Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Holiday Customers

Another game store who works the "entertainment model," buying and selling used media like video games, has had problems with customers. His problems are unique in that his business model deals more with the general public. In his case, he has issues dealing with minorities. Game stores generally don't have this problem due to the general paleness of the game store demographic. There are few minorities who game.

I bring this up because the issues and irritations he faces are similar to what I face during the holidays. This is the period where our geeky, interesting customers are not allowed to shop. Instead they send their muggle friends and relatives, much to their dismay.

My theory is that muggles, the regular people, or bala pritag jana in Pali (I love that they have a word for muggles in Pali), are just rude. They are rude all the time to store employees and get away with it. First, they shop primarily in stores with poor service, so rudeness is their default attitude. They put on their stony faces when they shop and expect to be left alone. Second, nobody who ever helps them, if help is what you can call it, have any authority or ability to call them on their rudeness. Minimum wage employees don't care and would get in trouble if they called them on their crap.

4 comments:

  1. You will have to be the first store owner to deputize their employees to call muggles on their crappy attitudes :)

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  3. When I worked at Heroes Aren't Hard to Find - a comics and games shop in NC
    http://www.heroesonline.com/index.htm

    the owner allowed "The Dharbin" and certain other longtime employees certain latitude in dealing with annoying customers.

    On the other hand, it was also one of the friendliest businesses I've ever been to, and extremely family oriented, and our customers loved being in the store.

    Think of the record store in "High Fidelity", with Jack Black as the manager.

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  4. High Fidelity is always in my mind when thinking of employees. I definitely don't want a Jack Black.

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