Season 2 Episode 3 - Cute Cat. What's Its Name? (Part 1) - 9-7-2014

It has been a very long day today, my friends.  It was long because my days are always long, but also because I had to deal with some very difficult customers.  Even about 5 hour later, I am still fuming, and it actually brings me to a topic that doesn't get a lot of attention - annoying customers.  (The title is a reference to Kevin Smith's 'Clerks'.  The cat's name is Annoying Customer.)

Don't get me wrong, I love all my customers.  Some of the kids have been coming since day one, and a lot of the people I've met are super cool.  There are three specific interactions that will illustrate my point, and two of them involve theft, so you can see that I am not talking about my honest customers who may be slightly annoying.  

The first incident occurred back in I would have to say June or so.  One of my favorite customers, Panda, had his EDH deck stolen from his backpack.  We are always on our people to watch their stuff, because things get stolen if left unattended.  It's sad, but true.  In this case, we were all pretty bummed, and I told Panda I would keep an eye out.  He had a pretty sick Wort, the Raidmother deck, so I knew a lot of what was in the deck already.  

Okay, now flash forward about a week later.  Two of the kids who come in to play YuGiOh, Brad and Sam, brought me a binder full of trades.  I start flipping through the binder, and what do I see but a Wort, the Raidmother.  This is not necessarily condemning outright, as it is highly possible that multiple people have a Wort, but then I see a Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, which is a pretty rare card, and isn't ever really in the hands of YuGiOh players.  

So I start to ask questions - 'Where'd you guys get this stuff?', 'How much you pay for it?' etc, just casually like I do while I flip through binders.  He told me he got the cards 2 weeks ago, from a mysterious guy for waaaaay under market price, at Hot Sauce (the rival store 5 miles down Irving Park.)  

And then I saw something that solidified the situation - a card that I personally owned for months, and then sold to Panda, that had very specific damage done to it.  Basically, the card had something of a Zorro mark on it, and it was a pretty familiar sight to see in a stranger's binder.  The conclusion - this stuff was definitely stolen, and from a customer / volunteer employee, no less!

So Brad and Sam decide to leave the cards with me so they can go get food, and I immediately bring the cards to Panda, who confirms that I am basically holding most of his stolen deck in my hands.  I tell Ed, who has been waiting for a thief so he can kill them, and we discuss a game plan while the thieves are at the mall.  Panda, in the meantime, decided to go confront them right away, and the rest of his cards were given back.  When Brad and Same got back, we confronted them, and because I had asked so many questions to begin with, they were totally caught in a web of lies.  

So we kicked them out, banned them for life, and notified the local game stores of their faces.    We would have done worse, but there were a few mitigating circumstances.  The big thing was that we weren't technically stolen from, Panda was.  That was important because Panda is a groovy dude, and he was happy to get his shit back.  

The other mitigating circumstance is that we could not literally prove that they stole from Panda, only that they now had a lot of stolen cards, and their story for why they had it was total garbage.  We lost nothing in the actual exchange, except for a few YuGiOh customers which definitely hurts a bit.  It was pretty much the end of the story for us, and we moved on with life.

But Brad and Sam would not find moving on so easy....

Roughly two months after the Panda Incident, we get a nasty review from Brad on Facebook.  It was pretty fucked up and pointless, like we even gave the kid two thoughts anymore.  Unfortunately, all of Ed's reservedness from the initial confrontation was out the window this time, and he went on a hung-over inspired rant that involved calling Brad's lips 'cum covered'.  

This led to a huge explosion, and basically the thing kind of went viral.  It was so weird, because by the time I was even aware of the situation at all, it was already way out of hand.  We received a flood of 1-star reviews from people who admittedly have never been to the shop.  On the advice of a states-man like customer, I issued one of those bullshit corporate apologies, but of course Ed was mostly proud of his words, so that didn't help.  

All in all, it really came down to 'bad advertising is still good advertising', and we did draw in a few people who wanted to see what the fuss was all about, and one of them even became a great customer (thanks Carmine!).  Since all the bad reviews are total crap (except for the one about Eddie being creepy on a 16 year old, that one is probably true ;-), we were able to have most of them taken down, since you can't really review a place YOU'VE NEVER EVEN BEEN!  

As I mentioned, there are two more stories of customers that are beyond annoying, but those are stories for later, I think.  The rage has subsided... for now.  

Thanks for reading!