Supermallet

Well, after two and a half years of dedicated service, I'm moving on from Gamestop. I have been offered and have accepted an excellent management position at The Bridge Cinema in Los Angeles. I know that for a while, I was one of the few people here who tried to defend or at least justify some of the company practices that were widely derided by members here and others elsewhere. But recently things had gotten too out of hand. It became increasingly clear that the people who ran Gamestop (which, before the merge with EB I agree was one of if not the worst specialty game store out there) have stopped listening to the people who ran EB (which I feel was a much more sympathetic company that did its best to attend to customer needs within the limits of its business model). In fact, one of the major EB execs, who had been with the company for 18 years, has recently announced his decision to leave.

This switch from "merged mentality" as I like to call it (when the people up top did their best to take into account the needs of employees from both companies as well as the customers) back into the old "Gamestop mentality" has left many people cold. While I won't go into specifics, as they revolve around day to day operations that would bore most of you, the long story short is that the higher ups stopped listening to the people who run the stores, and that's never a good thing, because by their very nature the executives are detached from the daily operations of any given store. You have seen and many of you have commented on several new Gamestop policies that you feel inconvenience you as a consumer, and those are small potatoes compared to the stuff being hoisted upon the employees.

The worst part about it from my perspective is seeing the culture change from EB by itself, to EB with Gamestop, back to Gamestop with EB under its heel. I genuinely liked EB Games as both a consumer and an employee, and to see it become so impersonal and restrictive upsets me. I think that the company is going to hit a rough patch very soon, and I don't want to be there when it happens.

I think that I've been pretty candid about Gamestop on the past, even when I wasn't meant to be, but now, all bets are off. Anything you want to know, ask and I will answer to the best of my ability. Don't hold back and I won't, either. Even if you don't have any questions, I thought you guys might want to know that I won't be trying to defend Gamestop anymore. They deserve all the bad press they're going to get.

DodgingCars

Good luck. I like The Bridge. Did you work at that EB Games there? I used to work for Vivendi.

Josh H

Good luck in your new job, and congrats for getting out of Gamestop!

darkside

I have really noticed a difference. The guys at EB Games would do some cross selling, but they were cool about it and once they knew you they would leave you alone.

That has changed under the GameStop banner. I was there today to check out the new sale and was badgered non stop. They literally would not stop trying to cross sell me on preorders. I was trying to look through the sale area and the guy never would shut up. I told him twice I had no interest in preordering anything right now politely, but that did not stop him from trying. When I finally went to check out he shoved some preorder book in my face to look through. I finally had to ask him what the fuck was the matter with him. Was it just his hearing or was he retarded. I ended up being a dick, but my patience has limits.

Outside of major sales I will be avoiding them as much as possible. It seems that 90% of the employees I knew are now gone and the ones they have replaced them with are nothing but cross selling robots.

Supermallet

Yeah, it's the EB right next to The Bridge. That's how I found out about the job at The Bridge in the first place.

Josh H

I had a similar experience in November, and haven't been back since. Last purchase was my Wii.

Just not worth the hassle of listening to all that crap, getting ran over by all the little kids parents drop off at the store etc. etc.

shumway

Congrats on the new job. No more feeling obligated to defend when people start bitching. I'm sure you're really looking forward to that part. What will you miss? I'm guessing swag and/or free games from developers.

Supermallet

The swag was nice. Never got too many games from developers. I should stock up before my last day.

tanman

Actually I would like to know what practices do you feel were the most despicable.

I find the utter horrible smell in most of the stores the worst. Why does it always smell like a locker room in there?

Supermallet

You mean you've been pondering joining Gamestop, or you've been pondering how their attitudes have contributed to the decline of the company?

Sonny Corinthos

How much do new store managers at Gamestop make a year?

Supermallet

Since you guys want to know, there have been several recent changes that made me feel the executives have stopped listening to us. The first was the introduction of a scheduling program known as Kronos. The program was meant to make scheduling more efficient and save money for the company, while also giving stores the hours they need to staff correctly. It would take each store and spit out a pre-made schedule for them each week. To put it simply, these schedules were beyond awful. They'd have the first employee of the day coming in after the store was meant to open. They'd have the last employee leave several hours after closing time. They'd schedule only one person to work for an entire day, or two people to work the exact same shifts, leaving no one to close. And so on. Then came the edict that we had to follow these schedules to the letter. Any problems that made the schedule break labor laws would be changed, as well as problems like the opener coming in after opening. But that was it. And they've been checking for schedule compliance. The regional manager himself has come to stores just to see if their schedules are set to the original Kronos. It's a waste of time and money, and puts employees in awkward situations. A sole example would be to have someone close by themselves. I think this is a security issue and a loss prevention issue, as what is to stop them from stealing if they're all alone at closing time?

The next problem became the intense focus on reservations and Game Informer subscriptions. These have been a focus of the company since the merge, but it's now becoming outrageous. Managers are getting fired if they can't make weekly quotas, regardless of how well the store is doing in other areas. This has led to a major increase in reservation and subscription fraud, which helps no one and can sometimes hurt customers (if, for example, an employee cancels a reservation with a lot of money on it and splits it into several smaller reservations under another name). Stores with low numbers are required to call their performance numbers into their district managers every hour of every day, severely restricting our ability to actually do business or care about anything outside of numbers, which leads to more badgering of customers.

