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5 Reasons GameStop Employees Secretly Hate You

5 Reasons GameStop Employees Secretly Hate You

The holidays are upon us, which means that a lot of gamers will be venturing out to GameStop for their shopping needs. With an onslaught of new game releases, gamers might even find themselves in line for midnight launches. Unfortunately, it sometimes feels as though there’s an adversarial relationship between the GameStop employees and the customer base. But if the person ringing you out seems somehow dead inside, it is a good guess that it just might be your fault (or someone you know). Here are five reasons that your Gamestop employee might seem a little grumpy or annoying (and may wish you dead).

Power Up Rewards

Power Up Rewards

Word is that GameStop doesn’t push this subscription quite as heavily as it did a few years ago, but it doesn’t change the fact that selling Game Informer and a discount card are a core part of an employees non-commission sales job. Most starry-eyed employees just want to be there to help you locate the games you want and make sure that your visit is as enjoyable as possible, but they are also judged based on how many of those damned things they can sell.

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When I worked there, people would routinely get in trouble for not meeting goals. Often, these goals were ambitious, and meeting them just seemed to mean that the district manager would increase the expectations put upon you. That means that a customer telling the employee “no,” has a negative effect on the employee. Nobody wants to push these cards and we know when the card isn’t even useful for certain types of customers. But still, a long spiel is required and employees probably hate doing it.

Pre-Orders

Pre-Orders

This is just another metric that employees had to meet. As soon as word of a new game is on the horizon, an email might come through to the stores telling customers to push the pre-order. Yes, they’re all refundable, but Gamestop wants that money in their hands as soon as they can. It is the employees’ job to get that money, even if they disagree with pre-order culture.

It was sometimes incentivized with a *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* type of communication for employees to “search” for a copy of the game and act like the customer was lucky to get a copy if they didn’t pre-order. This is rarely true. Also, some districts will sell your game regardless of whether or not you had a pre-order on it. It does seem that employees have become less pushy, though, so maybe the culture is changing.

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Midnight Launches

Midnight Launches

Midnight launches require that a manager be present. During holidays, that same manager might be opening the next day. A lot of stores give very few hours, so there are times when a manager might have to operate the store by themselves for these events too. And a lot of them do their best to make sure that the event is safe and enjoyable for the customers.

Salaried managers don’t see any benefits to being there, but sometimes it’s their responsibility, even if the pay is rarely all that good. Again, most employees really like their customers but retail can be exhausting, and sometimes it feels that the company doesn’t have your back, in terms of providing hours for coverage

Stolen Games

Stolen Games

Gamestop takes in used games to stock their shelves. When games are stolen and then traded in, the police might show up and confiscate the goods. That’s no fun and just takes time out of everyone’s day.

What’s more, that the employees might know when they are taking in stolen goods, but unless someone explicitly says something, then they aren’t allowed to refuse the trade. It doesn’t matter how suspicious it is that someone is trading in a bunch of games that were released that day, some of which have box cutter marks on it almost as if a Walmart employee hastily cut into a shipment.

Checking Their Nerd Cred

Checking Their Nerd Cred

GameStop employees often know a decent amount about games, but they don’t know everything about every game. It isn’t their job to. They do their best, though. There are times when a customer (who also might have had his job application rejected) will challenge the employees nerd cred at every turn. It’s not a polite thing to do.

Female employees seem to get a lot of this. Hell, female employees have a lot that they have to put up with at GameStop, but that’s a different story altogether.

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