Tales from Hastings Entertainment

"What's Hastings?" You ask? Well let me give you a little background. We have everything from video rental, game rental, sale copies for both, consoles, to TVs, sound systems, headphones, T-shirts, bar-ware, weed paraphernalia, CDs, records, record players, books, skate equipment and so on. When I first started I was amazed by the sheer quantity of different things we sold. If you're looking for something in the entertainment genre, we've most likely got it.

I am one of my store's front counter team leads. We are essentially the boss of the entire store when ever the manager is out. In my time there I've had so much fun and met life long friends. With all the recent news about the company I figured it was time to make a "Tales from" series.

The guy was obviously extremely mentally disturbed. While I wasn't there to watch everything go down, the life style's manager was. When he found the guy back in books he had already started going to town on his arm with a knife. It was described as "It looked like he stuck his arm in a meat grinder." We called the police and EMTs and they came and grabbed him, but not before he threatened to attack our employees. I closed that night and I snuck a peak at the crime scene and man oh man it was like something out of CSI. We had to write off almost an entire shelf's worth of books.

Hastings had a very interesting program called "Used Buybacks". Essentially you could bring your old DVDs/Blu Rays/Books/CDs/Vinyl and if it was in our system we would pay you with cash or in store credit. Great in theory right? Most often the case was that the drug addicts and low life's would waltz into Walmart, steal ten or so new releases and come into our store to sell them for cash. It was insanely easy to spot the culprits even before they came up to the counter. Twitchy, nervous, unclean and so on. We could never prove that anything they had was stolen but we all knew regardless.

When I say we have everything I mean we have everything. Our VHS collection might not be huge but we've got them.

The shipping and receiving area is very clean and organized, but there are some doll heads hidden here and there. Upstairs above receiving is where the bodies are. It's honestly looks like something out of a horror movie. Dark, flickering lights, a judgmental owl watching you and a slew of doll bodies.

Even if the rentals didn't work you can't sue a video store over broken rentals. I told him that nine times out of ten it's the fault of the Blu Ray player. He told me that "I built my own computer I think I know that everything works." Now, I've been building PCs professionally for 6+ years and I can tell you without a doubt that those drives are all garbage. I told him that he needed to check his drivers. Before I sent him off I threw each one of his rentals into the store's player and lo and behold all three worked flawlessly.

One of my responsibilities is to run video back to the rental wall. The disks are in flimsy plastic holder and then put in a hard plastic lock box. These don't weigh much on their own but when you throw fifty onto a stack it gets pretty heavy. Once an hour I'd spend seven to ten minutes putting away all that rental and man, it is really heavy once you start running around the store with it.

Look, I understand that everyone gets horny and everyone wants to jack it. That doesn't mean you can tear open the porno mags and "use" them back in books. The last thing I need on any given day is man goo all over my book shelves.

This was a common occurrence. We even had a little sign that said our check reader was broken. It's mostly old people or people with down syndrome that use checks but it's always the elderly people that don't tell us they have a check until after we've scanned all their items. People with down syndrome on the other hand always have their check books out and it's easy from there.

I know most of you have never even heard of Hastings. I loved our store, the employees and the atmosphere to death. It cuts me deep to see it going away. Most of our customers feel the same way. People are constantly expressing how heart broken they are at the news. I try to think of it as just another chapter in my life's story but it's a sad time for sure.

I've got tons of stories from my store and if it's wanted I can do another one of these!