Bump.
I saw people talking about working at Sportsman's Warehouse, so I thought I would register and join the discussion. I worked at an academy sports one summer many years ago, before I went to graduate school. Even though I was very new to guns at the time, they put me behind the gun counter, or as we called it, “the gun bar”.
I absolutely recognize that you hear a lot of dumb stuff from people that work behind gun counters, but I can assure you that you hear an equal amount of weird or outright crazy stuff from the customers. and while the customers are allowed to leave, you have to stay and continually get subjected to the BS such that your own IQ starts to suffer.
Anyways, just a few stories :
-people would prank call our store. One person would call and ask if we had cannons or muskets
-A woman who told us that she was a cop (I believe she was actually a security guard but whatever) came into the store with a Smith & Wesson Sigma that she bought off of a coworker. The coworker had purchased it from a different Academy store. She said that the gun kept jamming. We took it apart, and it appeared to need cleaning. My boss suggested that she clean the gun and bring it back for us to send to Smith and Wesson if that didn’t work. This woman turned into Karen mode and started walking around yelling about how “Academy doesn’t test their guns before selling them!!” we tried to explain the basic idea of why we couldn’t test guns and then try to sell them to customers as brand new, but she didn’t wanna hear it.
This younger woman came in and asked to see some sort of .22. I think it might’ve been a Ruger 10/22. She held it and looked at it kind of fondly and then hit us with, “this is the exact gun I used to shoot my sister‘s boyfriend in the crotch with after he got handsy with me”. Umm….ya they don’t really train you on how to react to that interaction
We had an older gentleman who had obviously come in from playing golf. He was wanting his fishing reel respooled. While we were doing that, he told us that he heard from a friend of a friend that army special forces were secretly using Taurus Judge revolvers for close quarters combat, because the army secretly found out that a .410 slug from a Taurus judge was almost always a 100% one stop shot
-A guy came in looking for 7.62X39 ammo. We had some staircase surplus stuff at the time that I recommended to him. His response? “STEEL CASE AMMO!!!…son…. Are you trying to blow up my extractor?? I only shoot brass case ammo through my guns” and then he left.
-“is this Taurus just as good as this Glock”. My response was always, “if you’re shooting 100 rounds a year at the range, yeah, it probably is.” people didn’t like that answer. They usually want you to tell them that the cheaper gun is just as good as the more expensive gun in terms of quality, fit, finish et
