Exactly, the smoking gun is not the CoL, it’s the 30% quota with the Glengarry Glen Ross reward for third place. Damn right Jack Lemmon’s gonna lie his ass off to make sure he at least gets the steak knives.
I have to admit that I’ve had a number of positive experiences at GameStop. Just about the only things I buy there are Nintendo e-shop cards (because giving Nintendo my credit card number seems crazy, and putting my credit card number on my kids Nintendos is insane). But when we go there my kids usually have to spend their allowance on some dumb overpriced tchotchke as well.
The employees are almost always super nice to my kids, asking them what games they’ve been playing, and often giving them little freebies (once the guy gave my daughter a nicely packaged CD of Nintendo video game music, which she went bonkers for). They just really made a shopping trip into a fun experience for them.
Which obviously isn’t to defend any dumb corporate policies they have, but if GameStop did disappear of the face of the Earth I’d be a little sad.
Not typically, when I was there. The only time I ever put shrinkwrap back on an item was when we were selling our last copy and the display was out on the wall and the customer wanted to give it as a gift, so we put shrinkwrap back on it. 99% of the time we only used shrinkwrap for sending defective or traded-in hardware to corporate so that all the cords and stuff remained together.
To me, there was nothing deceptive about having to open a new item to make a display, however I absolutely respect the opinion for someone that wants their new game to be still in the original plastic.
Well just because I am not a fan of having employees open brand new sealed games, take them home to try them out and sometimes return them with the codes used or an item missing entirely, or because I hate seeing kids turn in games for 75 cents, or because my local store employees feel like they need to “educate” me on every game I buy from them like I don’t know anything about gaming… doesn’t mean I want them gone.
At one point they were a nice place to go to pick up used games for discontinued systems, and they’re still strategically located in places like actual and strip malls. I’ll go in there once in awhile. I do feel high pressure sales though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the used game thing is pushed heavy… I would be surprised if they’re telling everyone to lie, lie, lie though.
I left GameStop (Babbage back then) when it became a push for preorders. Used games were just starting and already my store numbers were being set on preorders. We had to continue our sales for new, but had to add a percentage of preorders. The writing was on the wall then, and I left at that time. I was a manager and couldn’t see how we were supposed to hit the preorder percent on our store sales. We were top store in the district, so we had to sell more preorders to get our bonus. Once used started, the numbers just got worse.
I might still stop in a GameStop, usually like the people there, but seeing this company go through its slow death spiral isn’t fun.
Agreed, Galadin. Quite sad.
I have fond memories of Gamestop’s ancestors, and while I’m sure the people involved in destroying those brands have faded into the annals of mediocrity, watching this bastard offspring flail in misery still brings back the memories of what once was.
I’ve bought games at GameStop like 5 times ever. One of those times the “new” box had no disc in it, and two overlapping clear seals.
Clear, round stickers?
We used those when selling an opened but new copy, so it could be returned if the stickers hadn’t been removed. But everyone who worked at a store has accidentally sold a box without the disc in it, me included. More than once I pulled the disc out of the drawer and put it on the counter, then it didn’t get into the box, sure fire way to feel like an idiot.
Stopped shopping there over a decade ago. I hated their “opened but new” bullshit. Those stickers always left a residue and the “new” games were often scratched to hell. Also hated their sales push. “BUY USED, TRADE IN YOUR OLD SHIT! PRE ORDER ARTIFICIALLY SCARCE VIDEOGAME X”
I do feel bad(ly?) for the employees, it has to be an annoying store to work in.
Horrible company; horribly policies; Gamestop.
I’m pretty glad my legacy of hating Gamestop lives on
The rest of the real world calls this used. I understand there might be some display boxes or demos, but for the most part the all the other retailers give you a factory sealed product. It really irks me that Gamestop reseals in the back like that’s no big deal.
This was common back in the day for DVD’s and CD’s elsewhere, for whatever it’s worth. Part of scanning in the inventory was putting together the boxes and/or inserting the discs and then hitting the shrink-wrap machine. Of course, the discs could get scratched by the employees handling them carelessly which then led to interesting conversations with customers.
