Is the Event Ref fucking special. I hope to god he's retarded so that it can possibly excuse his retardation.
So source:
I have friend who worked for GW. They have nothing good to say about the company.
Now this was GW in Cuckistan (Europe) so maybe it is different in the US, their knowledge might also be dated, and it is also possible that the store they worked at was uniquely fucked up, but they said their experiences matched with other people they talked to and continued after they left.
Anyway every employee at GW is given "store rules" which amount to "Sell anything you can to anyone who walks in the store, keep out anything that isn't GW: materials, words, ideas.". They literally were given cringey sample scripts from corporate on how to turn nerds talking about
The world's most popular roleplaying game to topics related to GW properties like Warhams and Mordheim.
You were either
helping interacting with customers, organizing/cleaning, or you were visibly performing some sort of GW task like building/painting minis. After release of new models/rules (I think Chaos?): two employees were playing warhams: onewith the Hot New Models and dominating the other guy with the old & busted previous meta darling. Another employee, paid but in street clothes, had his Hot New Army set up to bait other people into playing(army composition mandated by corporate, with instructions on how to use new rules/units to stomp any other army that rolled up). A fourth employee, paid but also in street clothes, was building and painting the cool new units at the painting bench. All this to advertise the new plastic and get the WAAC crowd to drop more money so they can keep being King Autist.
Again, all of this was rigorously enforced by store management because they had regional management up their ass; Friend's first boss was punishment transfered to a store in a worse market an hour away because while he'd hit his total sales numbers, he hadn't moved enough of the newly released books and minis, so he was out.
Anyway, tl;dr: Rules about pushing GW product are enforced by management who's jobs and bonuses are determined by how much inventory they move.
So the Event Ref is usually a GW employee voluntold to be Event Ref. On normal "Come and meet the other people who wasted hundreds of dollars on plastic spacemen" days, the Refs might be a little more lax because management isn't breathing down their necks - let you get away with unpainted minis, weird kitbash, etc.
At official tourney events, the Ref is told be anal and usually a manager and/or GW corpo rep is there watching the Ref ensuring they are. There were hardcore anal rules like minis had to be painted with minimum of three different colors, and they had to be built with ONLY official GW components/components from their sprue - Orks got leeway as long as the extra kit was "decorative". For the higher-level "this will influence lore" tourneys, you not only had to have your minis painted but they had to be painted with a GW approved official color scheme, which resulted in a Chaos Marines player playing with wet minis because he'd borrowed some units for the tourney and they weren't a KHORNE color scheme, and had been told he had 30 minutes to fix it or he'd forfeit the match.