The final thing is that the company no longer cares about anything that cannot be quantified. They do customer service surveys where the only answer that they actually record is "Would you recommend Gamestop to your friends?" They rank the managers on practically everything you can think of, and if your ranking dips in a single area, they tell you to work on nothing but that area. When you do that, another area is bound to drop, so it's a never-ending cycle of pointlessness. And everything seems to be of the same high priority. Just today we got an email from our regional manager saying our subscription numbers were so low that we shouldn't even focus on reservations, which is one of the two core focuses of our company. It's positively schizophrenic. And this is just off the top of my head.

Supermallet

Depends on several factors. How much managerial experience you've had, whether you're an outside hire or an inside promotion, etc. I would say you'd likely get $13-$15 per hour on average in California, with 4 hours of overtime every week. Outside of California I don't know, because managers outside of California are salaried. I got more than that when I moved up to manager, but I was an internal promotion with several excellent recommendations by various supervisors, and also moving to Los Angeles, where living expenses are higher. There's never exactly a standard rate for all managers, just like there isn't a standard rate for managerial positions at any company. Gamestop is one of the lower paying large retail companies for managers, though. The yearly raises are also nothing to shout about, and bonuses technically exist, but are awarded based on specific performance requirements that a lot of stores don't hit.

Tommy Ceez

Sorry dude, but your gonna quit every job you have for the rst of your life if those things are dealbreakers.


BTW...they use Kronos in thousands of places

Supermallet

It's less about the specifics and more about the attitude behind them. Moreso, it's about seeing a company going from a place that cared about employees and customers, to a company that cares about nothing but numbers. If I went in to a company knowing they cared nothing about employees, then I couldn't very well complain about it, could I? But the company I joined is not the same as the company I'm leaving.


Yeah, Kronos is fine when it's a tool to help business. But when the company clearly doesn't know how to implement it correctly and creates more work, more headaches, and less efficient stores because of that, then it's a problem.

Tracer Bullet

You work for the MTA... you should know.

matrixrok9

Nah actually he defended Gamestop before and was pretty loyal to them. I'm glad he quit his job and got another one. More power to him.

Thousands use Kronos to its full effect. If it's not properly used, what's the point of it?

Giantrobo

Best of luck Suprmallet.

I think understaffing in Retail stores is just the nature of the beast. Their Business models and staffing programs tell them they're losing money if they staff a certain way so the program spits our understaffed schedules. Nevermind the fact the less staff means less help when things get busy, less staff to keep an eye on stealing, and the obvious security issues.

I can remember working Loss Provention at Best Buy and being the only LP guy there on certain days. Oh yeah, I wanna get stabbed keeping a group of guys from stealing Rap CD's. I'm glad I'm out of there.

Supermallet

It wasn't even necessarily under staffing. My store got the same amount of hours, we were just being told to use them in really bizarre and inefficient ways.

Draven

Just as mall CD stores have mostly gone by the wayside, the mall-based videogame store is soon to follow. There used to be no less than 4 game stores at the Mall of America, now there is only 1. I'm looking forward to the day when they close their doors for good. Good for you for sticking out, but better for you that you are moving on.

Josh H

Maybe every retail job. There's lots of jobs where you don't have to put up with that kind of shit.

One of the main reasons I'm getting a Ph D...so I can pretty much be my own boss, work my own schedule (outside of class times) etc.

MovieExchange

Trust me, you have no idea what you're talking about. I don't work at Game Stop / EB, but over the years I've become friends with many managers and employees at the locations in my area and I hear about all the bullshit that goes on in that company. I can tell you that Suprmallet has just scratched the surface about how screwed-up and ass-backwards this company is. He hasn't even gotten to the inventory issues, where if your inventory comes up bad 2 times in a row the entire goddamn management staff is fired. It doesn't matter if they're the best management team in the district, it doesn't matter if they're not getting any support from Game Stop, it doesn't matter if Game Stop makes them lay the store out so that it's simple for thieves to steal, it doesn't matter if the fucked-up Kronos system only has one employee working which makes it easy for one person to distract the employee while a friend does the stealing... they're fired.

And it's a vicious circle on the hours / loss prevention front. A store with low sales gets lower hours to distribute, meaning only one employee on duty a lot of the time. One employee on duty means it's easier for a pair of thieves to distract the guy and steal. Since the store has low sales to begin with, they're not accorded a large margin of error on their inventory, so the thefts end up putting the store on impact. Corporate points to their little magnetic peg locker devices as a way of stopping theft... what bullshit. Within a week of them being installled at the stores around here the thieves were bringing in their own magnet to pop them off or just taking a knife and cutting the item off the peg to steal it.

Wazootyman

To be fair, when there were 4 stores there, they were all under a different name, and it was before any of them had merged. Also, I thought last time I was there (late December) there were two Gamestops still around.

Josh H

Gamestores will go away when /if future generations go to downloaded games.

No used games=no profits for them. Otherwise they make so much money of sucker trading in games for shit that they turn around and sell for huge profits that they can stay in business indefinitely.

darkside

Lets not forget the improper use of Kronos caused the death of a GameStop employee here in San Antonio. They dealt with it simply by closing the store and forcing the remaining employees to either transfer or be laid off. Nice company.