Amazon sure does.
According to information given years ago, probably several by now, Gamestop would actually let their employees go home and play games, reseal them and sell them as new. You would buy these games and not only would the disc be scratch, codes and other items in a new box would actually be missing or used. Maybe Walmart, Amazon, and Target all have employees sitting in the back of a room today re-packaging all their discs for inventory purposes or putting them together. I guess we need one of those employees to tell us that, but what i am talking about it was not for inventory purposes.
That started way before GameStop. Software Etc was letting their employees borrow games back in the 80s. Good friends wife managed one and every new game he got to play right away for free. The idea was good, helps employees know their products, but I hated buying a game that was obviously used.
Never heard of a place removing the contents of DVDs or CDs. All the places I shopped just put them in those plastic security containers. I never went back to GameStop after I bought a new game and they had to get the contents out of the drawer.
I worked at EB Games about 25 years ago when I was in high school and it was a very eye opening experience. The shenanigans and abuses we hear about today are way worse than what I experienced long ago but working in any kind of retail pretty much sucks and the video game stores were a unique (in flavor if not in degree) kind of suckage.
When I was there it was the age where you could return a game just because your horoscope didn’t align with the colors on the box that day. We would check the packaging and if it “looked like” everything was there we’d take the return, fill out a long white+yellow+pink triple copy return slip and then put the box to the side. Later we would dutifully re-shrinkwrap those games and put them right back on the shelf.
When I was there they really didn’t have sales goals or nonsensical corporate newspeak style bullshit so much as they just had the typical retail personnel issues. People showing up late, people not following the guidelines for things, etc.
Being a manager there sucked ass though and we went through a series of at least four different managers in the 12-18 months that I worked there. The first guy was the guy who hired me as a precocious/nerdy 16 year old as a seasonal guy one winter. I think I was a junior in high school at the time. I then stayed on after the holidays and worked through the summer and into the next year and went through 3 more managers as they got shifted around to different stores for reasons that never made sense to me.
We finally ended up in a situation where the store started having a very significant employee theft problem. Entire systems (SNES and Sega Genesis systems probably) were disappearing. The obvious and rumored mechanism by which this had to happen was that the keyholders and closers were stealing these items, but our regional manager had to come and talk to everyone one Sunday morning to tell us that we were going to have our pockets searched when we left. And anybody that had super large SNES sized pockets was going to be really suspect!
At that point I think I was a senior and I was getting to the point where I had a lot of stuff going on and being caught in the middle of a retail police state did not appeal to me so I tendered my resignation. Later on in college I thought I might apply there again to pick up some extra spending money but was informed by the manager of the store I applied to that I was blacklisted.
She told me that it “might be” because if there was, for example, an employee theft problem at the store I’d worked at when I had quit that that “could be” the reason.
So basically they banned a 17 year old who couldn’t possibly have been responsible for the thefts (honest it wasn’t me!) from ever working there again because retail workers are just worthless cogs in a machine, right?
I think EB was widely considered to have been “better” than GameStop even back then but whatever minimal soul they had was clearly devoured and used for dark rituals when GameStop bought them out.
I call it necessary because people steal shit. Look, I totally get it, and I completely respect any customer that doesn’t want to buy an opened product, but it doesn’t make the company Evil as many have portrayed over the years.
That’s just not true though, every other game seller from ToysRus to Best Buy managed to use security cases, or paper slips. Not ideal, but better than taking a new product out of a box when the company also sells used copies of the same product.
There were some great Gamestop employees, but I remember disliking going there for years because of the preorder/used game hassle it became. Plus just listening to employees outright lie to moms about games and systems when I was in there was always off-putting.
They have thus negative image for good reason.
I always thought I missed some sophisticated trade-in system, as I never understood why the price for their used games nearly equaled the price for new games. Now that I read this thread I understand that there is no such system.
I was never able to understand why people traded their games at Gamestop when you can do so much better at ebay, or probably even trading them in to Amazon (which originally wasn’t an option in the beginning).