Overworked GameStop Employees Walk Out, Tell Gamers To Shop Elsewhere
GameStop faces employee walkouts even as meme stock soars
kotaku.com
Kotaku: Overworked GameStop employees walk out, tell gamers to shop elsewhere
- Thread starter Rosebud
- Start date
kotaku.com
When I worked at GameStop, it was policy at my store to go into payroll before everything was submitted on Saturday night and delete any overtime hours anyone had accrued. There were days when I went to work on a busy, understaffed Saturday, and then went home and knew I would have fewer hours worked that week at the end of the day.
Fuck GameStop.
Fuck GameStop.
This is HYPER against the law. Not that that stops them - but a simple anonymous complaint to your state or city's labor department would have fixed that quickly. They actually do tend to take matters this extremely seriously. Just FYI for the future.
A lot of people will make this about the company overall but it sounds like the problem here is a really shitty district manager who likely won't be around for much longer after this publicity.
Jesus, this sucks but is no surprise. It's also bizarre just seeing the immense drop in business in the past several years. My local store used to be so busy and now it's a ghost town every time I go in.
I hope those people get picked up at much better positions.
EDIT:
Holy shit, $17/hour as store manager? Jesus I worked that starting out as a lab technician and started at $20 as a paralegal in a small ass town. That's horrible.
Apparently this guy was responsible for four walk outs overall; I think his stability in his position still says a lot about his bosses who kept him around.
I hope those people get picked up at much better positions.
EDIT:
Holy shit, $17/hour as store manager? Jesus I worked that starting out as a lab technician and started at $20 as a paralegal in a small ass town. That's horrible.
Apparently this guy was responsible for four walk outs overall; I think his stability in his position still says a lot about his bosses who kept him around.
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I worked at Gamestop for EIGHT years! Once I finally started finishing up my degree, I got an internship at a food company and immediately made more money than I ever had at Gamestop. Fuck 'em.
Oh, I know. Wage theft is the most common form of theft.
I was younger and dumb and felt like I needed that job.
I remember one day when the assistant manager, about to quit and sobbing, begged me to promise her I would never work for free. I promised her, and then I did anyway.
Nearly all district managers who work retail are notoriously terrible to work with and often far too demanding of their subordinates. Their employment depends on the success of the stores they oversee so they have a very personal stake in it. It is not unheard of for DMs to just churn through employees and management as long as it means his stores stay in the black.
I worked for GS 10 or so years ago and it was awful. I loved interacting with customers and talking games with people, but upper/corporate management was awful. We had strict numbers we HAD to hit. If you had a great week or month, no one cared, and it was always "we need you to do better". There was no winning. You had sub numbers, pre-orders, warranties, etc. I worked in a smaller area where people still bought used PS2 games in mass so hitting number goals was hard. I hated it. There was 0 recognition for doing good work (aside from a couple good store managers I had but their hands were tied most of the time).
As a former Gamestop assistant manager for years, nice. Some district managers really, really sucked. The regional manager was even worse, anytime he'd come by. Absolutely no knowledge of how to run the store and yet insisted on everything changing to meet his specifications. Awful experience anytime they came by.
Proud of this store and the team that walked out.
Proud of this store and the team that walked out.
Can attest to this. Was assistant manager at a store in Phoenix where on a phone call our DM chewed us out for not leading the area in Fifa preorders and that it should be "fucking simple to accomplish" because our location is full of Mexicans. I quit about 3 weeks later when I found a new job and the manager quit shortly after.
It is a company thing. Minimum wage for everyone but the store leader. No hours for any store. Can't train new hires, but expect them to run the store like they've worked there for years. I left there two years ago, not a single Store Leader from my district, at the time, is still working there. No walkouts here, but turnover is insanely high, and the company won't fix it. They haven't given raises to store level employees since 2018.
I remember my manager arguing with me that I didn't get over time working Midnight Launches, because 8 hours is on one day, and the next 2-4 hours after midnight count as another day. Man, fuck that company. I did enjoy the shit out of it in High School when I had my whole friend group hired, but as we grew older and wiser that place was shit.
Gamestop would have gone into bankruptcy and shut down this year if it wasn't for the insane meme stock stuff which let them raise ~$1.5b which should cover them for years. They still have no real viable strategy to stay in business long term though. The dumb quick-get-rich-scheme right now is "we'll do NFTs" but they are entering a market that is essentially wiped out.
They still have over 4000 stores in the USA which is kinda nuts. I think my town still has something like 20 gamestops around, although they did shut down a few that were literally 1 mile apart from each other. Their locations are generally terrible too and ignore the growth many suburbs have experienced in the past decade, so you get clusters of gamestops in areas that made sense 20 years ago but don't anymore.
They still have over 4000 stores in the USA which is kinda nuts. I think my town still has something like 20 gamestops around, although they did shut down a few that were literally 1 mile apart from each other. Their locations are generally terrible too and ignore the growth many suburbs have experienced in the past decade, so you get clusters of gamestops in areas that made sense 20 years ago but don't anymore.
