Has Gamestop ever 'cleaned house'(got rid of all their employees) at a store near you

IAmTheCheapestGamer

IAmTheCheapestGamer

Banned
I ask because that's exactly what happened to the one store I used to grab stuff from on occasion. All of the guys working there either 'quit at the same time to go on to other ventures'(as I was told) or were fired for being lackadaisical in their 'duties'.

I guess the whole store was in disarray when they all left, as the one pair of people who work at another store were brought in to clean up the racks and straighten up. And, I was told that they were supposed to have shipped out all PS1 games(since they weren't selling there), so that's another reason they got fired or left I guess.

Anyone ever have this happen at their local store, where ALL the employees just leave the company at once? Only other time this happened was after the LAST purge, they brought in a bunch of ummm(apologies to the female CAGs who may read this) 'eye candy', none of whom knew squat about games and were all gone within 2 months tops.
 
[quote name='pimpinc333']Yea that happened with my Gamestop about 2 years ago.[/quote]

Same here... walked everyone of them out at once.
 
Yup, this has happened several times at a few stores by me. I came home from school for Thanksgiving break and the people I've always known were working, but in the month I was home for Christmas break a few weeks later, NONE of the same employees were there a single time I stopped in (which was at least a few times a week), which was surprising since they were pretty regular staff.

When I came back for spring break yet another different set of employees was working, and now (on summer vacation), only ONE of the guys from spring break has been in the store in the month I've been home, and none of the original employees have been around. I've asked a few times and every time I've been told that these locations "shuffle around employees a lot" because there are "just so many Connecticut stores to cover," which seems like B.S. considering there aren't even that many stores in the area, and that I've never recognized former employees from one store when I venture into another, which I assume would happen at least once if they were just switching back and forth.

I mean, I know that different employees work different shifts, obviously, and that it could have just been timing, but on more than one occasion employees have talked about being new or about everyone else leaving, and I'm in there too often to just be missing the guys I recognize. I guess it's just standard operating procedure for Gamestop to only hire seasonal help or to clean house fairly often.
 
Actually Im the minority here and the two local stores I go to have had the same morons for about 4 years now give or take a few extra people thrown into the rotation ...
 
Not sure who all is still working at my local store, but at least 4 of the 5 regular guys from the last year or so disappeared after the holidays. Kinda killed my penny guide luck, and any interest I had in hanging around the store.
 
I know a few transferred to other locations from other stores in my area, including the one guy who is now a manager in a store about 35-40 miles from me. He n I bs'd a bit when I realized he was from one of my areas stores. I used to go to the area he's in now alot with my grandparents on 'Sunday drives' as a kid, nice area but getting WAY overpopulated now.

It's been kind of hectic, as GS has transferred managers from one store to another as well as clerks, which makes seeing familiar faces all the more difficult. And yes, I was going into the stores locally often enough to be recognized even when I'm not at one of their stores(like the one girl who works the one GS, who saw me at WallyWorld the other night n asked me what I was doing there LOL).

The ones that LAST @ GS brand stores are the ones who know their product and how to push I suppose. Kind of disheartening on some level because I like just walking round a store and if I NEED help, I'll ASK for it.
 
Yeah about a year ago, these guys that I used to see got fired because they would like put ketchup on the game manuals and disc. These were considered "shitty games". It was horrible, but I never looked back at it and saw it as a bad decision.
 
LOL So they were ADDING to the mess some of those discs already were? Lovely. And here I was always trying for CLEANER discs and perfect manuals/inserts.
 
Gamestop in my local mall fired all their employees because they did not know who was stealing what or giving things away in the store. My cousin's friend was the asistant manager. He was on vacation, when he came back to go to work, the manager at that place was like uh, you shouldn't be here, you were fired.
 
They really need to clean house at the one by me. Those guys are just awful.
 
Let's see if I remember all of the people who were pushed out over the years...

1 Pair of Married Managers (Middle Age) Who Loved Games: Too Much Time/Not Enough Pay
1 Pair of Married Managers (Middle Age) Who Loved Games: Ditto
2 Other Managers: Worse Pay, More Hours, Fewer Benefits than Other Jobs
2 Other Managers: Transfer to Other Stores, Really Cleaned Them Up
1 Other Manager: Transfer to Other Store, Fired for Having Workers Clock Him in During Off-Hours
14 Random Workers: Fed Up with Making Next-to-Nothing for High-Stress Work
6 Random Workers: Would Rather Work Food Service [That's Saying Something]
1 Random Worker: Shitcanned for Leaving Door Unlocked, Product Stolen


Problem was that almost all of the ones mentioned were excellent employees but ended up getting screwed by corporate one way or another. Almost all of them were also facing severe cuts in hours despite better Used sales, preorders, and Edge Card sales because they wanted a better bottom line. They also moved towards having one person open and one person close the store every day, which in some locations is the most ludicrous thing you can imagine.

