[quote name='nintendokid']YESS! Finally, a Toyriffic employee. Will you please enlighten me and the rest of us? Since the beginning of time, I've been wondering about these things:
1) Is Toyriffic a local, regional, or national chain? I know it only exists in MN and WI. Are there other places?[/QUOTE]
Regional. We have stores in Maplewood, Hudson, Eau Claire, and Rice Lake. Used to have one in Menomonie, owned by cousins of the owners, but due to some incident involving bad business practices, they were forced to change their name. I don't know any of the juicy details, sadly.
(2) Who is the owner anyway?
A married couple, Dave and Denise, are the owners. They live in the Minneapolis area.
3) Are employees swapped from location to location? I used to go to college in River Falls and I stopped at the Hudson location one time. I went to the Maplewood a few months later and bam! The same employee (I know it's the same because of the long hair).
Haha, I bet that's Marcus. The Hudson and Maplewood stores often swap employees because they're so close, but Rice Lake and Eau Claire have their own staff. At one point it was only myself and another person working in Eau Claire, so every other weekend or so they'd send one of those employees down to give us a day off - but now we have four guys working in Eau Claire, so we don't have that problem anymore. Whew.
(4) WHAT'S UP WITH TOYRIFFIC'S PRICING??????!!!!! 99% of what they have can be found for $10-20 cheaper, and sometimes, in better condition, on eBay and even here on CAG. *Thinks about the ridiculous N64 prices*
The eternal mystery. I know a guy working at the Maplewood store was doing the prices at one time, but he quit a few months ago. I'm under the impression that a lot of the better stuff gets priced at "what we can sell it at." Sometimes this price is average, sometimes it's a little low, and sometimes it's crazy-high.
I do my best to update the Eau Claire price books to reflect any sort of price drops, but unfortunately I can't alter some of the more pricey, older stuff. I'll occasionally mention when something is unreasonably high to my superiors (SNES Mario Kart used to be $39.95, but I managed to get them to drop it to $29.95 - we have a ton, and it's no wonder!), but that's no guarantee it'll change, and I certainly can't fix everything. I'm probably one of three employees chain-wide that are aware of the actual value of this stuff, and we try to change it as best we can (one of them works at the Eau Claire store with me, and lurks on these boards every now and then). Anything that's not priced concretely in the price books, such as DVDs, I'm much more generous with.
If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!