Wed, January 21, 2004

There are so many stories about my new GameCube, and there's so little time, especially given how much of my free time is now devoted to playing with the thing. I talked about my super-awesome game that I love, but in order to do so, I had to skip over the enthralling story of how I came to own the system in the first place.

As regular readers of this site are aware (or even just readers who started yesterday), the GameCube decision crystallized over the weekend – between Andy's recommendation, the newfound information about the original Zelda being re-released on GameCube (It arrived today! My god, I missed that music!), and my existing fascination with Burnout 2. But that's just the beginning of a very bizarre story.

I heard about the Zelda re-release on Thursday night, and by Friday afternoon I had secured my copy with a winning bid on eBay. I had a few other things to take care of on Friday, and there was no rush to own a console without the game anyway, so I didn't make a big fuss out of it. However, on Saturday morning, I started thinking about Burnout 2, and I fished around in my files of old "Entertainment Weekly" magazines – I knew there was a reason I kept those! – to find the review about it. I realized that if I could get a decent retail price for Burnout 2, then I'd have a game to play on the GameCube, so I might as well get a GameCube right away!

Being the savvy shopper that I am, I went online to try to look up some prices. I started with eBay, for a comparison, and then went over to bestbuy.com since there are multiple Best Buys in town, and I would probably buy the GameCube at one of them, anyway. According to their site, they don't carry Burnout 2. They have Burnout, which is about 18 months old, but they don't have the five-month-old Burnout 2. (This should have raised a red flag.) Oh well, I thought, I'll just look elsewhere, or maybe buy it off of eBay. Or possibly check at the store when I buy the GameCube, because maybe their site is out of sync with their inventory. But before I left the website, I noticed something. Best Buy had the silver GameCube I wanted (Nintendo calls it "platinum," and who am I to disagree?) and if you bought it from them online, you got a free steering wheel controller. Not a bad deal for someone in the market for a driving game! I ordered it up, the site indicated inventory for both plus the memory card at my favorite location, so I scheduled in-store pickup, had some lunch, then left for the spa.

Now, the in-store pickup option is one of those things that Best Buy has been crowing about in its advertisements for years. The retail stores that offer online shopping love to flaunt the in-store pickup option because it's more immediate than Amazon.com but more convenient than a store where you can't place your order ahead of time in your pajamas. You would think that they would have refined the process of delivering on that exciting concept by now. You would think, but you would be dead wrong.

I placed my online order around 10:00 am, and the confirmation email I received said that I should wait until I received a second confirmation that the store had received my request and set my order aside for pickup. The email said it usually takes about two hours. Sounded reasonable to me; the store receives notification of my order, some apathetic high-school dropout in a bright blue shirt shuffles over to a rack and grabs my stuff, he puts it in a pile, and he clicks a button to tell bestbuy.com to send me the second confirmation. Two hours is ample time! By 1:45, when I had to leave for the spa, I still hadn't heard anything. I printed out the first confirmation to take with me, figuring that by the time I left the spa at 6:00, the heavyset kid with the buzz cut and the breathing problem would have managed to drag himself out to the rack and pick up my Platinum GameCube.

Cut to: me in the Refunds & Exchanges line at Best Buy around 7:00 pm on a Saturday a few weeks after Christmas. Fun. Yes, you're right, there is a separate desk for picking up online orders, but nobody was standing at that desk. I guess all those cheery advertisements were for naught; I'm the only one who uses the in-store pickup option. So, I had to wait behind people returning Discmans (Discmen?) and faulty copies of The Order on DVD, just for the privilege of "saving time" by ordering online for in-store pickup. (The in-store pickup option is actually called "Gotta Have It," in reference to the supposed immediate gratification of picking it up yourself rather than paying to have it shipped to you. Hm.) Finally at the head of the line, I learned that the kid had no idea where my order was. He hunted around in a pile of stuff in a sloppy cabinet and found the memory card and the GameCube, but no steering wheel. He wandered off into the "warehouse," looking for the last part of my order, only to return and tell me that they didn't have it. Even though the website said they did. Okay, fine. I'll pick up the rest of the order another time.

I got home and, sure enough, I had three email messages from Best Buy. The first one said that my order was ready for pickup. The second indicated that they couldn't find one of the items, so I should call them to let them know where to ship it or select another store for pickup. The third said "Thanks for picking up your order." Yeah. It was a blast. (This message also cemented my uneasy feeling that, since I picked up part of the order, the order as a whole would be marked as "complete," and the free steering wheel would be lost forever. Which would defeat the purpose of my online bargain-hunting. Fortunately, this one prediction would turn out to be unfounded.) By this time, the hotline was closed, so I waited.

