An Open Letter to Gaming Store Employees
If a potential customer walks in your store to do nothing more than browse and maybe buy something, don’t ambush them with stories of yore. We don’t care about your favorite RPG unless you’re trying to sell us a copy. If you’re talking about an out of print book, then don’t hype it up. It just makes us want to walk out and spend our time in the nearest used RPG book store to try to find what you’re talking about.
This is especially true if it’s around noon-time. This means I’m in your store during my lunch hour and I have limited time to get through my browsing/purchasing.
Case in point: I was in a FLGS (Friendly Local Game Store) a few days ago to look and see if anything new came out. I came across a copy of Twilight 2013, and I wanted to see if they had the same background items Twilight 2000 had. It did, but they were toned down, I think. I didn’t get a good chance to read through the character creation because I ran out of time. Without enough time to read the pertinent parts of the book, I didn’t make a purchase. Why didn’t I have time to make a purchase? Because I was ambushed in the corner of the store by an employee who just had to tell me about his favorite out of print RPG. sigh He even went on to detail the races, the combat system, his favorite three characters, and some back story about the author of the RPG.
Had I not been trapped by this over-eager employee, the store probably would have made a $40 sale that day. Their loss.
