(although not much else).
