You’re not going to believe this, folks, but EB Games is having a sale. I mean, I assume, I didn’t check. The games retailer has an infamous love affair with ostentatiously promoted sales that has attained a nearly mythic quality.
Pictured: More effort than I have ever put in at any job (I hope my boss isn’t reading this).
At any given moment, every EB Games store in the country is draped with enough red plastic to repair the damage to the hull of the Titanic – but it hasn’t always been like that. In our well-established traditions of hard-hitting investigative journalism and publishing in-depth pieces in the public interest, we went straight to the source itself to get an inside glimpse into this phenomenon: people who have worked at an EB.
PART 1: THE BEGINNING
So when did it all begin? One former employee, who worked at an EB (then Electronics Boutique) in Victoria from 2000 to 2002, told us they hadn’t even begun encroaching on their deep love of signage at that stage:
“It’s become bedlam, hasn’t it? I’ve seen it where you can barely move for bunting. We definitely had nothing like that in the early 2000s.”
Testimony from a former employee who worked in stores around New South Wales slightly after that seems to indicate that the sale sign arms race began around 2004/2005:
“They weren’t self-aware how bad it was back then, but they used to get the manager of each store to be in competition with each other for who had the best sales signage.
“I’m not sure if there were bonuses involved, but my career-climbing manager was obsessed with making it absolutely perfect.”
Perfect here meaning ‘complete saturation of signs’ – “Basically no blank space. A minimalist’s worst nightmare.” But that was only the start:
“They must still do something similar because it’s only deteriorated since then.”
One employee who spoke to us noted a very marked difference between when they were working there as a casual in 2003 and returning in 2005:
“The old stuff usually consisted of getting the fold-out table from the back, putting the ‘sale wrap’ skirt on it and ‘merch’-ing the store with the sale stickers and putting them at eye height.
“The new approach was you get sent a shitload of posters, sale wrap, sale cards, price point cards, boxes and tape. You get told by the area manager (Satan) to cover the store, make tables out of the boxes and to push the limit of what centre management will let you do: push the sale table into the walkway and stuff.”
PART 2: THE QUICKENING
EB Games knows their reputation, as a spokesperson from the EB Games Community Team told us in response to whether they aware it had become almost a meme:
“Oh yes, we are definitely aware. I wouldn’t call it a ‘sort-of’ meme at this stage. There is a fan-run page with over 100,000 likes on Facebook dedicated to wondering about whether or not we are having a sale (Spoilers: Yes, we are.)”
“There was about a minute and a half last August where we had absolutely no sale. This was quickly corrected. Gotta love those cheap games!”
It wasn’t always like that, though.
According to an ex-employee who worked at a store on the Gold Coast from 2005 to 2011, their passion for sales was, at first, very, very real:
“I was there around a time when it was changing, the upper management were clamping down on a whole bunch of stuff. They all started being way more cultish. Just like that raw, unadulterated enthusiasm that feels a little off. . . . they were swimming in Kool Aid.”
Apparently, this got pretty hectic:
“The intensity was upped and upped and upped. The area/state managers were crazy, cult-like, in how they wanted you to plaster shit everywhere on their stores. We’d be like, hey, there’s no room for prams/wheelchairs with all these signs and such.
“They’d be like ‘Oh they’ll fit, put more on’. The answer was ALWAYS ‘Just put more on’.”
He believed the transition began to occur over his 6 years at the store:
“It went from a store having a sale to a plastic fetishists’ nightclub.”
PART 3: THE EMBRACENING
Returning briefly as an employee in 2013 was when he noticed the start of that self-awareness:
“Yeah, I feel like they were on the verge of being aware at how insane the sales were. Whether that was due to staff having trauma from customers saying the completely original joke of ‘Oh, are youse ‘avin a sale?’ or something else.”
One former employee theorised they started becoming cognisant of their reputation a bit earlier:
“Probably around 2010. When social media and smartphones became commonplace. The are very good at finding cheap advertising, they’d see every iPhone as a potential billboard.”
Another person we spoke to, who worked at stores in Sydney from 2009 to 2011, says they noticed a ramp up in 2010 as well:
“The 2010 mid year sale was fucked from what I remember. The signage (bright red plastic wrap) had to actually cover all the walls in the store, so we had to take all the shelving down in the store, layer the walls and then put all the shelving up. It took us about 4 and a half hours to do it. It defs felt more over the top.”
Not many of the employees we spoke to have particularly fond memories of their store during sales time, with one describing it as “a sweaty, red tinged discount pit.” Still, definitely worth braving if you want to pick up a heavily discounted, pre-owned copy of 2010’s Rapala Pro Bass Fishing on PS3.
It seems like eventually there’ll be a crisis point where they will be completely unable to one-up themselves, but EB seems unconcerned:
“We live in a constantly expanding universe. So in theory, there is no limit. We were never going to stop with just the walls, we have had amazing store teams create tanks, pirate ships and even dragons.
“Now that you mention it, we haven’t managed to get any sale stuff on the floors yet. Maybe next year.”
I wish them only the best of luck in plastering the visible universe with red plastic.
