It’s been five years since I’ve worked at a gas station. Five years since ten-hour shifts, lonely nights, cold fluorescent lights, the smell of asphalt degreaser, and barely seeing the sun. Even though I have a cushy desk job with daytime hours today, my body still rebels, or is perhaps shaken by, my year as a night clerk. Sleep, for example, has never hit exactly the same since my futile attempt to flip my circadian rhythm. If I stand for long periods, you might notice me favoring my right leg. Turns out standing on hard linoleum in Vans is a mistake.
I have shockingly few stories from my time as night’s custodian. A drunken caterer tried to carjack me; he drove down the street and brandished an icepick at the night clerk at a rival gas station after I fucked with him long enough for the donut guy to get out of the bathroom and got him to leave my store. Then there’s the time an accountant from our local la Cosa Nostra chapter careened into the parking lot at 2:05 AM in his white Kia Forte, blisteringly drunk, only to yell at me about how the beer cooler locks weren’t on the doors yet, what the fhhhhuck w-was wrong with me?
Honestly, guy? Fair.
There’s also the time I was moved to a convenience store-only location in a roughish part of my city after the previous night clerk had been robbed and subsequently quit, and I didn’t show quick enough deference to the patrolling cop who’d stopped in to use the restroom after midnight. That one’s wild; I was cleaning soda spigots at the fountain (those things are truly horrifying if not cleaned) and my vision of the door was obscured. Guy walks in, “can I use your bathroom?” “Sorry man,” I say, “bathroom’s closed after midnight.”
“WELL, that’s the LAST time we’re patrolling over here I guess, gonna let our friends know too!”
Before I had a chance to say anything, the cop was already gone. Alright, whatever. Didn’t see another cop in the area for a solid month, so that’s fun. I did get shit on by my manager following this event, which was less fun (and part of the reason I decided to quit shortly after Christmas, 2014).
The Convenience Store is a remarkable game in that it accurately recreates the feeling of being the only person behind the register at your local convenience store, bodega, or gas station after the sun has gone down and the daytime crowd has gone to bed. As soon as I started playing, I was removing expired perishables from the shelves and peeking over aisles to see if anyone was at the counter waiting to be rung up. If I was behind the counter, I’d be following the path of NPCs up and down the rows, much like I used to do in between inventorying cigarettes and mopping the floors.
More shocking than any of the creepy goings-on at this convenience store in Japan, at least for me, was how quickly I fell back into this mode of thinking and working. It wasn’t instantaneous, the switch flipped and then there was a delay, but it wasn’t much of one. And then I was back in my smock and stained khakis, rubbing spilled soda out of the floor mats. I went about familiar tasks, restocking missing items, killing rats and, at one point, getting a guy five cans of light beer and a pack of cigarettes (muttering “get them yourself” under my breath as my playable character did).
Unfortunately, the existential horror of finding your body involuntarily react to the prospect of being back at a job you hate was more potent for me than the psychological horror presented in the game itself. The aesthetics of the game aside (which are honestly perfect), I thought it relied to heavily on horror tropes we’ve all seen dozens of times before. Without spoiling the specifics, The Convenience Store takes story beats from Poltergeist, The Ring/The Grudge (of course) and every vengeful spirit/corporate construction over old murder home story you’ve ever seen or heard. The execution is alright, but I would have loved to have seen it paced out better. Because honestly? Being a night clerk is terrifying and way more dangerous than it’s worth for the money, and this setting is one of the most plausible for horrible things to happen.
