It was a busy Thursday afternoon, and I looked down to see an adorable little boy, maybe eight or nine years old, approaching the counter. His mom stood a ways behind him as he walked up to me; clearly he was being given the responsibility of making a purchase with his allowance money all on his lonesome. I finished ringing up the customer ahead of him, bagged his comics and wished him a good day, and then the youngster took his turn.
“Excuse me, sir, do you sell pogs?”
Huh. Technically speaking, no.
I mean, we had pogs. As far as I was aware, we’d never actually sold any pogs.
Pogs were the predecessors of the collectible card games that redefined, and kind of wrecked, comics and game stores in the early-to-mid 1990s. Originally a pastime invented by poor Hawaiian kids, it consisted of collecting the cardboard inserts from the caps of a local fruit drink—passionfruit, orange, and guava flavored, hence POGs—and playing a sort of marbles-eque game with them. You’d stack up your pogs in a circle drawn in the dirt, and then you’d take turns slamming down on the stack of cardboard discs, trying to get them to fly out of the circle. Any that landed outside the border, you’d pick up and add to your collection, and then your opponent would take his or her turn.
The comics industry leapt on the concept and attempted to make pogs the “next big thing” by printing character imagery on cheap cardboard discs and declaring them collectible. They also sold heavy “slammers” that you would use to smack the stack of pogs, and kids were meant to get excited about winning uncommon and rare discs.
The problem is, nobody wanted to play fucking pogs. We’d had several boxes languishing in the storeroom as long as I could remember, boxes of mylar pouches filled with cardboard imprinted with DC or Marvel superheroes. They were universally derided as being dumb as hell, and as far as I knew we’d never sold a single pog in the years I’d been there. They became a running gag in the shop; we’d occasionally take out a pack and throw it at someone, and if the pogs touched you, you had to take them out of the shop. No take-backs.
But this little man wanted pogs, and he was polite about it, so by God I was going to sell him pogs. “One moment, please!” I said brightly, and dove into the back room. I scrambled, pawing through the shelves, trying to remember where the damned things were. I finally found a dust-covered box buried on a low shelf, ripped off the plastic, and hustled it out to the counter. I opened it like a treasure chest in front of him, and he was delighted.
“How much are they?” he asked.
I paused.
I had no fucking clue. We’d never sold any of them and I couldn’t remember what they were supposed to retail for. “Two for a dollar?” I suggested.
He looked at the money in his hand. “Can I have four?” he asked, pushing a handful of change at me.
“Absolutely, my good sir,” I said emphatically. I let him pick out four packs, and he laid them on the counter. I rang him up, picking out the coins necessary and pushing the rest back to him before bagging his four chosen packs. While he carefully recounted his change and put it back in his pocket, I swept the entire box off the counter into the bag as well, and then handed it over with a grin. The young man thanked me and returned to his mother, excited for the additions to his pog collection.
Will walked over, shaking his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe you actually got money for pogs.”
About fifteen minutes later, they returned to the shop. His mom walked up to the counter, obviously chagrined. “There must have been some mistake,” she said. “He bought four packs, but it looks like you gave him way more than that.” Her son looked a little crestfallen that he was having to return his windfall.
I glanced back at Will, who absolutely anticipated what I was about to do, stepping past me into the back room. “I appreciate the honesty, ma’am. In fact, I appreciate it so much, I feel like I owe your son a reward.” Will popped out with a second box of pogs, and we handed it over, along with the initial bag. “On the house.”
She protested. I reassured her that we didn’t get much demand for pogs, and that they’d be doing us a favor by taking them off our hands. It took some convincing, but she finally acquiesced, and her son was absolutely over the moon. Grinning from ear to ear, he walked out into a fall afternoon with his two entire boxes of pogs, absolutely chuffed at his unexpected bounty.
Little man loved pogs.