(This was forwarded to suggestions@gamestop.com, for all the good it will do.)
Dear Sirs:
Your malignant preorder policy will eventually, in a just world, find you in a fire sale trying to derive cents on the dollar to pay off your poor, misguided creditors while your executives are roasted over a large pit fashioned solely for the purpose. I applaud the temerity with which you extort your customers for the privilege of preordering games, constructing an artificial “shortage” mindset that causes everyone to quiver in vexation as they wonder whether they’ll actually be able to acquire that game that has become the apple of their eye without preordering and basically screw the entire process all to hell.
They certainly won’t be able to purchase the game from one of your “retail” establishments without a preorder. Heavens no, you’ve effectively made one of the hardest parts of retail life trivial: deciding how much of an item to purchase. Actual retailers have to utilize complex equations to calculate probable demand given demographics, time of year, and population density. You people have a simple query that says “how many preorders do we have? 7? Great, ship us 7.” God forbid a self-professed retail establishment actually carry any stock of the things they are trying to sell.
In which the term “retailer” is explored
At this point, quite honestly, you can’t consider yourself a retailer anymore. If anything, you’ve perfected an online sales and distribution model, just without the actual “online” part. If I buy something from Amazon, at some point thereafter they pack a box with the item I bought and ship it directly to me. That’s convenient for me, it shows up at my house. I don’t get to walk out from a store with the item immediately, but I get it eventually. You guys are smarter than Amazon, though. You have the same model: people “purchase” things from you but they don’t get to walk out with it either… it’s a “preorder.” But people actually drive to your store and do this. They expend their energy to do it. At some future point, you perform your complex calculation to determine how many units of said item gets sent to a store and you send one package to that store. Already you’re ahead of Amazon since you don’t have to send 7 packages to 7 customers. Then your customers, who paid you for the privilege of providing you with what is typically complex logistical information — namely, that they want to buy something from you — expend their energy again to drive to your store and pick up their merchandise. Brilliant, I applaud.
You have no value add. Your prices aren’t better, you don’t provide a better buying experience, and, frankly, you don’t even beat other retailers in getting the damned games. For all your fear speech about how you’re our only hope for getting a game as soon as possible, you fail even at that. Allow me to provide a relevant example!
In which illustrative experience is depicted
I preordered a hot, hot new game of which you may have heard called Gears Of War for the Xbox 360. Your employee kindly helped me to secure my copy with a deposit, the generous fucker. Fast forward to the unofficial release date. Friends in other areas, whose retailers realized they could provide a value add, were able to walk out of their respective retail establishments with game in hand on November 7th. Fantastic! I could watch them show up online, enjoying their game. In the meantime, my own Gamestop, when queried, told me — in between punching a child in the trachea and tripping an elderly, incontinent leper — the game would be available November 8th. Fine, you hate life and good but I’ll wait until tomorrow while my friends cheerfully curb stomp each other in the game. So glad to have secured my copy early!
So I show up to my Gamestop on the requisite day — they had helpfully called the previous night to tell me to die in flames and I can pick it up the next day — to discover that you mangy fuckwits didn’t get the game in. Blame your shipper, blame the weather, blame Almighty Jesus… I don’t care. The simple fact is you, the “retailer” I selected to provide me with an item, can’t. Even after I paid early. I preordered and you can’t get your logistics straight to actually deliver a game into my hands even a day after others have it. How deliciously incompetent!
In which you are shown to be the lying fearmongers we know you to be
I got my money back, of course. There were other displeased people in there. The harried employee, looking as though he’d love to mainline strychnine at this point, is mystified as to why we’d RISK OUR VERY LIVES by canceling our preorder. “It’s not like you can get it elsewhere!” he exhorts us.
So I drove 5 minutes, walked into Best Buy and walked out with a copy of Gears Of War. And the movie Cars, with the fancy “while supplies last” poster.
Eat it, GameStop/EB Games. Eat it hard.
You, my ColdForged friend are a hero to the oft defrauded consumer. I applaud your brassy, flip style and your swell (though, not quite urbane) turn of phrase. They should make games for the Xbox es with real life heroes like you. Keep kicking corporate ass! Truly, Oscar Zulu (OZ).
Praise Jebus and a particularly benevolent web master that the same lack of necessity to scamper about for scraps of food and fight off the bigger examples of the species to rut with a toothsome wench provides you the time and opportunity to whine from upon high about others’ pastimes.
I’m not fond of mutton, you can have my share.
I submit this post as exhibit ‘A’ as a manifestation of what I love and hate most about America and humanity all at once. Thank providence that the government institutions and corporations that feed our tummies and recycle our shit took care of those problems 40 years ago, and that the engineering, distribution channels, and safety systems that keep the wheels turning ’seem’ to be stable in this country.
The head stomping bone crushing GLORY we all live vicariously through in games like GOW provide an important outlet for the angry, vitriolic, white man who would otherwise kill me, rape my wife, and plunder everything I held dear to increase his power in absence of an abundance of resources and distraction.
Thank you machine! Thank you fat corporate profiteer! I pray the system never breaks down. Because of you I am safe, and it keeps me from battling whack jobs like coldforged for potatoes and mutton in the countryside.
When will we evolve?
I think this is probably the ‘average’ customer experience at GameStop/EBGames which begs the following: 1. How are they still in business? 2. Why do people continue to shop there?
Did they try to sell you a copy of Halo since they didn’t have GoW?
I’ve never bought into the whole pre-order scam. Never never. First off, it’s a scam. But secondly, I’ve never been so desperate for a game that I felt the need to own it a day before everyone else in the world. (And we’ve all seen how well that works.)
CF: I don’t understand, I made a reservation for GOW, do you have my reservation?
GS Prick: Yes, we do, unfortunately we ran out of copies.
CF: But the reservation keeps the game here. That’s why you have the reservation.
GS Prick: I know why we have reservations.
CF: I don’t think you do. If you did, I’d have a copy of the game. See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to hold the reservation and that’s really the most important part of the reservation, the holding. Anybody can just take them.
(with apologies to Seinfeld….)