Friday, 6 May 2005
Old-Man Story Tellin' Time
So about two weeks ago, I read the news that GameStop and Electronics Boutique were merging. Specifically, that GameStop was buying EB. There can be only one, and all that.
Now, for a lot of people, this is meaningless or trivial. For others (specifically, hardcore video game buyers), it's a matter of religion.
For me, it's a rite of passage. See, I opened the very first GameStop, back in the day.
In 1992, I was helping to pay for university by working at a Software Etc. store. My manager was chosen to become the manager of a new store - the one the chain was opening in the Mall of America.
Ah, yes, the Mall of America. In the land of malls (the first fully-enclosed mall, Southdale, opened in 1956 the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area), this one was to be king. The biggest mall in the U.S., by some measures.
Anyway, Cari tapped me to become her assistant manager - one of two - at this new store. It was to be a store unlike any of the others in the chain: focused on video games, instead of the software that formed the core of the eponymous chain.
It was a pretty weird experience, those first few weeks. Pre-opening, I saw a giant construction crane indoors, in what seemed to be the biggest greenhouse I'd ever seen (later to become Camp Snoopy). Opening week, five employees working full-day shifts were barely able to handle the flood of people sweeping through our little store (300 square feet, if that). And so on.
It was all pretty impressive, because the base assumption was that the store would be an abject failure. Showing up the computer-oriented snobs, the little game store that could, did.
Just a couple of years after I'd been promoted to manager (of the first store in the Software Etc. chain, but that's another story), the chain went into Chapter 7 - a nasty experience that I was spared by having left mere months before those dark days. And yet, the chain survived (through some sort of buyout, if I remember correctly) and was restructured around the gaming business.
One year soon after that, during the nasty competition from Web-based shops like Amazon, the only reason that Barnes & Noble was in the black was due to GameStop revenues. That's really impressive, considering the minuscule margins on games versus the markup on books. Of course, it helps to remember that the video game industry dwarfs the movie entertainment business (this I remember reading somewhere, but can't remember any figures).
So, it's somewhat of a watershed event that this chain has gone on to grow and swallow all other retail competitors - used and new. And I was there, at the very first store.
Wearing my stupid, purple polo shirt.
Jeez, am I glad those days are over. Still, good luck to you, lil' behemoth.
(A short, probably more accurate, history can be found at Wikipedia.)