Repost: Big Box Kick in the Nuts

Apparently I have a short memory. Yesterday (July 8th) I decided to go to Best Buy and pick up a copy of Civilization: Revolution for the xBox 360. No luck, not on the shelves and I did not bother to ask a sales tard. I just walked across teh street to Circuit City. CC is one of my last resort stops, they have actually gotten better but I still really hate going in there for some reason. No luck.

This time I asked the chick at the regester what was up, she checked the website from her terminal and it confirmed today was the release date, however the site also said “Not available for instore pickup” WTF, shrugged and walked out. Figured surely I could handle walking through one store for access to the GameStop in the mall. Walked in the overly cheerful and annoying rep there asked if she could help. “You bet” I said, do you have a copy of Civilization: Revolution ?”

“Nope, we will get that in tomorrow, we do not get releases on release day it usually takes an extra day or so because we are on the East Coast. Would you like to reserve a copy?”

I replied “Nope, thanks.” and walked out. Fairly pissed a confused by the whole experience.

Problems I see here are as follows in order of occurance.

You would think Brick and Mortar establishments would want to have things, new things in store for people to purchase. I could understand if they under ordered something like Civ, as it ain’t Halo or Rock Band 2, but this was just a case of BB and CC not even apparently intending on getting it in. I will not make this mistake again. Another bad experience I had was when Joani and I decided to get LotRO and start playing. They both had 50 bajillion copies of WoW but not ONE copy of LotRO.

As far as the experience of Game Stop goes. I think they just have a problem with deffinitions. Release day is not a few days around the time the product is supposed to be in stores, it is the day announced as release day. Having worked in both record and retail stores, we used to get shipments from our warehouses the day BEFORE the announced release or by 10 am on the release day. Big dog titles we searched the box for and had the ready to go, the 2nd string stuff we would shelve soon after. teh 2nd concept GameStop seems to have off a bit is that Huntsville, AL is on the East Coast, let alone that location should impact whether they get something on release day or not. My time in retail was both in Toledo, OH and Huntsville, AL and unless the Major distributors has a huge cock up, we got things on time.

I did not want to reserve a copy at their stupid store I would have to spend another hour round trip getting to and from after they had already pissed me off. I figured I would check Rhino at lunch today, if they had a copy fine. If not Amazon would get my money and I would have it by the weekend. Well GameStop got in a little jab because apparently they are now the proud owner of the former Rhino location, and they had a copy left of what has apparently been a suprisingly brisk selling title (Might be because the CC and BB don’t have it).

Oh and while I am at it, let me pick on the dorks at Barnes and Noble. They had a store sandwiched inbetween BB and CC. We have a new people àquarium theme park shopping extraviganza called Bridge Street that is around 5 away from their former location. They opened a newer bigger fancier, higher priced cherry position location there.  At the old location, there are signs plastered all over with big red letters. The read °Thanks for shopping with us we are now Closed° and then in finer black magic marker it is scribbled in that they hav emoved to bridge street. The casual passer by might just think they have closed and move on. Their signage people should be shot. It is not like B and N does not move frequently. This same store has done it once before. A big WE HAVE MOVED is much more friendly than WE HAVE CLOSED.

I will go with my first instinct next time and just pre order the game from Amazon and get it without wasting gas, time and peace of mind.