Canadian Transformers News and Discussion Forum

[Shepp]

I've helped people over the years. Parents, adults, employees, and children have received my advice.

I don't give it out to tell them what to do, but I give it out to try to prevent them from making bad decisions. Its up to them to decide.

If a child is with the parent, I do what I can to not say anything, and let the child tell the parent what he/she wants.

If people are confused, I might pipe up with some information, normally not very much. Stuff like "there are more in that aisle" or "this one is good, and this one is evil"

After that there are times when the parents or children will ask me more questions, and I'll do what I can to answer them.

I've suggested ultra and voyager universe figures to a 5 year old child and his mother instead of 25th anniversary Prime. I didn't hand him a figure and tell him to buy it, I just pointed at a few on the shelves and told the mother that those ones would be much easier for him to play with and were much cheaper. The kid asked questions about them and I answered which ones were good guys, and which ones were bad guys, which ones were planes and cars, and if they made noises or fired missiles. I suggested to avoid the movie stuff, since there's a lot of little frustrating fiddly bits on them, but I did also point to several Animated figures.

In the end I think he ended up picking Universe Stormcloud, since he liked the way it looked over Powerglide and Silverbolt, it was big, and he liked planes, even though it was a bad guy. I told him he didn't have to play with him as a bad guy, and he could make him whatever name he wanted. And he could play with him with his other toys, not just Transformer. All that kind of blew his mind and he liked his choice even more.

The mother thanked me and said she was very lost with this sort of thing and that it was all new to the child also. I made all of it much easier than she thought it could be.

I didn't pick anything up that day, mainly because the shelves were pretty bare and I was just checking the price on 25th Prime, but my mood was boosted and I felt pretty good about myself for a while afterward.



On other occasions, while asking questions to store employees, there were a few times where they thought I was the Hasbro representative and were really willing to give me like full access to all sorts of information about what was in the back and stock levels, and info from those telzon guns.

I never took advantage of any of that though, since I figured that it might be really bad for the employee to give out info like that to just some random guy. Sure, I might have abused the assumptions and asked them to check for something in the back, but that's something they should do anyways.