GameStop employees report extreme pressure from ‘desperate’ bosses
In multiple interviews with Polygon, store managers and staff speak of plummeting morale
www.polygon.com
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Polygon: GameStop employees report extreme pressure from ‘desperate’ bosses
- Thread starter Saucycarpdog
- Start date
www.polygon.com
Part of why people dislike going to GameStop is being asked a billion questions when all they want to do is buy a game, and they want to make that worse?
The phone trade thing does sound obnoxious, but I'm not really sure I have a better solution to offer. It does seem like a dying business model.
I just need them to last through May so I can pick up my TLoU CE
I used to be a GS employee years ago, they were heavy on pushing sales back then too. Can't imagine how it is now.
I used to be a GS employee years ago, they were heavy on pushing sales back then too. Can't imagine how it is now.
The transition to full on pawn shop was inevitable, and in their desperation, it looks like we're here.
It's a shame. They were a good place. I'd assume this falls same for EB in Canada
I remember years back (I was an ASM) and my District Manager demanded to know why our visitor count died down a lot (we had only 2 people walk in that entire day) and she demanded that we start advertising by us holding signs in front of other company store fronts inside the mall we were located at. my SM & I never did it, as that was an area we wanted no part in due to the legal grey area (our DM insisted it was perfectly legal). I left that job after two years of work shortly after and never looked back.
My friends at the store I used to work at have to keep a HAND WRITTEN LOG of every customer they told to bring in tech trades. It's insane. My old DM is a fucking psycho so this checks out.
I usually take Gamestop internet news with a grain of salt due to the agendas people have against them and the disregard some posters have for people losing their jobs but this is very real and sad. They're gonna lose a lot of employees due to this because the stress is just not worth it and the pay most definitely isn't either.
I'm glad I quit in 2013 when the Xbox One "no used games" thing happened. Yeah, they eventually reversed it, but I knew that with their reaction to that it would only get worse. 8 years was enough of my life wasted in that cesspit. (My store was good but corporate and my DM were awful. Even most of the customers weren't that bad. But Corporate and overzealous leadership is what will sink this ship for good.)
I usually take Gamestop internet news with a grain of salt due to the agendas people have against them and the disregard some posters have for people losing their jobs but this is very real and sad. They're gonna lose a lot of employees due to this because the stress is just not worth it and the pay most definitely isn't either.
I'm glad I quit in 2013 when the Xbox One "no used games" thing happened. Yeah, they eventually reversed it, but I knew that with their reaction to that it would only get worse. 8 years was enough of my life wasted in that cesspit. (My store was good but corporate and my DM were awful. Even most of the customers weren't that bad. But Corporate and overzealous leadership is what will sink this ship for good.)
I worked at a GameStop in high school. Extreme pressure from desperate bosses is something common at the store level.
Straight up, I understand why they do it and it's not something either of us want as part of a transaction but it's the sole reason I stopped shopping in store
I usually visit my closest GameStop and the only difference I see is 1 employee working instead of 2. They act pretty much the same as usual. Just out of pity I usually try and buy something cheap but these damn games are still so expensive, even the one's release at the start of the gen o_O
Yeah, before a local game store got bought by another one, you couldn't set on foot in there before someone shoved a preorder list in your face. I actively avoided going in there for that same reason.
Fuck just let me buy games without being harassed. Why I stopped going to gamestop. Bunch of clueless execs with overpriced MBAs running shit. I bet they spend all day on their phones browsing linkedin without doing any actual work while the company sinks.
I feel sorry for all of the employees, but GameStop won't be around much longer in their current direction, and I don't think it is fixable at this point.
I just don't ever enjoy going in there.
It just feels so tacky and the whole thing is an eye sore.
If I'm ever going to buy a disc I feel that it'd be a better experience to walk through a Target or Best Buy.
It just feels so tacky and the whole thing is an eye sore.
If I'm ever going to buy a disc I feel that it'd be a better experience to walk through a Target or Best Buy.
I just wish management didn't push all this shit on the other employees. It's not their responsibility to save a sinking ship.
I have to wonder if they would still be in a mad scramble downward if instead of doubling down on shitty sales tactics that work through heavy handed pressure, they instead focused on offering quality products and hard to find physical copies of games.
Selling games that have been opened and played as new, offering chump change for valuable and relevant games, and extreme pressure to preorder new games or buy used copies when I want to buy new is why I stop going there.
It also doesn't help that they treat their products like trash. Throwing away cases, and artwork and so on. Those things are the reason I value physical purchases, if I didn't give a damn I would just buy digital all the time.
