Do you guys ever feel weird shopping for video games?

[VidKid369]

Hey, everyone! I'm just having another sleepless night just writing in my journal by myself when I sort of remembered something. So as some of you might know I actually live in the Philippines now but I used to live for 26 years in San Francisco. I was just writing about video games and there was something kinda bothering me and I've been thinking about it for the last 10 years.

I actually am a huge fan of RPGs and I have lots of stories and I'm not trying to be negative at all.

I always have a routine when I shop for RPGs. As a kid, at Toys R Us I go straight through the store to the video game aisle and I stay there for about an hour just getting lost in all the tickets.

At Blockbuster, I go straight to the video games to see what's available and I sit on the floor and read all the gaming magazines and choose one to buy.

At Mom & Pop rental stores I always talk to the owner to see if they have any more RPGs coming in soon.

Once I found out Funcoland wasn't a bed mattress place and actually sold video games I found out they were the nicest guys ever and once I picked out a RPG they totally told me everything about it and if it was a good game or not.

At Kay-Bee Toy Store I would just stand in front of the counter looking behind the cashier at the games behind the plastic cabinet no problem. Sometimes for an hour.

At Electronics Boutique, I sort of fell into this routine of going straight to the PlayStation aisle and going through each case one by one to see if there's any RPGs. And I go to the Used Bin also and do this. No one ever bothered me and it was never a problem. I kept on doing this until I was a teenager.

At Game Crazy, the employees were hardcore gamers and helped me find a Sega Saturn around.

Then around the time GameStop came I noticed that they felt I was weird that I didn't go straight up to the counter right when I walked in and ask them anything, and I would look for it myself. I think they want you to tell them what you're looking for and they go to the floor and get it for you.

Then when I was like 24, I just kept doing my usual thing and I noticed the employees were super aggressive in selling you a video game. I would just say, 'I'm just looking.' Hoping they would get the hint and I'll ask them when I find something. But they always go straight behind the counter and the employees start talking about me and kinda looking over at me.

It happens every single time at all the GameStops in San Francisco.

Like to be honest it just made me feel a little weird cause I can see the store is sort of marketed to kids, and kids come through all the time... like they made me feel I was a creepy old guy or something in the store.

The vibe got so weird after each interaction I stopped going to GameStop and the malls altogether. The only reason I would even trek to the mall was to go to GameStop anyway. And I sorta just kept all my video game shopping to online?

Do you guys ever shop for video games anymore in person or do you guys just buy online now?

[Shinto-Cetra]

I mostly buy games on ebay (or Yahoo Auctions via shipping proxy for the real obscure stuff), or Steam. I haven't been in a Gamestop in years, not counting with friends where I just walked in and didn't even consider buying anything. I've basically lost interest in modern gaming, but there are at least two local independent brick and mortar game stores near me that I visit and buy from from time to time, as they have still retro gaming things. I've also bought games/accessories at conventions. In the 90's-Mid 00s, I was living the "PC Master Race" dream, long before that joke phrase had been coined, on MS-DOS/Win 3.1-XP. So while I went to Toys R' Us and KB Toys way back in the day, I never bought console games there. The Independence Day alien action figures at Toys R' Us always came with a 3.5 floppy game that I would play on my first PC, looking those games up now on Youtube they were quite terrible. I now have a NEC PC-98 running MS-DOS, so that interest is coming full circle in a way.

[VidKid369]

Oh, totally. I usually do my online shopping for video games on Amazon. I don't think I've ever bought anything off of GameStop's website. And I've found a few deals on eBay and stuff too mostly Lunar/WD stuff.

I think GameStop expects you to browse what you're looking for online and tell them when you walk into the store. ? I wanna see what they actually have available on the shelfs.

I always hear about these retro gaming stores in the Midwest (?) but we don't have them in the Bay Area I've always been kinda jealous of that. The height of video game buying was definitely the 90s with Toys R Us, Kay-Bee, Funcoland, EB. Mom & pop rental stores would even sell to you if you really want it. Tbh, Electronics Boutique was always my favorite out of all of them cause it seemed premium? Like they sold just video games. When I lived in Nevada, I got to experience Game Crazy and it made me realize the non-West Coast loooved video games.

Oh, I've never been really into PC gaming but I've been to RadioShack like all the time. I only used my PC to game when I was really into Survivor Ultimate Edition -based off the show.

