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Some of the more interesting ones taken from Reddit.

Not many horror stories, but as a part timer back in the 90's i only got paid £2 an hour. Still I'd probably have just hung out there and not get paid if I didn't have the job.

My favorite was the area manager going to visit a nearby store, and some kid walking down the road with a newly released "armies" boxed set (retailed at over £100).

The managed says to the kid as he passes by "you just nick that then?" as a bit of a joke and the kid says "yeah" and smiles. The manager then walks into the store and congratulates them on the sale - to which they realise that the kid has just walked into the store, picked it up and walked out with it - and noone noticed.

Every store in the area had to store them behind the counter from then on.

I have a Games Day one as well. So Games Day is a yearly convention run by Games Workshop, it's a big event - and everyone has to paint a gak ton of figures for it - and then your store goes in a big bus with loads of customers and you have a great time. However the painting of figures for the month up until Games Day can become a bit all-consuming. I think this year we had to make an epic army but in 40k scale.

So there's some regulars and some staff sat around a table, chatting away and painting - I want to say Squat Mole Mortars - although I can't be too sure on the details. Anyway, the banter gets a bit personal and eventually crosses a line. We don't figure this out for a while, because everyone is engrossed in their painting.

Whatever had been said about one guys mother finally got to him, and he picks up a scalpel off the table and calmly stabs it into the thigh of the person who made the offending comment. Silence reigns. No-one moves. The scalpel is twanging back and forth and we all look between it, and the faces of the two individuals involved. Nothing is said. Calmly the stabbed party removes the offending scalpel. We resume painting and the manager decides to call an Ambulance, however the stabbed persons objects and says if he has to go to casualty he wants a pint first. We end up having several pints, and if memory serves, we never bothered to go to casualty in the end.

I had a friend who worked at one in Toronto.

He said Robin Williams came into the store one day in a hurry. My friend said he was jittery and couldn't slow down enough to actually look around the store.

He rushed up to the counter and talked to one of the other guys there and asked how much for one of the painted armies in the case. The guy was starstruck and said, "oh sorry, those aren't for sale" which they aren't for regular people.

Robin thanked him and ran out.

Later he told the manager this amazing story, the manager was livid that he didn't sell Robin Williams a full painted army for a few thousand dollars.

Without giving too much away I was hired during a transitional period for the company. So by my first quarterly meeting everyone that hired me had been fired or transferred to a different position. By my second quarterly meeting our big boss was fired and replaced with like a ruling council and by my 3rd there was just one person left from that council.

At the same time however we had extremely strict sales goals. We were tracked on two things, month-over-month sales, and per sale average. If you had 2 consecutive months of less month-over-month sales you got a warning, did it again and you got fired. Same with per sale average

Now those of you familiar with Game Workshop they do "splash" releases of new models or army books once a month. This means that you could get fethed in your sales based on release schedule. For example no matter how good your sales were you weren't beating a new edition release for 40k. Therefore the year after any edition release you were already 1/2 for in "negative months".

It also meant that people buying single pots of paint were the bane of my existence. I knew one store manager who tried to cheat the system by taking any sale of single items (glue, paint, paint brushes, magazines) refunding them immediately after they were bought, and then rebuying them as one big purchase at the end of the day.

At one point gift cards counted as a negative sale, so some store managers kept a "gift card gift card" and would refund a gift card sale onto that "gift card" after the fact.

Then of course there was the webstore that didn't count towards our sales unless you used the in store terminal and had it shipped to the store. So have someone visiting from another town/state/country that wants an online only model? Too bad the online store gets that sale. The other pain about this was that GW offered "free shipping" to your local store. So what people would do is they'd go online at home, and then buy something and have it shipped to my store for free, that didn't count towards my sales though.

Honestly the high pressure sales tracking was my least favorite part of the job and why I eventually quit. Every time a subpar new army book/modelset came out and people would trash it I'd freak out because every single post of "new tyranids suck" or "don't buy this overpriced garbage buy the mantic version instead" was more sales out of pocket. I felt like I was living in a bubble world where all that mattered was plastic men and my happiness/sadness was determined by the Internets opinion on a new release.

