I put in almost 10 years with Gamestop (mostly part time except at the end when I took on a management role) and did another 2 years with Funcoland prior to that. I've got a couple of stories that I've posted on here before.
One thing that's always bothered me is how people have this rose-colored goggle view of Funcoland. They incorrectly remember it as some kind of bastion for old school gaming when in reality most all of the stupid shit people complain about Gamestop doing nowadays actually originated with them. I'm talking about the pesky upselling and pushing magazine subscriptions. The one exception is the gutting of new games, that always was a Babbages thing.
Anyway...like I said, treating employees like shit, threatening their jobs if they didn't sell enough dumb shit like cleaning kits, reservations, or magazine subscriptions was absolutely a Funcoland thing. To add insult to injury you only got a 10% employee discount that only applied on used product. When I heard that Babbages was introducing the Gamestop concept, I immediately jumped ship and literally got in at the ground level.
For the first two years of Gamestop's existence, at least in my experience, it was the DREAM JOB that every gamer could hope for. In the beginning we only sold used games so there was no gutted copies of new titles. We had no magazine to pitch or pre-orders to take. The only policy in place for us that they pushed was called MSTs or Multiple Sale-Items per Transaction. If a customer was buying a game, they wanted us to ask if there was any other games they were interested in or perhaps an accessory like a memory card or controller. Unlike Funcoland, there wasn't the same pressure and fear of losing your job over not selling more than one item per transaction.
Aside from the stress free environment, perhaps the biggest difference from Funcoland to Gamestop was the employee discount. As a Babbages/Gamestop employee, we enjoyed a 25% discount on new/used items (excluding systems). Needless to say, I cleaned UP because I had a regular 40 hour job that paid decent (at least back then) and GS was just a weekend job so any money they paid me went right back to them.
This post is approaching novel length so time for a story. I had one customer who we dubbed as "Mush Mouth" because he had the most gnarled teeth, was always high and dressed in tatters. He would frequent the store with his equally trashy woman and their loud as fuck offspring. Without fail they would always buy something only to return it shortly thereafter.
One particular day I assume Mush Mouth was feeling rich or something because he buys a bunch of Xbox 360 games. I joked to my co-worker that he'd be back shortly and sure enough about 20 minutes later he strolls back in to return the games. His reasoning? In his words "Uhh yeah I need to return dis to git Pampas (Pampers) fo my baby". I processed his return like I always did but internally I'm going "Jesus Christ dude you SERIOUSLY need to learn how to get your priorities in order!"
While Mush Mouth was a nice guy, he and his ilk were the epitome of the Retail Customer Nightmare. He regularly stunk of body odor and weed. His offspring, usually minimally clothed or just in a diaper, did whatever the fuck they felt like including constant screeching, making messes that they wouldn't clean up and once even defecating on the floor.
Mush Mouth was just one of a handful of regulars who came in that were "memorable". Others included this obese man named Howard who used a length of clothesline as a makeshift belt, these mentally handicapped twin brothers that I dubbed as the Trigger Twins, WWE Divas Guy, and a host of other mouthbreathers like the one who said Nintendo owned Turbografx and Sega because they were on the Virtual Console.
