I work for HMV in the uk and we never close early for games released on midnight launches, in face we never closed early when the WoW Wrath of the lich king pack got launched, something what meant the store was basically Blizzard's bitch for the night seriously, staff members working were taking orders and forced to wear blizzard agreed clothing and doing things blizzard style. I know, I was one of them, though it still took 2 of the very pretty models in the store for the launch to persuade me to crush my spikes to wear the baseball cap with the "?" logo common to NPC's in the game environment. We closed at 21:00 and everything got set up in the remaining 2 hours to 11 then the customers were comming in. It was chaotic but we're flagship it's not the first and not the last time we've had big events we coped.

A day won't generally make a difference to most people the best thing to do is to appeal to their better nature remember these people are simply people and are not always assholes be nice and polite about it and they will be lenient with you they generally have the discetionary powers to do this.

In my opinion be honest and appeal to their nature if you lie to the assistant about their own store's actions, most likely worked they're going to not do you any favours. I certainly am an asshole to those who lie to me in the store.

Blackmage, I've had similar stuff in my place happen. I will simply say I didn't just want to laugh in the guys face, I did laugh in his face and then said "no" seriously I was just like "hahaha...no!" My boss was right next to me and just laughed at it he thought it was hillarious way to deal with the guy and so I got away with it totally scott-free.