Texas-Sized Opinion is a semi-weekly opinionated article where I stand on my soapbox and disperse my view of something from the video game industry. Enjoy.

Play-N-Trade: Not the New GameStop

Because GameStop is succcessful.

Lemme share with you guys a story. This started as a response on a forums, but it was so long I decided to post it here. Enjoy.

I used to work Play-N-Trade here in San Antonio. I took the gig after quitting a better paying job that I hated. I cashed out my 401 of 8,000 bucks and decided it was time for me to take a chance on something I might like to do one day: Own a video game store. So I invested in “Play-N-Trade”, which was a start up game place by my house. I decided that even though the pay would be bad I could live off my 401K for the few months and then once the owner got the ball rolling we could talk more cash.

It was owned by a guy who didn’t know squat about video games except for first person shooters like Halo and Call of Duty, absolutely hated on every other game and listened only to his son who was a raging xbox fanboy. I entered the scene and blew them all away with my knowledge on video games, going to the interview and beginning my work day on the same day, as I already saw areas he would need help in (he had hired a bunch of idiots, one guy that knew alot about fixing video game consoles but was hardcore PlayStation fan, one girl that was really slutty, a bit ugly, and weird, and one asian guy to be the token asian guy/PC fan). At first I thought this would balance out the force, but then I realized he would be asking us what games he should stock and whatnot. Of course I recommended only carrying a few of the bigger titles as everyone and their mother would have those, and that our angle should be just to carry titles they don’t have anywhere else. You could get “Super Mario Galaxy” just about anywhere but I’ll be damned if you could find “Ikaruga” for the Wii. While it may not be the highest demand balancing the store out to where you have the games with high demand moderately and the games with not as much notority yet you could profit from more because of their rarity would work out quite well.

Instead his smart son told him to get 30 copies of Mass Effect,Call of Duty 4, and anything with the generic marine solider. And then he complained that he listened to the son when he wasn’t making money SURPRISE! To top things off he didn’t know how to run the trades nor the discount card that PnT offers, leaving me as the only one with experience from GameStop. The fact that PNT was created by some people from GameStop led me to believe they are going to run things like the old GameStop was, and I was right.

So I sold cards, did reserves, all that jazz. The only problem was he wanted us to reserve games but he could never garuntee we have the games in the store, meaning people would be pissed. Why couldn’t we promise the game? Because he got all his games from this one warehouse apparently, and if they promised a bigger buyer the game they got it first. So what did he go instead? He would go buy the game from Sam’s Club or Wal-Mart, stock it on his shelves, and sell it for 5 dollars more so he could make some sort of profit. So now did we not only have the same games as everyone else we were charging more. On games he sold used I told him “ok GameStop sells it for this much, let’s sell it for 5 dollars less and give 5 dollars more on trade-in” since the company gave you a general outline of what to trade it in for, but you could set your own guidlines per area. Now you may think “wow Texan you only gave us a 5 dollar difference from GameStop blah blah blah” but you have to see this two-fold: One, like the owner usually told people wanting free stuff this isn’t unicef this is a business and I wanted to make this guy money so he would raise my pay from 7.50 to 10.00 bucks like I needed him to at the time. Two, it’s still better than what they gave you and if you said they gave you more than what we said they gave you I would personally call GameStop, verify, and then mark ours up or down. I wasn’t kidding, I was in this thing to beat GameStop. Not because I’m one of those “GameStop is the super devil” or anything, rather just because I love beating people that are good at what they do.

When I used to work at GameStop, I was the best at getting people to reserve games and subscribe to our magazine. I was consistently #1 or #2 just depending on who in the district got more hours one week or if I decided I didn’t want to work a certain day, though me working every saturday was a given. I hustled you guys out of your money so easily I was sent to other stores to teach other employees how to do this. It’s funny looking back and realizing how much money I made GameStop, yet how easily they decided to just let me walk away when all I wanted from them was an extra 2 dollars, a promotion to Assistant Store Manager (after being there 4 years), and a pat on the back. Alas, I left and to this day I occasionally go back to GameStop and decide to hustle more people into reserves and subs, because I can do it better than most of the people working there, to the point the store managers get frustrated that they can’t make the people paid to do it do it right.

