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My son turns 13 this coming weekend. Despite being born in 1999, he has developed a great affection for 8 and 16 bit consoles and computers. Maybe it's Dad's collection of Atari, Commodore and TI systems, or maybe its Nintendo. Who can be sure? So for his 13th birthday he wants an original SNES. Not a reproduction unit, a real actual genuine SNES. Living in Seattle, we are blessed with what appears to be an above average number of retro game stores, including Another Castle, Game Gurus and "AL's Music, Games and Videos". We also host the PAX Prime conference and Seattle Retro Game Expo here. All in all, pretty much a retro paradise. So it was with some confidence my wife and I set off earlier today to Pink Gorilla in the U District to buy a SNES. We confirmed they had some before leaving, and they said they had one. But what they had had major discoloration. I know how to retro-bright, but I asked if they were willing to swap out the case plastics for non-functional one in the window display. "Err.. Dude. No". So then I checked their display of used games for some of the titles my son wants to play on his SNES. They were lacking a couple. I asked and the clerk reported that they didn't have them. "You have two other stores right? Could you check inventory there?" "Errr. Yeah. guess.." He checked one, and they didn't have it either. But they did have two working SNES consoles, so maybe our odds of success were better across town in West Seattle. We bought a Mario and a Kirby game and headed off to the next store. At the next store they had two SNES consoles. A rather battered one for $45, and a slight better one for $50. "We'll take the fifty dollar one." Then he showed me their display of SNES games. They had a Mario game that was a compilation of several other Mario games, including the one I had bought an hour earlier in the other store. Despite buying a console, and having a receipt for the game from their other store across town dated today, the clerk told me repeatedly they could not exchange the more limited cartridge for the more extensive one. I was willing the pay the difference, but Pink Gorilla would only trade in the earlier purchase for maybe thirty percent. Wow. That is about the most ridiculous approach to customer satisfaction I have ever heard. Even the DMV would struggle to match that. So somewhat annoyed, I bought the SNES and no more games. I asked about any warranty that the $50 SNES would actually work when I got it home. The clerk hesitated and mumbled. "Yeah, these old systems are made like really well, it's our name here, it's like one hundred percent guaranteed supposed to work..." Now that's a definite maybe if I ever heard one. So we drive home with our SNES in a bag, only to discover the unit in the bag is the battered $45 unit, and not the somewhat better $50 one. We check the receipt and sure enough, he's charged us for the more expensive unit. We call, explain, and head back across town. Upon reaching the store, the same clerk looks up and says, "Err, why are you here again?" Wow. Just wow. Retro gaming is now so main stream, so over burdened with customers, the few suppliers in this market can resort to customer satisfaction policies that would make the main stream brick and mortar's blush crimson. That my friends, is real progress.
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