First thing Sunday morning, I called Best Buy and talked to a cheery young lady who told me that another nearby store had 16 of the steering wheels in stock, and so she would transfer my pickup order over to them. She told me that they had 16 in stock, which means she was communicating with their computer system somehow. This will be important later. At that point, it was around 9:15 in the morning, and Best Buy doesn't open until 10:00, so I had time. I ate my waffles as usual, and I continued my shopping for those things Best Buy didn't carry – the game controller extension cord, and Burnout 2. I had checked when I was at the store Saturday night; they had thirty dozen copies of Burnout, but none of Burnout 2. Fascinating. I found a store I'd never heard of called GameStop, which did not offer Gotta Have It, but did indicate that both items were in their inventory. It was in the Fox Hills Mall, someplace I'd never been to or even heard of, and in an area of town that I don't typically frequent. A less courteous writer might employ the term "ghetto." But it was three minutes from the new Best Buy, so I printed the map. Around noon (so, four hours after the phone call), I headed to Best Buy. I am not a fan of leaving home on weekends, especially two days in a row. After all, I was all relaxed from the spa day, and I had been to Ralphs and Trader Joe's, so I had all the frozen goodies I would need to survive a nuclear winter. But it was an opportunity to wrap up my business with Best Buy, so I took it.

First, I was confronted with the separate desks for Returns and Online Pickup, and yet again the Online Pickup window was unmanned. This time, I decided to stand there, rather than waiting in the long line. I wasn't there to return or exchange anything. A big beefy kid with (surprise!) a buzz cut wandered up to the desk a few minutes later and said that I should be in the Returns line. By that point, moving to the Returns line would mean getting behind four people who showed up after me, a harsh penalty for queuing up at the proper window in the first place! I mentioned that, and he kept repeating the sentence "Online pickups are handled in that line." But, the sign says Online Pickup right here. "Online pickups are handled in that line." But I'm in the right place and you're telling me to get behind people who got here after me. "Online pickups are–" Can it, dickwipe. And, by the way, maybe you shouldn't have a sign that says Online Pickups. Or, just maybe, instead of wasting time hassling me, you could just fix my order. You can believe I took down his name.

(You know where he went after he was through with me? Back to the break room behind the counter. Yes, the person who has the shift at the Online Pickup desk just shoos customers away and then gets back to loafing. Ah, to be young, apathetic, and rock-stupid.)

Fortunately, at that point, someone waved me back over to Online Pickups and took a look at my order. I was asked if I had the second confirmation. Well, no. This was a special case, my order had already been placed, and this one item was just switched to a different store. I spoke with someone on the phone, not online, and she set it all up. She said you had 16. He got on the store phone and found someone in the back who had seen the request. He asked if they had retrieved the item off the shelf. They hadn't. He asked them to do that and bring it over to the Online Pickups desk. He said they would recognize it because it was the desk where all the people with Online Pickups weren't. (No, he didn't say that. But he could have.) They had seen the request. This will be important later.

He told me that I needed the secondary confirmation from bestbuy.com in order to pick up the item. I said that nobody told me I needed two confirmations this time around; I had assumed that the girl on the phone who could see right into their computer system had arranged everything. This was no longer an online order, it had become a special phone order thingy. He explained that the order has to go to the online store, then they send notification, then someone retrieves the item and tells bestbuy.com to send me the second confirmation. That's what I thought. And, since I knew that they had seen the notification, then it was just a matter of picking the item up off the shelf and telling bestbuy.com so they could confirm. I was willing to wait for that. I even offered to go get it off the shelf myself. The kid said I could do that, pay for it, and cancel the online order. But I pointed out that it was free in the online order, and the store wasn't going to match that price. I used the desk phone to call Best Buy. I spoke to a smug prick who told me that bestbuy.com needed to send the request to the Best Buy store in order for them to give me the item. He told me that it takes from two to 24 hours. (So much for Gotta Have It!) I told him that I had spoken to someone four hours ago who was tapped right into the system, and certainly she would've sent the request immediately. Two to 24 hours, he said. I got his name, too. I asked whether he couldn't expedite the process, since I was standing in the store and the lunkhead had just returned from the shelf with my item in his hand. Apparently, once the order is in the system, no human is allowed to interact with it for a period of two to 24 hours. It kind of makes you wonder why they even answer the phones.

So, the contradictory stories were flying everywhere – the kid in the store said he had the request (remember?) and needed a confirmation; the phone rep said that the request hadn't been released, and of course the kid at the desk then changed his story to the "no request" tune, but if they didn't have the request, how did the kid emerge from the back with the right product? Lucky guess? What I was left with was a customer "service" person holding a copy of my paid order in one hand and the item I purchased in the other hand, and saying to me "Sorry, I can't give it to you." Literally. One in each hand. Not kidding. I should have punched him and run out of the store with the product I'd rightfully bought, but I just quit.

Now, sure, maybe everyone in that story followed the procedures correctly. (Except the snippy fucktart who kept saying "Online pickups are...") Maybe the computer system won't let the store release the item until the order is submitted into that store's computer system, and the store can't access the order in the main Best Buy system. And maybe, inexplicably, in the age of the information superhighway, it takes 24 hours for a single line of information to move from one bin to another in the computer network. But, if – IF – all of that is true, then the system is still fucked up to a staggering degree. The system is not designed to do the one thing it should do, which is to make the shopping experience easier and more effective for Best Buy's customers. When the kid is holding the order in one hand, and the product in the other, and watching me walk out the door empty-handed, something is wrong.