Don’t believe me? Hit up the gamestop at Bandera and Mainland one day, and maybe you’ll catch me talking to the employees, or toying with them to see if they ask me to reserve the game I want them to ask me (I make general comments about “being a sports fans”, and want them to ask me “wanna reserve the new X sports game?” Usually they just listen to corporate and shell out some dumb game that I would hate if I really was a sports fan).

Anyway, back to the point.

So PNT was like a smaller version of GameStop, and the best part was that PNT sold NES SNES DC PSX games and such. Every so often we’d get those in and those sold the best. We made most our money off of those games yet they remained hidden in the back where people had to squat down and look for them. Why the games that gave us the most profit weren’t displayed promptly for everyone to see was beyond me. I had no choice but to comply because at this point I knew the owner wasn’t going to listen to me, even once I got frustrated with him and got in his face the way he was running things. I did this because all I heard from the other employees were complaints, and they would complain to him but he didn’t listen. As the employee appointed “manager” I decided to take some responsibility and try and talk to him, but he still didn’t listen, instead complaining that we didn’t sell enough. Oh yes, people, don’t think that he didn’t want us to sell used, reserves, and bundle packs. Those made him money, so why wouldn’t he want that? Made sense to me,but of course the other employees just say it as “GameStop v2.0″. These other employees I keep talking about? Let me go into a bit more detail.

He started out with about 13 kids ranging from casual gamer to hardcore nintendo fan (me, hehe). As I was a newly divorced single dad, it was a bit hard for me to find time to work, but he liked my experienced and I told him that as time went on I would find a babysitter. So we worked together well and I loved my first month there. After that first month we had a store meeting. This was called because during a tournement (one of many, MANY Halo tournements as that was all his son knew how to play) we were holding the owner decided to have a total of 10 employees working. 5 ran the tournemant itself, 3 walked the floor asking if anyone needed help, and 2 ran each register. This was a good idea. Except of the 5 running the tournement only 1 knew how to actually do a tournement, 2 of them brought their girlfriends to the store and did nothing but talk to them (I showed up later and accidently hit on one of said girlfriends, who actually seemed to like me oddly enough). The remaining 2 employees running the tourney tried their best but chaotic was that best it got. No problem with the people asking if customers needed help, except that no customers were coming in and buying anything. Why? Because the tournement blocked off all the games that were for sale, and it was packed with spectators which made it hard to walk through. I showed up with my son, thinking it would look good on me to at least make an appearance. I showed up, and it was dark, silent, and not a friendly experience. If I was a customer I would be turned off by this and quickly walk out.

So he called the meeting, yelled at everyone, and that’s when I stepped up for the first time. I tried to rally the troops, telling them “hey, we can do this, just follow my direction and this won’t happen again” and the owner really seemed to believe me, as well as a few employees. The ones that didn’t were the ones that ended up failing and getting cut. Soon there were massive cuts until it was only 5 of us left. Me, Slutty Girl, Owner’s son, PS Man, and Asian dude.

Slutty Girl, or SG from here on out, wasn’t too bad at first. We became friends because I was desperate for friends at the time and she seems cool, at first. As I got to know her it turned out she was into all this weird stuff (I won’t go into detail to save your stomach), and I was still willing to hang around her because I thought she was interesting and I’m a very curious guy so the weirder something is the more I want to know about it. She also hit on every guy that came into the store, and since our market was “guy that scares girls away”, they all loved the attention, gave her their number, and then she would go out with them and usually have sex with them. I loved hearing the stories she’d tell to me, and I came up with the name “Date-N-Trade” because it seemed she was getting more dates than games we were selling, so why not? The best part was that she had this little fantasy about having sex with the store owner while there at work, and she would flirt with him every so often on purpose. She would do things like stand a certain way so her breats were sticking out and he could seem them promptly, and she did this for her own sick pleasure and to make me laugh, because secretly I did. But I stopped laughing when he gave her a raise instead of me, and the bigger slap in the face was that his WIFE gave her the raise, because all her husband did was talk her up to the wife and the wife was either dumb not to see SG flirting with the owner or loved the fact that all of a sudden sex with her husband was much better because he was thinking of the younger girl working under him (and if SG had it her way, she would literally be under him). That’s not to say she was cute, she wasn’t, and trust me I had a chance to “date-n-trade” but declined.