I forgot to mention Costco usually has a bin of video games too.

What I was kinda getting at is do you think you can get too old to shop in-store for video games like the employees giving funny looks? It's hard not to notice the stores are decorated/marketed towards kids or adults with families. Do you ever feel like we're not the target audience anymore?

Obvs. I'm glad I can just online buy to not have to deal with the hassle of another human being handling the transaction and having personal feelings about the customer that's buying? -- I'd like to just eliminate the whole social thing of shopping. Employees see what you look like, at what time of day you come in. Video game shopping turned really weird and awkward for me once I turned and looked a certain age.

I've had so many weird experiences at GameStop with the employees there and I remember all of them.

[Shinto-Cetra]

Oh, totally. I usually do my online shopping for video games on Amazon. I don't think I've ever bought anything off of GameStop's website. And I've found a few deals on eBay and stuff too mostly Lunar/WD stuff.

I think GameStop expects you to browse what you're looking for online and tell them when you walk into the store. ? I wanna see what they actually have available on the shelfs.

I always hear about these retro gaming stores in the Midwest (?) but we don't have them in the Bay Area I've always been kinda jealous of that. The height of video game buying was definitely the 90s with Toys R Us, Kay-Bee, Funcoland, EB. Mom & pop rental stores would even sell to you if you really want it. Tbh, Electronics Boutique was always my favorite out of all of them cause it seemed premium? Like they sold just video games. When I lived in Nevada, I got to experience Game Crazy and it made me realize the non-West Coast loooved video games.

Oh, I've never been really into PC gaming but I've been to RadioShack like all the time. I only used my PC to game when I was really into Survivor Ultimate Edition -based off the show.

I forgot to mention Costco usually has a bin of video games too.

What I was kinda getting at is do you think you can get too old to shop in-store for video games like the employees giving funny looks? It's hard not to notice the stores are decorated/marketed towards kids or adults with families. Do you ever feel like we're not the target audience anymore?

Obvs. I'm glad I can just online buy to not have to deal with the hassle of another human being handling the transaction and having personal feelings about the customer that's buying? -- I'd like to just eliminate the whole social thing of shopping. Employees see what you look like, at what time of day you come in. Video game shopping turned really weird and awkward for me once I turned and looked a certain age.

I've had so many weird experiences at GameStop with the employees there and I remember all of them.

I didn't get weird looks at the independent gaming stores I mentioned. They treat everyone I see with respect, and sometimes joke around with me. I wanna say the last time I bought something at GameStop was Fire Emblem Awakening. That was in 2013, so it's been a long time, so I don't remember if they gave me weird looks...lol.

[VidKid369]

Well, apparently giving weird looks is a thing nowadays. Back when I worked in a restaurant customers would complain to my manager that I “looked at [her] weird.” I was just like um, what?

But I sorta just learned from that experience and have kinda learned a bit more about retail and serving customers so. It made me think about going in and buying video games more.

I think the very last thing I bought from GameStop was... Atelier Rorona The Alchemist of Arland lol. That was 10 years ago.

[Sonic#]

Yes. Back in the 1990s and the 2000s, I learned to distinguish between places that were happy to let me browse and places where staff checked on me multiple times. I avoided the latter, but had enough options that I was okay. I only had one actively bad interaction, where as a 13 year old I interjected into a conversation with some fact I'd learned about pre-orders for Sonic Adventure only to receive a litany of banter about pre-orders for games like Final Fantasy VIII. Being 13, I was undoubtedly awkward in my attempt to have a conversation about video games, but I've never had an adult so vigorously try to put me in my place like that.

But usually I could browse without feeling bad about it. In high school, college, and even the first couple of years of graduate school, my regular shopping ritual involved scanning the shelves for new games or good deals. I'd do this at mall stores as well as any place that sold games (Target and other big box stores; media stores with a game section; retro stores). What changed were two things, both unrelated to personal treatment:

- they got savvier about pricing. Once upon a time, I found Grandia II for $5 and Skies of Arcadia Legends for $20. Price differences could be significant from store to store, so careful browsing had its rewards. But by the 2010s, GameStop was the main specialty store, and the big stores rarely varied in price. So deal-finding was no longer a significant motive.

- I discovered digital gaming. The lynchpin was Skyrim; before that, I bought virtually all my games in physical editions. But I realized Skyrim was coming out and didn't feel like getting to a store to find a copy. So I downloaded it on Steam. After that point I bought an increasing number of games digitally on the PC, 3DS, Wii U, Switch, and PS4.

