People who deal in niche goods and hobbies often have repeat and loyal customers.

In theory, you want to make their buying experience as smoothly as possible, so they don’t start going somewhere else.

That happened here…for a while.

Then, things changed and the collector had to be the one to point it out.

Here are the detail.

You need me to stop calling in advance for my TCG order?

As a hobby, I have taken to trading card games. Pokémon, and Magic the Gathering to be specific.

I am not collecting sealed products, but rather I am usually buying bulk so that I can make multiple decks and play with my family.

This is important because I am often making huge bulk orders that consist of fifty cards or more.

There are a few shops near me, and I am fortunate enough to be close to about five hobby shops that sell Pokémon and Magic singles.

There has to be an easier way.

I managed to drag my family into the Pokémon TCG hobby roughly a year ago.

Since then, the process of making an order was to; select from their online stock, and checkout with the cart.

At this time, you are given two options; pay in advance for your order, or pay in the store.

Paying in advance, while very sensible, has often led to cards being paid for that they did not have in stock.

As in, it was mistakenly labeled as in stock, but actually was not. This would then result in a refund system that would take 2-3 days to complete.

The issue is that it was super inconvenient when I had to wait for 2-3 days to recoup the money.

I personally experienced a transaction of a $10 card that needed to be refunded.

Someone in the store had a better way, and it worked great.

So I spoke to one of the staff, and they told me, “When you have big orders, it’s perfectly fine to call ahead of time, and we can pick the order when we have time. In fact, as long as you don’t abuse this process, it works out for everyone.”

That staff member is awesome, and so for a year, that’s exactly what I did. This process accomplishes three things.

One, I am not paying for a product that couldn’t be fulfilled.

Two, I would reduce my time waiting because I called ahead of time by four to five hours.

Three, the staff members would have plenty of time to grab the order.

I never abused this process, and always came through when I said I would come through.

Until it didn’t.

Now, this wouldn’t be malicious compliance if not for the next part.

About two months ago, me and my family took the dive into Magic the Gathering, because Commander is a blast.

This has caused me to start hoarding cards again, and making decks for myself, and for my family’s usage.

So I was back into the swing of things again. Making 50+ single card orders from this shop that I loved very much.

During my usual four hour in advance phone call I was told, “Hey, you have to stop calling in these orders. It’s store policy to only pull orders that have been paid for. We won’t be pulling your cards until they are paid for.”

Weird… I was told otherwise, but I will ask them when I get there.

So, I get there to pick up, and pay for my order and tried to explain that this process was something that a previous staff member told me was A-OK, and even encouraged.

There were two staff members and they both responded again with a very terse and repeated message of “it’s store policy.”

The message was fine enough, but the tone and rudeness had me floored.

They told me from now on, pre-pay for all of my orders, and then come to pick them up.

Okay, fine.

So here is where the malicious compliance begins.

It was clear what they wanted me to do. Pre-pay and show up.

So a few weeks later, what I did was scroll through their inventory, and started the “bling-a-fication” of my decks.

I proceeded to spend roughly forty minutes scrolling through their online inventory, and adding to my cart with various amounts of most holo-foil basic land card I could find for under a dollar.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, these basic lands are pretty cheap ($0.10-$0.60 each).

They also are categorized by sets and as individual printings. So each basic land has its own set, and its own foil print version.

This means that they would need to hunt each land by set, and by foil print.

I had carted roughly one-hundred cards.

One hundred cards that they would need to hunt through at least forty different sets.

They would also need to specifically find the foil only of the basic lands.

Even more, I gave them an hour of time to pick the order.

An hour, while definitely not a lot of time, is more than enough to grab this order.

The employees had to learn the hard way.

When I get there, it was one of the two guys that had reinforced the new method of ordering. Even better, he was swamped.

He hadn’t even started my order.

I would have loved to give him the four to five hours that I normally would give, but it was store policy that I stop calling in advance, and just order, pay, and show up.

So I wait. I asked if they started my order, he quickly responded with “yes… I am getting to it”. I think that even he knew that this would have been much easier if I had called four hours in advance like I normally would.

This may be strange to say, but I was very happy that there were four cards that were not available for the order.

So I had paid for four cards that I would never see fulfilled.

I guess it all worked out in the end.

Do you remember the staff member that was awesome? Yeah, he showed up about thirty minutes into my wait, and he asked if I had been waiting for a long time.

I had said that it was about thirty minutes.

For my wait, he had given me one of the tournament participant packs, and I had actually pulled a $30 card! Roaming Throne!

The exchange was made, I waited forty minutes.

Four cards were missing.

I plan on approaching their social media (or shop owner), and ask for clarification from the establishment on what I should be doing in the future.

That will be something I do in the near future, but for now, I feel vindicated.

The staff member had to frantically hunt for the cards, and even had to tell me that there were cards missing. All things that the previous system avoided.

Why are people so stubborn?

I wonder what Reddit made of this one.

It might take more than once.

Just to reinforce it.

There are many ways all of this could have been avoided.

A special shop indeed.

What a world.

They made the whole process harder.

Which didn’t work out well for anyone.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.