I drove around the corner to Fox Hills, locked my iPod in the glove compartment, and tried not to make eye contact as I hustled into the mall. Just after I found GameStop on the information kiosk, a young man stopped me and said he had to do a survey. Ordinarily, we're trained to run away from these people, but he looked like an amateur and he looked a little weary, as though a lot of people had been turning him down. He explained it was for a school project, it was for math class, and it was about the Iraq war. He couldn't have been sweeter. I asked how math related to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and he said it was a statistics class, so presumably he picked the topic – he was just assigned to sample some data and then analyze it.

He was really nice and he asked a bunch of questions which were pretty fun to answer. He asked me to estimate my yearly salary, and I gave him a $10,000 range so as not to appear concerned with such things. Apparently, though, the "estimate" he was referring to was only flexible about a dollar either way, so I had to get specific. What a day to be out without my bulletproof vest. He asked if I thought the war was justified and I answered "No" very quickly. He asked what percentage of the administration's reasons were probably humanitarian in nature, and I got all cute and said, "Let's be generous and say one percent." He wrote it all down. Now, the real statistics project would be to count how many people would – like me – childishly use the interview as a soapbox, as though it were actually a poll about the Iraq war. Even if the final report showed that everybody at the Fox Hills Mall was against the war in Iraq and the administration's pretense for it, and even if the kid took the initiative to send copies to the White House and the Pentagon, and even if staffers there decided to place the report in front of the president and Donald Rumsfeld, and even if they read it – we all know that they don't care what Americans think about their policies, least of all Americans who disagree with them. But the kid was really good-natured. I wanted to ask him how many people had been as ready to get some things off their chest about the Iraq war as I had been, but I also wanted to go home. I wished him good luck and headed for GameStop. Along the way, a charming gentleman in a blue apron and a visor handed me a free donut hole. If you had asked me, I'd have said he was a dead ringer for 50 Cent. Or Sugar Ray Leonard.

GameStop was not very well organized, and the shelves devoted to each game system were cluttered and small. I found my extension cable and an official Nintendo guide for the Zelda re-release, but not Burnout 2. Sad, sad. A bunch of employees were milling around dealing with some sort of carpet flooding or something. I packed up my selections and headed for the counter. A young man named Derrick who couldn't have been older than Letterman's kid was at the cash register, talking to a young black couple who were buying a game. He was telling them about how he had played the game, and what his reactions were, and how much they were going to love it, all in a very animated fashion. I started to tear up. I'm even welling up a little writing about it now. I probably had to wait about two extra minutes for him to talk with them after they had paid, but it was worth it. He was just so devoted. When I got to him, I mentioned that I was looking for Burnout 2 and he knew all about it, and asked a friend to help him check in the back. They were surprised to hear it wasn't on the GameCube rack, but they immediately theorized that it may have ended up in the "MIA bin" in the back. I can guess at what that was, although it was never explained to me. Sure enough, it was located in the MIA bin, and my order was complete. By now, I wanted to marry Derrick. Not only was he enthusiastic and engaged, but he was actively interested in solving my problem, and even started thinking up possible approaches to a solution before he had begun! We talked about Burnout 2 and Zelda and he said he really wanted a GameCube because they have the best graphics of the three systems currently on the market. But he was saving up for a car, so he had to be responsible. I had also picked up an S-video attachment, to make the graphics look even better, and we talked about that. He said his TV didn't have an S-video connector, and I explained how S-video separates the color from the greyscale values for sharper fidelity and less "ghosting," and he acted interested. By the end, I was sorely tempted to just buy the kid his car. I took a business card from the register and I launched into this impassioned story about how terrible Best Buy is and how great GameStop is and how utterly fantastic he is. I told him, as my eyes got all wet and glassy, that I was taking the card so I could write his manager and say what a fantastic retail experience I'd shared with Derrick. He seemed touched, and maybe a little creeped out. I think I'll print out this column and send it to the manager.

On the way out, I noticed that a couple of women were vivaciously responding to Survey Boy while a mall security guard looked on. I could tell that they were, like me, looking for an opportunity to vent about Bush's ridiculous war; I hoped the math kid was enjoying himself, and secretly considered inviting the ladies out for ice cream. It really would be cool if his real project was about recording the way people react to an opportunity to rant about the war.

But off I went, across the parking lot and into the bright sun of a shiny new day. The mega-conglomerates had failed me miserably, but the mom-and-pop ghetto store was there to make it all right again. In that, I believe there is a valuable lesson to be learned about America.

***

Sometime on Monday (more than 24 hours after the order had been adjusted), I received that all-important second confirmation to alert me that, yes, the product they held up in front of me on Sunday afternoon was still at the store after all. I haven't had a chance to go get it yet, but I'm sure that, when I do, it'll be an experience to remember.

© onebee · all rights reserved