I had to do the same thing Saturday nights when I was an ASM. Also, when I opened I usually was taking my breaks 6 or so hours into my shift since the manager would saunter in at least two hours late every day. Oh, and we didn't get time and a half on Sundays since we were classified as a "Small Business".
To echo what you said: Fuck GameStop. With a sideways schoolbus.
That's every sales environment TBF.
The difference here is that the targets will be unrealistic and impossible to hit, because nobody goes to shops to buy games anymore.
Publicity is the key difference. People know what this store is and thus what DM is responsible. I would be surprised if he's still there by the end of the day, no matter who higher up likes him. Nobody survives making the company look this bad.
You're both preaching to the choir, trust me. But the wrong thing to do is to take a story like this and use it to craft a narrative more than what it is. Every retail DM cares more about profits than the employees. Nobody cares about us. It's a shitty job. But there are plenty who are smart enough to realize that pushing your people to their breaking point isn't the best way to recover losses.
This comment hits home for me. I lost my job two weeks ago, pulled into the office a few hours prior to store open (I was the Store Manager) and was unceremoniously dismissed. In the 2 years I was in role, seven other stores in our district had turned over their SLs, so it didn't come as a complete surprise, it was something that was always in the back of my mind on a daily basis.
Simple fact is, regardless of how good you are at your job, in retail, if the DM sucks, you're in trouble.
At least in my state, overtime doesn't care how many hours you work on a specific day. So you're both wrong I think. It only matters if you work more than 40 hours. If I'm wrong, let me know!
Good for every last one of them and I hope they all find better, more fulfilling jobs in the near future. Fuck GameStop upper management, seriously.
They've been unprofitable every quarter since 2019 and with stuff like the recent revelation that 80% of PS4 sales is now digital I don't see how they pull themselves out of the downtrend. They're surviving because of meme-stock shenanigans and taking advantage of it, but that's not sustainable especially if a recession happens. I hope their rank-and-file employees find better opportunities elsewhere.
I mean maybe pay entry level associates $15 min, and the store manager $25-30 per hour and they'd not have so many walkouts. The whole org could mandate better pay
Damn, referring costumers to other videogame retailers is such a baller move.
Fuck gamestop, they are and have always been trash both for employees and consumers.
Fuck gamestop, they are and have always been trash both for employees and consumers.
i believe that didn't actually mean ps4 game sales were 80/20, it included all micro transactions and dlc. For games only, I think it was like 60/40 or 65/35.
Good for them. Fuck GameStop.
Still salty that I went into one for the first time in five years, found a copy of the SMTV steelbook, they tried handing me a mock, sharpie written case instead of the one I brought up to them, and then got upset when I passed on buying it.
Still salty that I went into one for the first time in five years, found a copy of the SMTV steelbook, they tried handing me a mock, sharpie written case instead of the one I brought up to them, and then got upset when I passed on buying it.
The problem is capitalism as a whole. The entire point is to maximize profits for those at the top at the expense of everything else while chasing this impossible fantasy of infinite growth. It's basically a giant pyramid scheme.
Oh, for sure! That's why I will never work in sales again. It was just doubly frustrating because of the area we were in. No one pre-ordered, a lot of customers were lower(ish) class who would never pre-order or never spend enough for them to justify a sub. You'd work your ass off to get decent numbers and no one would ever notice. Plus, they never gave stores hours so, unless you were part of management, you'd be lucky to get 10 hours a week. I also constantly worked alone.
I'm pretty sure this is going to happen at a local one nearby as chill as the environment is I swear the manager there is always trying to push people into buying the dang memberships and stuff even if they're just going in for a Funko pop or things like that...
I avoid that store whenever he's there because he absolutely tried to sign me up for two additional years for my stupid pro membership when I was like 2 months into the year -_- like, I notice this extra $30 charge fool...
I avoid that store whenever he's there because he absolutely tried to sign me up for two additional years for my stupid pro membership when I was like 2 months into the year -_- like, I notice this extra $30 charge fool...
I think everywhere would not care about what date, what matters is the consecutive hours you work.
At my local Gamestop, most of the time there would only be one person behind the counter and the phone would ring every few seconds while they're trying to help customers in the store at the same time. All the while trying to sell customers on Power Up Rewards membership, I see it as a very stressful job.
They get a lot of rude people showing up too.
They get a lot of rude people showing up too.
Sure but they won't. And maybe it's just me but I've never worked a retail job that starts floor workers at more than minimum wage.
No corporation anywhere is going to give you more than they think they can get away with. The solution is to force them to by raising the minimum wage everywhere. Of course then they'll just cut hours more and force people to work alone for even longer to compensate. The whole system is broken.
But now we're talking about a different issue, you know?
Meanwhile, a more immediate thing to do is to talk about better systems to hold bad managers responsible. Just going "lol gamestop sucks" doesn't solve either problem though, you know?