Worked there for a few months about 20 years ago (woah, okay, now I feel old). GW had the place being run by one full time member of staff with no relief who was so crazy busy trying to keep it open that he hadn’t had time to find a home since moving to the area to run the store, and was sleeping in the back room in a sleeping bag, washing in the sink.

This was in the era when looking for a place to rent meant hours checking and calling the classifieds in the paper, not browsing on your smartphone and applying online. Until I started he had not even been able to get out for lunch breaks as the store had to stay open. I was the second full time member of staff there, and it was the first time he’d been able to get out of the store during the day to look for a new place.

We had an area manager when I worked at GW in the 90s, who was really into military re-enactment, in his case dressed as a member of a Waffen-SS unit.

He was totally obsessed with everything to do with the German army in WW2. I remember bringing a German service record book into work, that a family friend had acquired in the war. The area manager was due in that day so we all thought it would keep him quiet in the back room so we didn't have to talk to him.

Anyway, it did just that. He poured over every page, and then offered to buy it from me for £50. I politely refused. It wasn't for sale. He looked crestfallen, but took it pretty well.

It was only after he left that my manager said that apparently his entire house was dripping with Nazi memorabilia, and one of his prized possessions was... a bar of soap made from the fat of murdered Jews.

For the launch of Black Reach our manager decided to have a promotion where if you preordered the set we would assemble and prime them. Well we got somewhere around 200 orders.

As a side note this is GW Canada right before we got subsumed by the US branch so we had...leeway.

We spent ages building and priming those little bastards, had a really good assembly line down.

Well the night before we still had a bunch of sets left, my manager and I assembled and primed all day. At the end of the night (40k night I think) two of our good regulars invited us to their place to build and prime the last sets. As soon as we got there we broke out the drinks, those last few sets were probably not built or primed great. I was accosted by a raccoon while priming a batch. We were hammered and the launch was the next morning. Pretty sure we left by 2am.

Anyways all in all it went really well, made a lot of people happy and kept HQ off our asses for a while.

Was around in Baltimore when GW had a van retrofitted to carry shelves and shelves of metal bitz ( before everything went plastic). It was great, had a big ol Ork on one side and a space marine on the other. The driver would show up at events and sell parts at cheap discounts. Then one day it was stolen, and never recovered. Which means two people who likely don't play have a van full of GW figs.

Thomas [redacted]. Ran Direct Sales for a while and when the lotr bubble burst volunteered his department to make redundancies. Destroyed that department and somehow got promoted to run the studio. His defining moment was signing off on the new Dwarf army book. All was fine until ten thousand copies are delivered and it turns out the new book was just the new cover on the old rules.

Very amusing, although some of them are surely hyperbole or fake.

 Ketara wrote:

We had an area manager when I worked at GW in the 90s, who was really into military re-enactment, in his case dressed as a member of a Waffen-SS unit.

He was totally obsessed with everything to do with the German army in WW2. I remember bringing a German service record book into work, that a family friend had acquired in the war. The area manager was due in that day so we all thought it would keep him quiet in the back room so we didn't have to talk to him.

Anyway, it did just that. He poured over every page, and then offered to buy it from me for £50. I politely refused. It wasn't for sale. He looked crestfallen, but took it pretty well.

It was only after he left that my manager said that apparently his entire house was dripping with Nazi memorabilia, and one of his prized possessions was... a bar of soap made from the fat of murdered Jews.

0_o

I mean if that's true, I'm fairly sure it "wins", if you can call it that. Christ on a bike.

That thread was golden

ctrl F - found me lol

I highly doubt the soap was authentic, I mean the guy may have believed that’s what he had but I doubt it was genuine. Still, shows what some people want to collect for a ‘hobby’.

Interesting so far - and can't wait for MDG's contributions here too!

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I highly doubt the soap was authentic, I mean the guy may have believed that’s what he had but I doubt it was genuine. Still, shows what some people want to collect for a ‘hobby’.

As a WW2 hobbist historian I can confirm that people being turned into soap was a thing that was geninuely experimented on a happened, and incidentally the people responsible were not punished post war, as their work was done on 'already corpses' and didn't involve killing anyone.

