Hello person.

Want to read about my experience when trying to foolishly spend money on a game I probably didn’t need? Want me to put an angry spin on it and go completely over the top with my wordery? Well, here you go!

It’s all happened, of course, and I really do think the guy was a bell-end. However, as I was a bit shocked at the time, and because I’m a bit of a shy bastard, I didn’t say anything. Although there was a game left in the pre-owned DS, so WINNAR IS ME.

I did actually send it to them, but I don’t think I’ll get a response, somehow…

from Chris to customerservices@game.co.uk date 15 December 2009 20:21 subject Poor Customer Service

Dear Sir/Madam

Sadly, I’m writing with a complaint rather than a compliment. Recently, at your store in the Cheshire Oaks outlet village in the North-West of England, I had a very unpleasant, unprofessional experience with one of your staff. I was buying a pre-owned DS and several Xbox 360 games, one of which was Wolfenstein, priced at £17.98. Except I wasn’t allowed to leave the store with everything I had hoped to buy. An employee of yours, who I assume is paid to enhance sales, offer high-quality customer service and to generally ‘make money’ for the store, wouldn’t allow me to buy Wolfenstein. It was, besides the DS console, the most expensive item I was buying in that transaction

The reason he wouldn’t let me buy this game (which garnered reasonable reviews upon it’s release, as well as a recent article on Kotaku.com naming it one of the better over-looked games of 2009), was because he didn’t like it. In his words; “It’s well bad mate, I’m doing you a favour by not selling you it, mate. I can’t let you walk out of here with it, mate”. Now, I was tempted to ignore him, because I hadn’t asked his opinion and really didn’t want it, and buy it anyway (his use of the phrase “well bad” and over-reliance on the colloquial ‘Mate’ confirmed his idiocy to me, negating any validity his opinion might have carried) but I was quite shocked and taken aback by this, leaving me to mumble a soft “Er, okay then…”, handing over my card and leaving, feeing confused and offended. This isn’t how shops work! Shops sell things! If they didn’t sell things, they wouldn’t be a shop. You may as well close.

Now, I am quite a seasoned gamer, and an intelligent 23-year old man. I know what I like enough to take calculated risks on the games that don’t receive shining reviews. I don’t expect to be judged for my purchases, nor do I expect unwanted outbursts against my taste in games. For all he knew, I could own every single other Xbox 360 game and I could have been buying it as a last resort. Or I might really enjoy terrible games, in the same way you can enjoy a bad movie. It’s possible, also, that I was still bitter about World War 2 and harboured the desire to shoot every digital Nazi in the face, regardless of their supernatural abilities or shoddy game surroundings. I don’t believe for a second that your company makes it’s profits solely from critically acclaimed products like Modern Warfare 2 – No, you make money from things like Abba: Singstar, or Ready Steady Cook on the DS. I’m also very sure you don’t make money from customers by singling them out in a crowded store, in front of a line of 20 people, and questioning their purchases loudly in a stupid voice.

I’m going to make a bold assumption here, based on what I saw that day: When your store clerk rummaged through a few drawers and failed to locate the game in 5 seconds or less, he made the snap judgement to talk me out of buying it, rather than continue to look and risking the possibility of all this crouching/standing resembling exercise. His claims to have ‘rented’ the game when it came out, followed by vague generalised bad-mouthing of the product didn’t exactly leave me with a warm, glowing ‘customer service’ experience. It felt like he went out of his way to NOT serve me, because he was useless. However, you’ll be glad to know that he did run through every forced syllable of the ‘Game Care’ policy with regards to my DS, despite me confirming that yes, someone had already gone over it with me and I had declined it, and also despite me declining it at the end of every sentence that dribbled from his mouth. He was unrelenting. He was the T1000 to GameCare’s John Connor. I hadn’t seen the boy and I didn’t want the GameCare. It’s an offer aimed at the type of person who might take their PSP to the swimming pool with them, cram a Gameboy cart into the front of their Xbox or attach their Wii to a passing train with a grappling hook and dance about in gravy, stomping on copies of Imagine: Petz.

But I digress.

Let’s run through a similar example:
If you were in Burger King (a similar-level job to Game I’d imagine, i.e. – just slightly above McDonalds on the Self-Respect-o-meter) and you order a cheeseburger, would you expect to be served with a cheeseburger, or would you expect the till-jockey to voice their distaste in said cheeseburger and refuse to serve you? I’m assuming, rightly, that you would get a cheeseburger even if the cashier was a raging Vegan. So, just because your trained till-chimp also happened to have formed an opinion, miraculously, on a game he was employed to sell, I wouldn’t expect to be challenged about my decision to purchase it, and refused service.

If I were to be rude or insolent to a member of your staff, I would expect to be ejected from the store. So what happens when one of your staff is rude to me? Admittedly, I should have complained to a store manager at the time, but my shock didn’t actually register until we’d left the shop and my girlfriend remarked that the cashier was ‘a bit of a dick’. Her talent for understatement is one of the things I like about her. I’m shocked at myself that I actually went through with the rest of this transaction, validating the cashiers moronic little bleatings and piling money into your company, thereby inadvertently accepting his ‘advice’. He wasn’t being helpful, because no other alternative was suggested. He wasn’t ‘saving me’ from a bad game, because I am not an idiot and I’m fairly sure he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He was rude, annoying, and possibly the worst shop assistant I’ve ever came across. At least most other people in the retail industry have the decency to shut up and not pretend to care. I sadly didn’t catch his name, but maybe ask the guys there to rate Wolfenstein, and then fire the one that says “Well bad”. Out of a cannon. Into a library.

Also, yes I did buy Wolfenstein elsewhere afterwards (and not at Gamestation either, so shove that up your conglomerate) and so far I’ve enjoyed the innovative hubworld the game employs, although I’ve not had much of a chance to play it.

Chris Welsh

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I’m pretty childish, huh?

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