Save for the one who was fired for having people clock in for him when he was out that day or on vacation. He was quite the douche. The following was an exchange between him and a woman on line during the Christmas season:

[Him:] Castlevania: Symphony of the Night?
[Customer:] Yeah, my kid has been asking for that for the past 10 months and I only just found it today!
[Him:] Hey, if you want to blow your money on an old crappy game that's fine by me.

What a darling, he was.
 
[quote name='pcktlnt']Gamestop in my local mall fired all their employees because they did not know who was stealing what or giving things away in the store. My cousin's friend was the asistant manager. He was on vacation, when he came back to go to work, the manager at that place was like uh, you shouldn't be here, you were fired.[/quote]

See, it's funny because the local DM out and out accused MANY of his own clerks of giving me info on which items had pennied, when he had NO proof. Apparently, he's never heard of the INTERNET.

Either way, I was sad to see so many knowledgeable people go kaput at once.
 
gamestop gets those inspection secret shopper people sometimes basicly a quiz on if there doing there job properly 'asking the customer if they want pre orders' and stuff.

I figure when they hear back that this employee was not helpful chit chatting with other employees about a concert or something.
Then in comes a layoff.

Honestly..this doesnt hapen enough I say maybe 1 out of 10 gamestop employees does there job.
 
No, but I really don't pay too much attention to who works at a given store anyway. I care for maybe 3 Gamestop employees within a 30 mile radius of my house.
 
And yet another reason to be done with EBGamestop altogether, regardless of who the 'bad guys' are in any given store's "Preorder 66".
 
hey IamCheapestGamer where are you from? I use to work at a EBgames in southern California, and I quit along with 5 other employees like a few months ago. What a small world if the store you are talking about was the one I use to work at.
 
Yeah, I've been the one that's cleared out the entire staff. Went to one that opened in 2003 and soon into 2004, the service and sales went down. Then the employees started getting pissy and said "fuck it, I don't need to put up with employees who are being a-holes".

Avoided for a few months or so and came back to check a game and found out they fired everyone(including the store manager). Apparently they had some customer complaints about the store where the employees would backtalk customers.
 
It was theft. Plain and simple. Someone stole a shitload of systems/games. Gamestop's hiring standards have been lowered so far any petty criminal can get a job.
 
My store in Houston, TX on Blalock road did. Shame to, the used-to-be manager held a Wii for me one time, and he was an all around awesome guy.
 
It goes to show.. paying the lowest amount of compensation possible, with unrealistic sales goals, and restricting hours = poor quality of human resources.

I've seen it a couple times, it's usually due to employee theft or more often to get out from under a bad manager/district manager. The company totally ignores one of the most common problems faced by retail management (and core concepts of management principles in general): unrealistic expectations with little or no reinforcement.

It is possible to motivate minimum wage employees to care about their job (and I know because I have done it, before moving on to the world of finance and a cubicle); however, you have to first create a positive environment before you can mandate any sort of expectation like preorder numbers without any sort of benefit for doing so. It doesn't even have to be a monitary benefit; it could be off time/weekends off, choice of working hours, etc.

It also speaks volumes for the quality of leadership within the company, from the top down.
 
of the around ten gs i frequent, i only give a crap about the 3-4 pretty girls that work there. too bad they never last more than a few weeks.
 
[quote name='tenzor']hey IamCheapestGamer where are you from? I use to work at a EBgames in southern California, and I quit along with 5 other employees like a few months ago. What a small world if the store you are talking about was the one I use to work at.[/quote]

Actually, I'm from Pennsylvania, where apparently they keep shifting their employees around like crazy, along with making said employees move around the way the store is displayed almost every other month.

I guess their DM/RM must think that moving stuff around will move merchandise better, when in fact having actual good prices on games would do that a WHOLE LOT BETTER.
 
yep, happened here. And then the asshats that ignore company policy regarding the edge card and other discounts moved in.
 
Yep.

Also, if the store has a bad inventory twice in a row they will fire all managers regardless how well a store is doing.
 
