I Don’t Have To Reach Over The Counter To Beat You, Sir
Near the end of the video rental era, I worked at a game shop that was sometimes attached to a major video rental chain in the United States. Essentially, they would partition some of the stores and sell video games out of the other side.
One night, I was closing by myself, and a guy came in with his wife to complain about a defective game. He had purchased Wii Play — a collection of minigames for the Wii, which at that time came bundled with a controller.
The customer hadn’t brought the game disc, which worked fine, but complained that the controller was defective and that he wanted a replacement. If we had a used copy on hand, it wouldn’t have been a problem to swap out the bundle or just the controller, but we actually didn’t have any used or new Wii controllers in stock.
I explained to the guy that I could get one from the closest store on my way in the next day morning but couldn’t replace it right then.
He saw that we had a new copy of Wii Play on display and demanded I exchange it from that one. This led to two problems: he had bought a used copy, which was cheaper, so he’d have to pay the difference, and he hadn’t brought in the disc, so I wasn’t even getting the old copy back.
I explained this to the guy, and he started to lose it, calling me names, threatening to report me, and eventually telling me I’d better do it or he’d “reach over the counter and beat my a**.”
At that point, some of the staff and customers in the video store were taking notice, but I calmly offered again to get the copy the following morning from our other location.
Then, it occurred to me that I hadn’t asked if I could try out the defective controller to see what the issue might be. So, I asked him if I might take a look and maybe see if I could fix it.
The manager at the video store decided to intervene at that point and told the guy to leave. The guy’s wife asked him to go, too, and we got the obligatory, “I’m never shopping here again, I spend so much money in this store… blah, blah, blah.”
Since he’d put the controller down, while he was distracted, I decided to sync the remote to the demo Wii behind the counter and start playing whatever game we had on demo that night.
I looked over to him and said, “You didn’t know how to sync this to your system, did you?”
The dude froze in his embarrassment and, without collecting the controller, the couple walked out. I put the controller in the back and finished up, delighted to have made that guy look like an idiot in front of the whole store.
I waited a few weeks to see if they returned, and when they didn’t, my manager eventually decided that I deserved to keep the controller for the trouble.
I did see them in the video store one more time a few months later, and neither would make eye contact. I think the manager must have closed their rental accounts that night because I don’t think they ever came back again.