The last PC game I bought a full physical edition for was The Witcher 2. I still sometimes buy physical copies of console games (most recently Yakuza: Like a Dragon), but the last time I bought a game in-person at a store was the Mass Effect trilogy remaster. At the time, I was little annoyed the salesperson kept emphasizing that I should pre-order and I was lucky to find a copy. While that may be true, waiting a little longer to download a game (or 3 days for a physical copy to be ordered) isn't a big loss. So in a way, the advice made me a little more averse to even trying to shop in-person.

[VidKid369]

Hm, ok I feel what you all are saying. I guess the in-person video game shopping experience just varies from person-to-person. I’ve never had a problem buying from places like Target (where I bought my first PS3 from the first paycheck of my very first job), Wal-mart, Best Buy I think they’re just used to a lot of people coming in that they don’t really care what each customer is doing although sometimes when I go to Best Buy on certain days it’s sometimes empty. But definitely Target and Wal-mart I’ve never ever had problems with.

GameStop in the 2010s is when I first started to encounter problems while in-person browsing and shopping, at first I just wrote it off as bad customer service (I’ve worked in fast-casual restaurants like Chipotle Mexican Grill before so I understand when the worker is tired or not having a good day) but once the awful interactions started to noticably become consistent I knew there was something wrong with either the company itself and the type of staff they like to hire or they just have a personal problem with me.

I actually kept going into GameStop cause I had some wonderful memories of Electronics Boutique in its heyday and thought it could duplicate or even surpass my past personal experiences/memories with video game boutiques but alas they failed to meet my expectations of them in the end.

Listing each bad customer shopping experience and what exactly happened I’m not gonna do out of professional courtesy but there were a multitude of them. It got to the point where after 10 years of analyzing each situation that happened I determined that they just didn’t like me and always went out of their way to make me feel embarrassed, awkward and uncomfortable whenever I came into their store. It wasn’t just one particular location but this was at all the GameStops in the San Francisco Bay Area and there were usually 3 or 4 I would always hit up.

I haven’t done digital yet. I like physical copies. Hell, I just like being in the video game store. There’s actually video game boutiques here in the Philippines too and we still have Toys R Us and Kay-Bee Toy Store that still sells video games so I don’t miss GameStop too much if at all.

[Alunissage]

Lots of short (?) thoughts here.

- I came to console gaming late (meaning, college-age) and even then it took me a few years to really grasp that you could go to game stores. I mean, every game I'd played before then had belonged to a friend and tended to just kind of...show up? I had a housemate who had a friend who would get every new console and give away the previous generation, and he had just gotten a Saturn, so guess what my housemate ended up with. I'm not sure, but I think the first time I went shopping for games at a store was to look for SSSC in mid-1999. Wait, this can't be right, because I did know about Ocarina of Time when it came out and I persuaded my parents to get it for my sister. Well, the point is, I didn't go shopping for console games until at least the late 90s. So I had a bit of experience with the bigger stores having interesting stuff before they kind of all became one store, but not lots. And I didn't have, say, friends in school talking about gaming, and didn't know about gaming magazines, so I didn't really know what was coming up most of the time.

- When I found out about the cool SNES-gen games (and others) I'd "missed", I started looking in used game stores for them. Those places really gave me a sense of treasure hunting, and still do, though there are fewer of them (and I've gotten most of the older games I'd want to play). I'm in the Bay Area too and wish I could give you some pointers about where to find them, but yeah, most of them have gone. There are a couple in the LA area I go to when I'm visiting my folks, and one in Saskatoon (!) that I go to when visiting my husband's hometown, but it's mostly online shopping for me now. For used games that's usually auctions, though very few of those these days.

- I don't remember much about getting funny looks in stores, but that may be sheer luck. Certainly I have heard from many female gamers that they've had negative experiences in stores. Could be that people just assumed I was buying for a kid, I dunno. Oddly, the abovementioned housemate was the only male gamer I knew until 1999, while what console gaming I did do/see before I met him was all with female friends/relatives, starting, honest, with Pong.

- The letting people browse vs aggressively offering help can also be an individual retail worker thing. I notice it mainly in yarn stores, where I tended to bristle when offered help but was then happy to talk with sales crew after I'd looked over the store myself. That's not to say there weren't corporate policies in place for aggressive help, and new employees are probably likely to adopt similar styles to the employees that they work with.

