Mitch Hed­berg had an excel­lent bit where he talked about buy­ing a dough­nut. This is how it starts:

“I bought a dough­nut and they gave me a receipt for the dough­nut… I don’t need a receipt for the dough­nut. I give you the money and you give me the dough­nut, end of transaction.”

He would have hated Gamestop.

There were two clerks at the Gamestop I vis­ited a cou­ple of weeks ago: one a young lady and the other a young man. She was obvi­ously new because there was a line of cus­tomers, yet there was only one reg­is­ter open. No prob­lem, my turn came soon enough.

Lady clerk, big smile: “Can I help you?”

Me: “Yes! Do you have a copy of Dis­gaea 3 in stock?”

Lady: “Yes! We do.”

Guy Clerk, no smile: “Wait, wait. We’re not sure. Let’s see, hmm, do we have any left? Let me check.”

(Aside: The guy actu­ally paused to say the word Hmm. One of the hard­est parts of writ­ing fic­tion is cre­at­ing dia­logue that sounds believ­able. Writ­ten dia­logue isn’t at all the way that peo­ple actu­ally speak, because a typ­i­cal face to face con­ver­sa­tion is rid­dled with inter­rup­tions and mis­pro­nun­ci­a­tions and leaps of logic, none of which can exist in writ­ing. Any­way, my first thought upon hear­ing him actu­ally force in the word Hmm is: this guy needs to be writ­ten better.)

While the lady unlocked the game vault to get my copy, the guy con­tin­ued, “Did you pre­order a copy?”

“No.”

“You can guar­an­tee that we’ll have a copy in stock blah blah blah.”

I tuned him out.

When he was done, the lady started to ring me up. “Would you like a strat­egy guide–”

“No, thanks.”

“–because this one is really cool looking.”

Ok, that wasn’t soul­less, so I smile. “I’m good, thanks. Just the game.”

“Would you like any other new games?”

“No, thanks.”

“We’re also hav­ing a 10% off used blah blah blah.”

“No, thanks.”

“Blah blah used games blah blah.”

“No, thanks.”

“Would you like to pre­order any­thing else?”

“No, thanks.”

“Can I inter­est you in a time­share condo to play your game in?”

At what point did this com­pany for­get what it’s like to go shop­ping? I don’t resent either of these clerks per­son­ally; this is Gamestop’s train­ing. Way to make my trans­ac­tion as long and painful as pos­si­ble! How about: I give you the money, you give me the prod­uct I ask for? (I still can’t believe that this com­pany some­how con­sumed my quirky and per­son­able Elec­tron­ics Boutique.)

Gamestop is like shop­ping inside an eco­nomic fos­sil. I mean, I walked out of that retail store lov­ing Ama­zon more than I did walk­ing in. Every Ama­zon pur­chase I’ve ever made is noth­ing more than: I give Ama­zon the money, they give me the prod­uct. End of transaction.

This is a really long way of beg­ging Bliz­zard to let me buy my two copies of Wrath directly from them, digitally.

Please!