I'm probably in the minority though. Maybe people wouldn't care if they improved in the ways I think would help. Maybe physical is just dying and Gamestop isn't to blame for their own failings.
Selling games that have been opened and played as new, offering chump change for valuable and relevant games, and extreme pressure to preorder new games or buy used copies when I want to buy new is why I stop going there.
It also doesn't help that they treat their products like trash. Throwing away cases, and artwork and so on. Those things are the reason I value physical purchases, if I didn't give a damn I would just buy digital all the time.
I'm probably in the minority though. Maybe people wouldn't care if they improved in the ways I think would help. Maybe physical is just dying and Gamestop isn't to blame for their own failings.
A pawn shop + a Funko Pop emporium. I went to a GameStop for the first time in years last month to just sell some old games. I was amazed at how much floor space was now dedicated to not video games. It's just littered with ThinkGeek merch, Fortnite action figures and MOUNTAINS of Funkos. At one point the phone rang and the clerk behind the counter answered the with the line "Thank you for calling GameStop, where we'll buy your used phones and tablets, how can I help you?"
I just felt bad.
This. One of the reasons I've gone mostly digital is because I got so sick of playing twenty questions with the cashiers every time I wanted to buy something. I know it's not their fault, but damn was it an annoying process.
Thanks to games like Fortnight Lan centers have made a resurgence. Too bad Gamestop didn't hop on that train. It would have been great for them to provide a place for people to play games together while providing the games and systems for blocks of time. My local Lan center frequently holds Console, Pc, and Arcade fighting game tournaments. All gamestop has to do it integrate selling used games into that model and bam, they are in business.
I can see a goal of giving quotes to 50 people in a week, which seems high, but possible. But how many people are even *able* to at the drop of a hat trade their phone in? Is a single person going to say "wow, that seems good" and stand their, wipe their phone, pull out the sim card, and go without a cellphone until they buy another one?
And they want 5 people per week to sell you their phone?
Games retail spaces are dying in the same way that book retail spaces did, i.e., the big corporate companies are going away and local stores and mom 'n pops will step in and do robust business.
I worked there for 3 years in the early 00s it was the same then. District managers constantly coming in to pressure you to get sales.
A 10% conversion rate on asking people to hand over their phones is laughable.
This is what happens when you have executives who only care about margins and don't care about the customer experience. GameStop is doomed if these are the people in charge.
I'm in Canada where it's still EB Games, but the one by me here in Vancouver is pretty solid. More Funko Pops and merch than I'd like to see, but the trade deals are solid and employees aren't too pushy. I'm not even sure we do tech trades here. if we do, they've never mentioned it to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same commentary could be made about GAME in the UK. I walked into a store the other day for the first time in a long while and it really does feel like a terminal situation in there. Highest prices for physical games available anywhere and walls of Funko Pop figures... I can't see that being a path for a retailer to get out of trouble.
Yeah this is nuts. No one is ever just pawning off their phone for cash without knowing what they're replacing it with. And definitely not at a GameStop of all places.
There's no need for a video game store anymore with the advent of digital.
Moving into physical games is actually the correct course of action, they just need to dig in way deeper. Make it a tabletop game chain.
It's dead in my country Sweden. They went out with an E-mail that all stores are closing during the course of 2020.
Duh ?!
The gamestop division in France, Micromania, oftenly quoted as "Escromania" (fraud), never cares about games. I go to some of them as a kid, mainly for trading, and, oh boy, it was fraud.
I've set foot in a GameStop once in the last 6 years. I traded in my PS4 with a busted controller on a deal for a Pro and it was a steal. That's literally the only time I've been in one.
There stock surges dramatically after every new console generation but I don't think they are going to make it through the entire generation. At this rate I see them surging due to new consoles coming out this year but with games being more and more digitally purchased and cloud streaming there really isn't going to be a use for GameStop in the near future. Especially since the culture of the company is so bad I don't see them being able to adapt even if they wanted to.
Went to the Gamestop closest to my work the other day to get Baldur's Gate and Torment bundles because they have both for $19.99 and I walked in at right about 5:15pm and no one was in there and the guy at the desk just started bombarding me with questions and talking about not having anyone come in for hours. I don't go very often but it used to always be busy as hell in that store.
There was always pressure from middle management to get things up. The thing that's changed now is that there's enough evidence that this business model is about to put the company out of business, not just some attempt to push numbers up aggressively for the sake of making more money. I felt when I worked there, they would praise us for achieving out sales goals and immediately start encouraging us to do even better. Upper management never could just count a win when I worked there, but at least at the store level, we'd brush off that shit and just congratulate the staff for hitting goals.