As some may or may not be aware, I run a LAN Gaming Center, named LAN Speed Games.  (more info HERE)  A lot of the customers have been coming and playing games and making friends since near the beginning, 5 years ago. So they have a strong sense of loyalty toward the place.

I began working at LSG about a year ago.  Sometime after I began I made mention of an offer I’ve always made at the LANs I’ve worked at: If you get a tattoo of the store’s logo on a visible portion of your skin, I will let you play for free for life.  Up until recently nobody had taken advantage of the offer, as most company logos are designed to be very obviously, a company logo.  LAN Speed’s is fairly unique, and in terms of body art, actually works fairly well. (see picture)

So in January of this year, we finally had someone take the offer and get ink done.  We followed through and let him play for free. This seemed to break the dam, so to speak, and within about 2-3 months we had a total of 6 people with tattoos, at which point we said “enough” and haven’t let anyone else get one.  Until today.

As if all this wasn’t enough already to impress upon you the nature of the community that develops in a good business like this, I have one further note on tattoo #7, which walked in today.  Today is also the day when our 4 new systems arrived, giving us a total of 30 PCs.  We had stated when the tattoo thing began to escalate that we would not allow any more tattoos than 6, which is ~25% of our capacity with 26 machines.  And we told people that we would allow more if and when we got more PCs.

So today our 4 new PCs came in. And about 4 hours later, tattoo #7 walks in.  He had missed being in on the first batch by a small margin (we had a waiting list, actually).  And so he had deliberatly timed it so that he got the tattoo the same day our new PCs arrived.  That kind of dedication (or desperation, I haven’t decided) just amazes me, and I’m really glad to be a part of a business where we have grown such a strong bond with our customer base.