So it is entirely possible the soap was geninue, though equally it could have been fake.

AdmiralHalsey wrote:

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
I highly doubt the soap was authentic, I mean the guy may have believed that’s what he had but I doubt it was genuine. Still, shows what some people want to collect for a ‘hobby’.

As a WW2 hobbist historian I can confirm that people being turned into soap was a thing that was geninuely experimented on a happened, and incidentally the people responsible were not punished post war, as their work was done on 'already corpses' and didn't involve killing anyone.

So it is entirely possible the soap was geninue, though equally it could have been fake.

Well, not really. That stuff wouldn't be fit for turning into bars and it really was just (exceedingly gross) reuse of leftover materials due to severe shortages in late war germany. There's really, really not going to be any "bars" of that lying around.

/severely OT.

The story about soap being made from human fat is just an old urban legend dating back to WW1, when Germans were rumoured to have turned the corpses of their own fallen soldiers into soap.

While it's true that some Nazis had lampshades made from human skin, there's no evidence for soap made on an industrial scale from human remains. However, the soap which is often believed to have been made from human fat, certainly existed, although the acronym RIF merely meant "Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung" and not "Reichs-Juden-Fett" which some people seem to believe.

Stating outright that the soap you're supplying your civilian population with is made from Holocaust victims, at a time when the majority of Germans were oblivious to the fate of the Jews in German occupied Europe, just doesn't make any sense and would have been highly unpopular, potentially leading to outrage and resentment towards the regime.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2982639/Bar-soap-fat-Jewish-Holocaust-victims-removed-eBay-Dutch-owner-sale.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-soap-myth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpses

One local guy managed to hit all his sales targets enough to keep his job through the kirby years. He's now super defensive about anyone saying anything even slightly negative about anything. We were in the store to grab some of the new blood angels stuff for a friend and a comment about how awesome the warhammer tv/warhammer community site was lead to a 10 minute tirade defending GW's past practices.

As if saying things were great now is somehow saying something negative about the past that just cannot stand. It was both sad and funny.

Probably been enough years passed now since I worked in a store that I can be safe posting with some anonymity. I wouldn't call them horror stories, but hopefully a bit entertaining at least.

- The old metal Thunderhawk, one of those was doing the rounds of different stores. Someone (not me!) thought it would be a good idea to display it on an upper shelf on a fairly old glass cabinet. I think one of the shelf fittings couldn't put it with the weight (it was made of metal and weighed an absolute ton), the shelf collapsed and the thunderhawk took out half of the cabinet and several of the display forces on the way down.

- Continuing the theme of wrecked display miniatures, there was a LoTR Oliphant on display that was painted to a ridiculously high standard by an extremely skilled staff member, that had taken many, many hours. While it was out of the cabinet being looked at a kid dropped it, and it smashed into pieces when it hit the floor. There was a horrible silence, and the chap whose model it was froze with his face in a grimace. He was devoid of humour at the best of times. The manager turned to the kid and said "get out, now, for your own safety" - he was not exaggerating! The kid, who looked like a rabbit in headlights, scarpered for the door while the guy who painted it was ushered into a back room to calm down and be consoled.

- Playing in a store tournament myself and another staff member had to take on the winners of a 40k doubles tournament. Our performance was pretty poor and, combined with an army force that saw a generic army take on rows of heavy bolters, we got massacred by the two teenagers that had won the tournament. It was a bit embarrassing but I thought at least pretty funny at the same time - not so to my manager, who took us into the backroom and reprimanded us for disgracing GW with our poor performance. That was done without the slightest hint of sarcasm/irony..

- Not where I used to work but covering at another store there used to be a guy who would disappear off to the back stockroom and then would come back with a red face and glazed expression on his face, with a rather obvious smell of weed in the air. He obviously didn't give a damn and must have been on his own level of existence. Obviously eventually someone reported him and off he went!

