I have been feeling like sh*t the past couple of days, so now that I had a break in my schedule, I wandered over to Copley to engage in a little retail therapy.

EBX in Copley is a dark, dingy, hole in the wall, with the usual gaming malconents behind the counter. These guys, as a bunch, have zero morals. One time, a woman comes in, wants a Gameboy Advanced, they try to sell her an N-gage. No kidding.

But I digress.

I wander to the back, where the PC games rack is. What a f**king mess. Games are everywhere, willy-nilly on the shelves, and the used stuff is sort of piled on, or shelved with the new stuff. Not cool. I don't mind buying used games, but cross shelving them right before the Christmas season seems kinda low.

Anyway, my goal here is to purchase a copy of Joint Ops Escalation. I don't need anything else. Yes, I have Half Life 2, yes, it is cool. Yes, I have Doom III. Yes, that is cool too. Yes, it's not as good as Half Life 2, but it's still cool.

Yeah, I'll let you know when I need you to hold something when I go to pee, ok?

Two copies left. I grab the less mangled of the two boxes, and start to dig though the rack. Maybe these guys made a pricing mistake on something used. Always worth a look.

Customer number 1 comes in, and asks "Do you have Escalation?"
"Did you preorder?"
"No, we don't have any more. We got in 70 copies, and we put 35 out, 35 on hold."
"When are you getting another shipment?"
"Probably Friday. Not sure if more copies are in there or not. Pays to preorder it."
"Yeah, whatever."

Clearly the customer was a regular, and heard it all before. But keep in mind, there was still one copy on the shelf.

Customer 2 comes in. Same dialogue. Now, I'm about done with the rack at this point, I have my Escalation copy, and nothing else. I'm wandering around looking for that Nyko Airflow EX they had last week.

The guy behind the counter is unpacking a box of wavebirds, some in the used bags, and pricing them as he goes through the dialogue with customer 2. Now, if he got off his ass and went to the back wall, he could have sold his last copy of Escalation. But he didn't even bother. One would think that wavebirds fly off the shelves.

Find the Airflow EX, but can't justify the $25 this week. $30 is ok on a retail therapy splurge. $55, right after buying Half Life 2? That's serious discussion about my spending habits with my wife. Not going there. Don't have the energy.

Customer 3 walks in. Same deal. Three up, three down. Escalation copy #2 still on the shelf. There's now two guys behind the counter, giving Customer 3 the "preorder presale."

So when they are done, I drop my copy on the counter and get out my debit.

"Hey, I thought we were sold out of that!"
"No," I reply, "One more copy back there."
"Just had three people asking about it."
"Yep, I heard."
"Why didn't you say something?"
"Because I'm a customer. That's your job."
"But I could have sold that copy. Not cool, man."
"I didn't come in here to come to work, I came to buy the game. You don't want to go back and look, not my problem."

And I left the store, Escalation in hand. Someone else could have left with their copy too, but didn't because they relied on the guy behind the counter, who couldn't be bothered.

If that were my store, he'd be fired.