PS Fan Guy was pretty cool. I lied when I said I was the only GameStop person, he was also from GameStop, but the EB Games part. So we were the same but different. I always thought EB was idiotic in their practices but apparently some of their stuff was okay enough that everyone complained when GameStop bought them out (which i actually called about 2 weeks before it happened, passingly as a joke with the district manager). Anyway, so this guy and I got along pretty well, but he got along with no one else. He was there as the repair guy, and couldn’t sell anything to anyone because he didn’t have the people skills. When you talked to him, even if you guys were both the same “smarts” he would always make you feel stupid because of the way he responded to you. I purposely acted dumb and pretended I didn’t know what he was doing because it seemed if I made him feel smarter than me I could actually be smarter than him and he wouldn’t care. Worked as him and I never had a fight or anything.

Owner’s son was okay, but he had a bad temper and would get into customer’s faces, which from my time at GameStop I realized was a big NO-NO. I would step in when I was there and try to calm the situation, which worked when I was there. When I wasn’t they would call me and ask me questions about what to do in situations. I told them my advice, what I would do, but reminded them I didn’t own the place so they should run everything by the owner first. They ended up just listening to me, and then the few times it went wrong they said “Well TexanGamer said to do it” so of course I had to explain to the manager what I told them to do. And it turned out, they didn’t exactly listen to what I told them and that’s why they were in trouble. Had they done it my way, he wouldn’t have had a problem. The other things about this kid was that he didn’t need PNT as a family business, he was going to school, into paintball, all that jazz, and while he really loved video games he only cared for first person shooters really.

Asian guy wasn’t like your actual asian guy. He knew nothing about video games. He thought Pokemon should be filed under “G” since it was subtitled “Gotta catch’em all!”. He was bad at the alphabet and because of this all our games were always out of order. He knew alot about PC games but we didn’t sell ANY PC Games, and the one time we tried to the owner sold them used and they didn’t work because the CD Keys were already used up. So Asian guy’s knowledge was useless. The owner always blamed stuff on the guy and wanted to fire him for the longest time.

So this was our team. Oh yes, and me. I wasn’t perfect. I mean, I loved the place but I had my own problems going on, and eventually while I really loved the job I grew tired of the 300 buck checks and eventually quit to go to another job. I had a few good memories, and overall it was a good experience, but don’t think that this “Play-N-Trade” is going to out do GameStop, because it’s not. What happened in the end to this place?

Well, we did a cool grand opening in November of 2007, with me dressed as Mario and it was major fun. Things went sour after that. Eventually, I quit to get a higher paying job. The store remained open for another 4 months or so and then the owner called it quits, let everyone go, and closed down shop. This was after he had invested tons of money into the place. He had all these plans to open other stores and they all fell apart because he didn’t know squat about games. He was just an Army guy and he knew the Army so why he decided to take this risk and not instead buy a mansion in the clouds I have no clue.

So that was it, and this is why “Play-N-Trade” won’t ever work. You want a good example of what ends up happening? There’s an episode of South Park about Wal-Mart, where everyone hates Wal-Mart because it becomes super big and powerful, so they take it down and go shop somewhere else, burning down the wal-mart. Then, that new place gets so much business it becomes like the Wal-Mart, so they burn that down, and in the end they keep repeating the pattern.

The problem is that PNT even if successful will become just like GameStop, because GameStop isn’t doing anything wrong from a business angle. They are making money, and bottomline, that’s what it’s all about. if you want to not get screwed, just go old-school and sell it privately for what you think it should be sold for. Yeah it’s more work for you, but at least you’d be gaining from that effort.

More than you would going to GameStop and wasting that effort complaining about what they gave you.