Kotaku follows up by talking to 100 current and former staff.
[quote]
I don’t want this to sound like a sob story or anything, but my situation is the norm. I have employees who work at GameStop full time, and every time they sell a new console, or a day like January 24th rolls around where you have multiple new titles releasing at the same time, they all get extremely nervous about whether or not they’re going to hit their numbers. The worst part is the fact that all of my staff wants to do right by the guests, and we all try to do that as much as possible, but when we’re faced with either losing our jobs or selling a product that the guest doesn’t want, 9 times out of 10 we’ll sell something other than what the guests want.[/quote]
[quote]
Circle of Life (COL) was something that has been always a part of GameStop but got revamped around October for the holidays. The goals for our store were as follows.
These goals had to be met everyday or we would get a call from our District Manager (or District Leader, as GameStop would have you call him) to alert us about our low numbers and warn us.[/quote]
I used to work in a EB Games, before they merged with Gamestop; this was for about 5 months.
LP was a problem, so we had to strip open new games, tuck the discs in the drawer behind the counter, and keep the plastic sleeves on the shelf.
Trade-in for games wasn’t as big at the time, but trade-in for consoles was. And let me tell you, it was a fucking joke. Customer trades in a system, and I thought we’d send it to corporate for cleaning and testing. Nope. We just stuffed them in “Pre-Owned” boxes with the cables. Never even dusted them off, or even checked to see if they were working.
This was in the good ol’ days, so we usually had a couple people on staff at all times. But once I was there for a while, they let me close by myself. Let me tell you, it was a mess. Had to do inventory in the back, but that meant basically disappearing from the front of the store.
In retrospect, it sounds like paradise compared to conditions today.
I remember the days of Electronics Boutique, when they just sold PC software. Guys in bad suits manned the store. Always loved going there and browsing. Picked up so many great games from EB in those days.
Actually, there is, in a sense, to the extent that certain times are much, much better for trading in than others and there are used sales like B2G1F. Of course, your average employee isn’t going to help you with that. But the good ones can help you get a whole lot more value on trades, which is good for both store and customer. But it takes some patience and thought. I used to love having regulars come in and help them get way, way more credit than they expected. That wasn’t something that was possible every day, but when you have people that are regulars and you get them gobtons of credit on trades, they tend to listen next time there’s an opportunity like that.
When I was working back in the 90’s I’d go to Electronics Boutique practically once a week. I’d look at anything new that had come in, talk with the employees, and one store manager was especially awesome. I knew his kids, his health issues, wife all from those visits. It was wonderful. Then as the 90’s wore on things changed… drastically. The once fun, happy, lively manager was increasingly stressed to demands of upper management. After a lot of years, he was moved to a different, smaller, much crappier store that was much more difficult for him to manage with his family due to distance. I even called them to tell them what a superior manager he was and how much I was spending on games there (a lot). I never heard a more, “I don’t give a shit” attitude from a regional suit and I guaranteed neither store would make it more than 2 more years - and they didn’t.
What I hated and don’t understand is why for years Gamestop claimed they HAD to pull disks for EVERY SINGLE COPY of a new game. Why didn’t they just put an empty copy on the shelf and new shrink wrapped in the back? Because I’ll tell you what. Lord knows what kinds of stuff is collected on them as they were often nasty beyond belief. The few times I did buy like this, I’d have to take it home and disinfect it like it was carrying Ebola. I mean - if employee theft was so bad they were hemorrhaging insane amounts of money… why not pay your employees more so they don’t feel the need to steal the games they’d like to play?
I’ve been told the biggest losses at Wal-Mart and Meijers is from employee theft which can (supposedly) cost them 10% of total sales. My cousin runs the corporate HQ theft/loss department. So here’s an idea? Pay your people so they can live on their pay and I’m sure employee theft would plummet. After all, I’d have to bet 99.7% of people would much rather pay for goods than feel the need to steal them. Can you not take that 10% of losses and apply it to pay so people can buy your stuff instead of stealing it? At any rate I stopped going/shopping at EBGames and Gamestop for the aforementioned reasons.
No idea why they’d gut every game. That’s a LOT of manpower to do that. There were rare occasions where we did that for special holiday promos or that sort of thing.
Just as every store is only as good as its employees, every district is only as good as their DM. If their DM or regional blew you off…wow that’s bonkers. People, in any facet of life, don’t frequently go out of their way to say nice things about someone that helped them. That’s a shame.
Shrink (theft) is a big deal. Stores get audited regularly. Typically, if there’s a theft problem it’s a sign of larger issues (or that the manager is stealing themselves). If a Gamestop store had 10% shrink that store would be nuked from orbit in about 5 seconds. Hell, that’d probably have been true for 1% when I was there.
It was even stupider having to wait for an employee to open a new shrink-wrapped game on release day so he could sell it to me. It was always “corporate is making us do this” In another store I’d see an employee sitting on the floor with a huge stack of games, opening - taking disks out - tossing them on pile, etc. Wasn’t exactly a mystery how some new games got sold pre-scratched. But then again, remember those DVD scratch removers employees were pushed to sell?
It seems obvious to me the point of opening all disks was to depcreciate the relative value of new and increase the value of used. If everything is already opened, why not get that used one there for 10$ cheaper?
Bull shit trickles down
Does anyone remember Online Pass -yes, yes I do-
Fuck the publishers
Fuck the retail store.
The guy is certainly entertaining.
I can’t help but feel sorry for the employees though. This sounds like a terrible environment. And I don’t know how you can give a finger to publishers and sellers and still hope games sell…
My solution has mostly been, buy Amazon or any other online presence that I can (for mostly 3DS at the moment), and avoid any DRM heavy titles.
Yeah, I really first tuned in to Jim Sterling when he had that big copyright-infringement battle on youtube play out on his channel. (TLDR: certain companies will always claim copyright monetization on his videos when he plays clips from game trailers, and so he always includes other copyrighted works to turn the monetization into gridlock, so nobody gets paid, he has patreon for that)
I gave up buying anything there (a store manager became a good friend starting at the Dreamcast release) when I couldn’t get at anything at release without having preordered it.
I went in there a few weeks ago to reserve Has Been Heroes as it is being published by GameStop and I am leaning physical for Nintendo software. The clerk could not find my name in their system. Usually when they would look me up, the clerk would comment about how many things I had purchased. However, while reserving the game, I realized that “usually” was several years ago now and that I had not bought anything at GameStop (or physical) in…forever. So. Yeah, I think shopping habits are changing and not for the better as far as GameStop goes.
In my younger days I remember regularly checking in at the Electronics Boutique err EBGames at the Westside Pavilion mall. It got depressing as the years went on and the PC section shrank and shrank. Then Gamestop bought EB. I guess there are still EBGameses out in the world somewhere? Anyway I don’t see them anymore. I don’t think I’ve ever bought a game at a Gamestop.
We are certainly getting closer and closer to all digital, it seems. I think the company’s days under their current model are numbered. It will be interesting to see how they try to adapt.
Around here (and I assume this would be a company-wide strategy change) they tried branching out into electronics – phones, tablets and whatnot – for a hot minute and quickly realized that was a dumb market to get into for used equipment. Recently they’ve been pushing more into general gaming merchandise and apparel with the stores also having some sort of deal with Cricket Wireless. The last one is weird because they all answer the phone as “Gamestop Cricket Wireless” but I’ve never noticed a mobile phone section.
Oh, and their disgusting credit card that they push on kids who don’t know any better at nearly 28% interest. Gamestop won’t be missed.