- The thing about over-friendly mums coming into a GW store has got an element of truth to it. I used to get a fair amount of ribbing from the other guys that worked in the store (I have absolutely no idea why I was the target of attentions, unfortunately it hasn't extended into other areas of life!) but I was much to embarrassed/uncomfortable to react to it. There was however an guy at another store who had a bit of a reputation and all kinds of stories (hopefully some of which were exaggerated!) floating about.

- The track Life's a Bitch and other sweary Iron Maiden and Metallica on the store record player. Can you even imagine that these days?

No stories of stabbing or anything else though, if I can think back to anything else that isn't too incriminating will make another post about it!

 Zingraff wrote:
The story about soap being made from human fat is just an old urban legend dating back to WW1, when Germans were rumoured to have turned the corpses of their own fallen soldiers into soap.

While it's true that some Nazis had lampshades made from human skin, there's no evidence for soap made on an industrial scale from human remains. However, the soap which is often believed to have been made from human fat, certainly existed, although the acronym RIF merely meant "Reichsstelle für industrielle Fettversorgung" and not "Reichs-Juden-Fett" which some people seem to believe.

Stating outright that the soap you're supplying your civilian population with is made from Holocaust victims, at a time when the majority of Germans were oblivious to the fate of the Jews in German occupied Europe, just doesn't make any sense and would have been highly unpopular, potentially leading to outrage and resentment towards the regime.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2982639/Bar-soap-fat-Jewish-Holocaust-victims-removed-eBay-Dutch-owner-sale.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-soap-myth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_made_from_human_corpses

I'll source you later, and it certainly won't be a wikipedia page and the _Daily Mail_ of all things.
I'm not saying it was produced industrially, it was an experiment which turned out to be not particularly productive but was none the less performed and ultimately successful on a very small scale.

Not quite sure this belongs here.... but as there are a number of GW employees seeming to post I'll ask anyway.

For the one-man stores, exactly how long do you think a GW manager can stretch their "lunch hour" before being suspicious to supervisors? A store that I've tried going to on three occasions now has been "out to lunch" when I get there, and still out almost 90 minutes later when I return a second time.

orkybenji wrote:
Very amusing, although some of them are surely hyperbole or fake.

No, note really. When I worked there strange things happened. It was like 10 years ago about a year before they moved to the one man stores. We had 2 full timers myself and another nice chap, 1 manager who was a douche, and had a few key timers in there. The bits box was fantastic to rummage through.

Once upon a time, many many moons ago, when I was young, and you were even younger.....

Was scabbing about my local store when the Regional Manager was in. I notice he’s freaking out a bit. Turns out one of the stores has no staff left (I’m not 100% why, so I shan’t speculate).

Anyways, that being my sole job and for a mere one day a week (hard times were hard. I was also homeless, but that’s another story) I volunteer that if my manager can spare me, I can always go. 15 minutes later a train ticket collection code and set of keys are pressed into my hand.

So the next day, off I go. Once I’ve familiarised myself with the layout and the local area, I remember it’s Stock Take week. Now ever since they digitised that process and indeed the stock ordering such things have been a doddle. Grab your dootydeedoo, and just get scanning.

By the end of it, there’s something missing. Well, rather a lot missing to be precise. Try the entire Blood Angels stock (this was immediately after their release with the plastic Baal Predator. And I think the Stormhawk transport?). Like, none of it is anywhere to be found. At all. I searched everywhere, every nook and cranny, twice.

Eventually, there had to be a panicked call to my Regional Manager... believe me, that was pretty stressful!

Wasn’t all bad though. Ended up running the store for four weeks, and managed to take it from the bottom of the region to the top, including its best weekend for something like three years!

Never worked for GW, but had an interesting interview with them for an account manager position, around 2006. They basically described to me a scenario where an independent retailer couldn't afford the regular releases during a month and I was coming up short on the sales goal for the month. They simply asked me what I would do. It was a good question, but you can imagine the thoughts running through my head about what they really expected account managers to do versus what answer they wanted me to give. I think it was clear to them that I was pondering a bit before finally giving them some sort of wishy-washy answer, lol. Didn't get the job, and was kind of glad I didn't.

