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Blog

I try to be good, but I just get slapped in the face.

"They" say that we should shop at local retailers because more of our money stays in the local economy versus the national economy.  I think that depends on where you live - it may not be the same in New York or L.A. as in Middle of Nowhere, TX.  The last couple places I've lived have definitely been small towns.  I won't list them here because of personal identity reasons, but suffice it to say they both had a Main Street that was the legitimate Main Street in town.  When I moved to Tennessee I found a great local chain that did game trade-ins, used movie sales, and comic books.  When I bought my house it was suddenly located on the opposite side of town (a 20+ minute drive) but my wife and I make the drive every week to pick up our comic pull list and chat with our friend who works there.  I decided that I would buy all my games and comics from them rather than from Amazon or Gamestop to try and support "the little guy."  Also, there was that whole fiasco with Gamestop opening up games and taking out the OnLive thing in them (I don't remember what game it was) but it just felt wrong.  This is hard sometimes because Amazon has pre-order bonuses (so does Gamestop - I should mention here for honesty sake that I did get WH40K: Space Marine from GS because I had enough credit to make it free - and my wife got me some games from Best Buy on Black Friday because of how cheap they were) and so I've basically sworn to give those up.

Well, a month or so ago I asked if they would please order me a CE edition of Mass Effect 3 on the PC (The DLC costs $10 so it's $10 for the bonus swag - that's OK with me for a CE).  They agreed and I put my $5 down.  I got in this afternoon (went during my lunch break) and my buddy who works there was confused as to why I was there.  Hadn't I been told that no CE's came in?  And no PC editions?  Didn't they call me on the weekend to let me know?  He was mad that his underlings hadn't called me to let me know that my pre-order had simply been ignored by the owners of the store.  And no, me and the 7 other CE pre-orderes wouldn't be getting any kind of compensation for the sudden reversal of decision, just a $5 refund.  So now, I'm sitting here typing this instead of playing Mass Effect 3.   And I wonder why I bother to try and support the "little guy."

I get it - Bioware is going to make sure their biggest customers get their CE orders filled first - that's good business sense.  And so it takes me supporting the local shop and others doing the same to make Bioware care about filling all its orders (this is a local chain, not just a single shop).  And me demanding lots of free stuff as compensation is stupid because it's just a game, not the end of the world.   But I still feel slighted when I'm trying to offer a proverbial olive branch.  I've come as far as I can - won't they meet me halfway?  Can't they do more than they have?  I don't know what I would ask for to make up for it.  I ended up ordering the CE from Amazon for the PC so a discount on a 360 or PS3 versions wouldn't mean much to me - maybe store credit as a "We're sorry?"

I did spend the half hour after learning I didn't have a game waiting for me driving to every other store that stocks games nearby (Best Buy, Gamestop, Target, K-Mart [there are a lot of sad people who shop at K-mart] and Walmart) but only Target had even stocked a CE and it had apparently been sold.

So anyway - I'm a little bummed, but at least I'll get to play tomorrow.  That's gotta mean something, right?