I worked at a Funcoland between mid-'97 to late '98 (I think). For anyone not familiar, Funcoland was a chain of video game buy/trade stores operated throughout the USA. It is very similar to Electronics Boutique (aka, EB Games) that operated internationally, except Funco dealt almost exclusively in handheld and television console games. Similar to Gamestop, employees had an hourly wage and also daily percentage-based sales goals, however at Funco we made commission on certain items (game cleaners/warranty and magazine subs/discount), so there was incentive outside of keeping our jobs. I am pretty sure most people here already knew that, but given that company is now gone and I keep getting older, I thought I would get that out there.
Most of the time, working at Funcoland was fun. We did have some guidance and communication from the GM, but for the most part they let each store get on with how they wanted to run, as long as they kept up with sales goals (which out location did). As expected, we horsed around and played a TON of games. We had an employee program that allowed for buying and returning used games (which was abused heavily), however none of us collected in the slightest. Actually, that's something weird. Basically, people would come in to buy and trade in games, but nobody seemed to collect. Well, there was one guy that would come in with a massive three-ring binder full of pics and notes about his collection. Nobody liked him because he would sometimes buy hundreds of dollars worth of games, bend our ears endlessly about what he had and wanted us to keep an eye out for, drop off his card, and never buy a cleaner or sub. Anyone with daily percentage work goals probably knows what I am talking about.
While we did sell just about everything, there were some systems we couldn't buy for, namely Sega CD and 32x, primarily because tons of people came into trade in but not buy. While it was something we were discouraged against doing, I bought several Sega CD games I had always wanted to play from a customer one day, which was pretty miraculous. I am including this mostly because I know it will drive some of you wild, but I got a bag filled with about twenty games, including both Lunar games, Vay, Dark Wizard, Sonic CD, Shining Force CD, and Popful Mail, all for about $40 total (which was the contents of my wallet at the time). Of course I didn't keep them after playing them, but I at least traded them to an import shop for more games, so it worked out.
I actually got into Japanese gaming whist working at Funco. The friend of employee was a nut for imported fighting games on the Saturn, and since the company gaming magazine (Game Informer) started featuring Japanese games, I jumped on board, paying for a chipped PSX and Saturn, and went wild. We used to have fun little in-store championships, mostly playing Marvel Super Heroes and KoF '97. I was a big PSX fan, but as a store we heavily supported the Saturn, especially for the fighting games. I am afraid we talked some serious crap about the PSX ports, whether warranted or not. Personally, as an importer I played some great titles (Front Mission 2 and Metal Slug were my favs), but also ended up paying import prices for games that were later released in English (Tenchu and Grandia on Saturn to name a few).
Fall and winter months were very busy and profitable, but my favorite times were the summer ones, where barely a soul came in to buy, or even shop, so much so that I sometimes had a buy a cleaner or sub to make my percentage goals. During those months, I made it my life goal to play every game in the store, and for the most part I did, and in some cases too much. For the most part, this is the main reason I only return to a handful of SNES games. And there was this one guy came into the store just about every day to play Symphony of the Night on one of the "demo kiosks" for about three or four hours. It was a little weird, but he kept bringing in German and Swedish chocolates, so we didn't mind too much.
Oh, we did nightly inventories. Basically, at the end of every workday we would count every game in the store and verify the count was true to our numbers. I don't know if everyone in the chain had these, but we had little cheat sheets on clipboards for each system, along with letters to make it easier to organize. And since we typically had more than a thousand games in the store, it was often tedious, especially when the store manager was present and insisted on playing that damn Chumbawamba song at full volume. I'm pretty sure he did so we would beg him to not close with us, but he would still randomly show up sometimes to "help us with counts." That guy was really a horse's ass, and at the time I would have gleefully broken every CD Chumbawamba ever sold over that guy's head.
Overall, I think it was an okay experience. I made a decent amount of money and played a ton of games, including games that I never would have played otherwise. It really gave me a taste for imports and I found I could play through games in a language other than my own and still wring out a lot of enjoyment from them (though I often took a lot of notes).
