Do Not Be Fooled! Owner Is Not Who He Presents Himself To Be!
So, I work as a 32 hour contract employee for the University of Texas and have the months of December and May off. It is not a choice, I am forced to not be able to work, therefore I need income during these times. I found Raul's store online after being at my wit's end with Game Over Video Games since they never carry cash in the store and were always unable to pay me for the games I would try to bring in and sell.
At first, Raul and his wife Jessica, seemed like the perfect store owner's for a seller such as myself. He presented himself to be wholly transparent, using the website pricecharting.com to look up any game I would bring in and offering me 50% of the current market value. I began by selling him some Zelda games I had lying around my apartment. Now, I am 37, so I was in middle school and high school during the Nintendo 64 and GameCube eras. I wasn't a huge gamer, and although I would ask for the Zelda games for gifts, I could honestly never get very far into them due the complexity of the puzzles and my own impatience. And also, I am discovering this to be quite rare and unusual, but I kept very good care of my things. So, Zelda Wind Waker was one of the first games I sold to Raul and at the time he commented how he couldn't believe in what excellent shape it was in. Honestly, I didn't think much of it at the time, only felt some pangs of regret at my necessity to sell it. As the days and weeks unfolded, I began selling off my rarest and most valuable games solely to Raul. It made the most sense to me since he offered the best buy back rate. He even agreed to meet me at a local Walgreen's parking lot near me when my vehicle was low on gas or I just couldn't make it all the way down to South Austin to his store. I noticed in the last couple of week's or so a definite shift in his attitude and treatment of me. I offered him a gift as a sign of my appreciation, a CIB GBA game, and he didn't even bother to thank me at the time, just took it along with the other games I had sold him and promptly displayed it in his store. One night recently, he had agreed to meet me at the Walgreen's for a transaction, but then totally ghosted me. I was honestly worried about his safety that maybe something had happened since he had never done this before. He claimed he had been busy with his kids and Christmas and could meet me the following day. I even caught him in several lies through text message exchanges in which he deceitfully told me the wrong buy back rates on things I was offering. The night he ghosted me, I sat down and tried to figure out what was going on. I remembered his disbelief at the conditions of my games early on and then thought about my own interactions with him recently. I had shaved my head in the last few weeks as a show of solidarity and support for my father who has been recently diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. Also, in the winter, my skin tends to flake and break out just due to the change in temperature. That night it finally dawned on me why Raul had been treating me so poorly-he thought I was stealing the games and most likely abusing drugs, I'm assuming in this case due to my appearance, meth. I do not use meth, but I do have a bipolar I diagnosis which causes me to sometimes behave erratically or speak too quickly depending on the current stressors in my life. I even tried to explain this through text to him, but he ignored it.
Finally, early on in our business dealings, I had loaned him my PlayStation 1 Mini as he said he could mod it in his free time. I told him no rush, and at this point, after everything I have described here, I just wanted it back, modded or not. He agreed that he would bring it and then when we met that night, admitted he had not, but he would bring it to me the following day and I have not heard from him. I understand he has a large family and works several jobs and I'm sure he is quite protective of his five star rating, but this simply is not right and he needs to be exposed for the judgmental and bad man that he truly is, no matter what he presents to the city of Austin and us citizens. read more