- I like downloading games to find out what they're like but I also like physical copies, so sometimes I'll buy the physical copy after getting the download. Or I'll import the Japanese physical version, in the case of games which are download-only in NA. Sometimes those have English options in them, like Okami for Switch.

[VidKid369]

!!! I had no idea you were in the Bay Area area (? lol) Alunissage! I lived there my whole life in San Francisco. Miss that place, sometimes.

Well, my first experience with gaming stores was certainly Toys R Us and ended with GameStop. We have gaming boutiques here in the Philippines but I haven't fully explored them yet. My favorite shopping experience had to be Game Crazy - the workers were always fixing old consoles out front and it was so interesting watching them do it. Had never seen that before. This was in Las Vegas.

In San Francisco, the Electronics Boutique employees certainly had a cool kids aura about them. They always just seemed, I dunno, cool to me whenever I would go in and buy something as a kid. It was probably because it was S.F. and everyone there is cool- hip- to some degree.

The Funcoland guys seemed the most knowledgeable it seemed like they had literally played every single used game in their store lol. Whenever I ask about a game at EB/GameStop I usually get the "Oh, I haven't played that one yet" line.

The whole "being aggressive" thing well, my only comparison is when I worked at Chipotle Mexican Grill I was usually pretty aggressive when trying to sell our food but people don't really come in there to browse if they come into the restaurant and stand in line they're gonna order something. I don't really wait around in the store for someone to come in and aggressively try to make a sell the restaurant is packed all day and there's always a line of people so I'm always talking to a customer I barely have time to have a thought about my personal life during work. Which's in contrast to when I'm the customer I don't want to talk I just want to browse and be left alone.

I don't think we had any rules from corporate on how to behave at the restaurant it was mostly an individual thing with the general manager, my GM always wanted us to smile (so much so I had developed a permasmile) and never say 'No' to the customer so those were the only things I ever followed. Tbh, I remember letting a No slip out like twice the whole time I was there usually I would say something like 'maybe, lemme check...' LOL.

[Kizyr]

So for me, the short answer is no. The longer answer is no but because I've kind of curated where and how I shop to avoid situations I don't like.

Before GameStop basically consolidated almost all game-specific retail, it was honestly pretty fun to browse through stores and interact or not interact the extent that you'd like -- say back when I was a teenager it was kind of nice. GameStop corporate got very aggressive with its marketing though and I know employees were under huge pressure to sell customers on preorders and whatnot -- between that and like, a few bad interactions (not rude, just like "I bought a 3DS game to play on a long flight, but when I got home to pack, it turned out you forgot to include the actual cartridge... twice..." sort of problems), I just don't bother anymore. All physical games I just order online direct from the retailer or publisher now.

The big, big exception is retro games. And it is still really fun to go through retro games at stores for that -- fortunately in this area there're a few, and pre-COVID there were conventions, and in both cases it's not uncommon that I can just chat with someone about games, or not if I feel like just browsing quietly.

[VidKid369]

Haha, Kizyr, you are so funny. To be honest, I felt like immediately better after posting the thread maybe I just needed to vent a little? I actually don't hold any animosity towards GameStop and its employees I'd rather just forget about it? I dunno why I sat on it for like 10 years before saying anything, though?

I feel a lot better here since moving (like it changed my life for the positive in every which way you can imagine) I think I just needed to get out of the city life and the types-kinds of people you meet there. A lot of my friends online said it might've just been the environment I was in after I told them how I was feeling about it.

It's really interesting here in the Philippines they have a store called Datablitz which's pretty much equivalent to our gaming stores in the US, but it's much smaller and it's usually one worker in the store. It reminds me of like Japan in the LUNAR Making of when they were all crowded in a small store. Anyway they still have PS3 on shelfs. And when you buy a game, they take a boxcutter and open the plastic for you and show you the back of the disc to show you it's not scratched and it's brand new/not used. I nearly had a heart attack when they first did this, and I almost wanted to tell them to stop and that I'd do it myself when I got home but when in Rome.

But yeah, most of the GameStop stuff that happened to me was so beneath me in terms of the bigger picture in my life it was mostly just rude employees, who wanted to be rude and rude interactions. I'm honestly above it now that I wrote about it.

[ShugoHanasaki]

Not at all