As some of you may know, GTAIV was released a few days ago – something I have been looking forward to for a while. I pre-ordered the game on Play the day before it was due for release. I knew I wouldn’t be getting a copy anytime soon, but I thought I’d pre-order it anyway.

Anyway, the day of its release my friend Josh came over with the copy he pre-ordered from HMV. We messed around, enjoyed the game and everything else, but I’ll save that for another blog post, or RewiredMind. Later that day I spoke to another friend, Andy, who said he bought a copy from Zavvi, who actually had games in stock on the day of release (probably because Zavvi is such a lame name and nobody wants to go in the shop).

After umming and arr!ing about it the next day, I decided to cancel my pre-order and strolled into town to pick it up from Zavvi. On my way, I decided to pop into the new Gamestation, which one of my friends recently used to manage. Due to that being the case, and hosting a few competitions with RewiredMind a little while back, a few of the Gamestation employees know me, and often greet me nicely when I enter the store. Naturally I partake in some idle chit-chat with them, and during that I happened to ask “Hey, do you guys have any copies of GTAIV in?”. Ten minutes later I walk out of GameStation with a copy of GTAIV, having handed over my card without even asking how much it cost. Not that I’m overly bothered by this, but it turned out that I paid £45 for GTAIV in Gamestation; I could have got it for £38 in Zavvi.

It just goes to show, really, that when you are in customer service, being inviting and friendly really can be the difference between a sale and an unsatisfied customer.