Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by Duran

So why buy from them? How much abuse do you take before you walk out?

Originally Posted by 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

Originally Posted by Suprmallet

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.

Originally Posted by darkside

The B2G1F sales and the current sale they had was enough to get me to put up with them, but they have pretty much lost my business for regular buying. I would also mention that they weren't always this bad. It has only been the last couple of months that they became unbearable in their cross selling.

As far as the lawsuit, I have heard nothing about it but you can bet there will be at least a settlement on it.

Originally Posted by darkside

The B2G1F sales and the current sale they had was enough to get me to put up with them, but they have pretty much lost my business for regular buying. I would also mention that they weren't always this bad. It has only been the last couple of months that they became unbearable in their cross selling.

As far as the lawsuit, I have heard nothing about it but you can bet there will be at least a settlement on it.

Originally Posted by Goldberg74

btw darkside, what's the current sale?

Originally Posted by jonw9

Does it serve a purpose other than allowing an employee to take it home for the night?

Originally Posted by 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.

Originally Posted by jonw9

Maybe it has been answered before but,

why open the new games just to put the game in a sleeve and keep the case behind the counter anyways? Does it serve a purpose other than allowing an employee to take it home for the night?

Originally Posted by jonw9

why open the new games just to put the game in a sleeve and keep the case behind the counter anyways? Does it serve a purpose other than allowing an employee to take it home for the night?