BigDaddio wrote:
Never worked for GW, but had an interesting interview with them for an account manager position, around 2006. They basically described to me a scenario where an independent retailer couldn't afford the regular releases during a month and I was coming up short on the sales goal for the month. They simply asked me what I would do. It was a good question, but you can imagine the thoughts running through my head about what they really expected account managers to do versus what answer they wanted me to give. I think it was clear to them that I was pondering a bit before finally giving them some sort of wishy-washy answer, lol. Didn't get the job, and was kind of glad I didn't.

Hypothetically, could a GW manager not make a super-secret one-off bespoke deal with that retailer by providing the new releases on credit? Sort of a "We'll give you this product now, and you agree to pay us when you manage to sell the product? (like buying a sofa and paying for it later).

Do Managers have that level of discretion?

As a current (and long term) GW manager it is amusing reading about this kind of shenanigans
The company is definitely very different nowadays (and has been for the best part of the past 10 years). It's a bit of a shame working GW retail still gets judged based on these old anecdotes.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 cuda1179 wrote:
Not quite sure this belongs here.... but as there are a number of GW employees seeming to post I'll ask anyway.

For the one-man stores, exactly how long do you think a GW manager can stretch their "lunch hour" before being suspicious to supervisors? A store that I've tried going to on three occasions now has been "out to lunch" when I get there, and still out almost 90 minutes later when I return a second time.

That's excessive! It may well be different in the states, but in the UK we're entitled to half an hour lunch break as part of an 8 hour day.

I remember people working a lot more hours than they should do, for nothing, but enjoying what they were doing! (Guess that's the benefit of the lines between work and pastime blurring)

Another story (again not a horror story, but at least an interesting one, assuming it is true!)

Back in early 40k 3rd edition days long term fans will know there was something of a 'rationalisation' of the 40k universe going on at that time; by that I mean it was changing from the 2000AD/Dune-type, 80s Britain/dark humour background, into a different more serious identity and really moving towards what it has become today. During that time there was a lot of 'squatting' of old concepts and ideas - things like Zoats, slann, actually Squats themselves(!) were written out of the official background, while marines changed from Sardakur-like ex hardened-criminal warrior clans into supermen, and Chaos moved from Moorcock-esque anti-order into evil cackling guys with spikes on, and in a lot of cases miniature ranges were changing along with it or being discontinued. The reason I am saying this is because I think it makes the following story a bit more plausible, if you acknowledge that along with this 'official' update of the background, while a lot of gamers are quite relaxed about it and the game itself attracts imaginative people, there were those who took GWs updates as gospel, and would be rather derogatory or come out with pithy, snide comments about aspects of the 'old' 40k. We all know of those stories of players who have refused to come to the table against a non-Codex army, no matter how well realised or imaginative it is, and I think it was even more pronounced back then simply because the changes were bigger.

With that in mind back in the day early, pre-Black Library GW had commissioned established sci-fi author Ian Watson to write a series of books based on the early 40k universe. Although these are now almost universally admired for their part in helping to build the 40k universe, back then the stories featuring Squats, Zoats, non-screaming/evil Chaos characters, and the crowning glory of a chaos squat riding an Ambull (look it up!) and firing heavy bolters was sitting ill at ease with a modern version of 40k that featured none of these things. For a period of some years it was absolutely impossible to get hold of the books - I actually remember a staffer scoffing at me (almost refusing to answer the question) when I enquired about getting hold of the book 'Harlequin' from the Inquisitor Trilogy. They were essentially apocryphal texts.

Anyway - am starting to ramble and that's enough background info! Apparently one very rainy day some years ago (and during the height of the 'anti-Rogue trader snobbery') Ian Watson's daughter, in an attempt to get out of the rain, dashed into a GW store. She remembered the look of some of the miniatures, no doubt samples from when her dad was writing the books. When approached by the staff she mentioned, "ah my father used to write novels about these things." "Ah wow, what is his name?" they enquired. When she answered they kicked the young lady out of the store immediately, and back out into the rain..

Thats horribly unprofessional, and a missed sales opportunity.

They should have buttered her up, flattered her dad and persuaded her to make a big purchase as a gift for old times sake.