Ok here is the situation here:

I have never actually seen or known this to happen but at the Gamestop store near my house they seem to have purged all the good employees and let the manager stay. This particular manager is an interesting character as he knows I am their devil customer and makes sure that I know that I am not wanted in the store. Fortunately its easy to avoid him, go to the store on a weeknight. This store used to have 2 of the COOLEST employees working there I have ever known, heck I even sold an atari 2600 to one of them right in the store, it was pretty crazy now that you think about it, me hauling a big box of atari stuff into a gamestop store, only to sell it to the employee working there. Actually I made the other guy walk out to my car to get it since the box was heavy and I didn't want to carry it, lol. This store is absolute crap now.

Ebgames by my house, this is the better of the 2 stores. My personal friend from high school used to be the manager of this store but now the manager is an eye candy person, although she does seem to know stuff about games, and I know she at least plays them so that is cool. I am a frequent customer to this store so I get the best service, which is one of the reasons I keep coming back to GS even though I really despise the corporation. If it wasn't for this store I wouldn't even keep going there. I think the male employees annoy her because she is much nicer to me when they are not around. I have not seen an employee purge at this store, the one guy who has worked there has worked there probably since the store opened up, heh, and thats a long time, probably about 5 years, he is an excellent employee and always gives the best service possible. There is another employee that used to work at this store that got transferred to another ebgames store that is further away.

I think the reason we are seeing this trend is because of just the way retail works, you cannot expect someone to hold a retail job like gamestop forever, or at least most people. Most people will move onto other jobs after just a few months at gamestop, so that may be why the clerks you see there today will not be there tomorrow. The extra sales pressure put on employees after the GS buyout may also be a reason why there is such a high turnover on gamestop employees.
 
i hope i hate everyone who works at the gamestop near me except maybe the manager. at ebgames the other store all of them are assholes. so i hope this happens at my stores lol.
 
A purge? Nope. A ton of shuffling of managers and staff? HELL YES.

By my mall, there are three within a block of each other (two in the mall, one in a stripmall in the parking lot next to it). For years, I would always see employees form one store randomly in another, then last week, the managers swapped, the one in the satellite stripmall moving to one twenty minutes away, and a manager from a mall location taking over.

At my local GameCrazy, though, I noticed a few "purges" - one at the next town over, where it seems that everyone there was replaced, and a few months later the manager from there put in for a transfer out of state -- but before that happened, he swapped to take over a store in my town, because it seems the former manager "is no longer with the company," along with a couple other employees.

Its really a shame, though. All of them are really cool guys. There used to be a nasty old bitch who ran the GC in the next town over, and I was really glad they replaced her (twice) with much more chill managers.

I think I might apply at one of them though, if I can do it just a couple of days per week. Since they're no longer accepting old games, that means that SNES stuff is fair game for me to offer the customer cash for.
 
Hehe Slim

If for nothing, the only reason I think I'd take a job at a GS store would be for the older games people still bring in to try and trade. I would LOVE first crack at some of the stuff I've heard of people bringing in(from the few clerks who know me as the 'guide guy' and stand around n bs with me).

I'm still holding out for a complete Intelligent Qube that I won't have to get ass raped to buy at near Ebay prices.
 
All the employees were fired from one local store for supposedly stealing tons of product...like walking out with multiple PS3 systems and crap. The only reason I know about it is that the employees that replaced them the next day were yakking about it to each other and I overheard. I wonder if they were later fired for talking about confidential company business in front of customers? I haven't been in that store in a while...by Gamestop/EB seems to have a new crop of employees every few months. Probably because the pay sucks and people find better jobs.
 
[quote name='tenzor']hey IamCheapestGamer where are you from? I use to work at a EBgames in southern California, and I quit along with 5 other employees like a few months ago. What a small world if the store you are talking about was the one I use to work at.[/QUOTE]

Which store?
 
I never really notice employees unless they've been around for a while or they're cute females, but I'm sure it's happened around here.

As most of you know GS/EB is ran by people who only care about money and numbers and don't put anything else into perspective when they raise their required % numbers. They don't care about employees, why give a shit when there are so many people who they can be replaced with because everyone wants to work at a game store?

And they don't even think some of their ideas through, like when they had employees everyone who comes into the store if they had stuff to trade in. Sure it might be getting the word out that you can trade in games, but there are other more sensible ways to do that.

I don't go there much anymore unless it's in my benefit, like a sale or if they have some game that's hard to track down (and it's not marked up to a stupidly high price).

GameStop - for soccer moms and casual gamers who aren't informed enough to know that they really aren't the source for all things gaming.

(Okay, enough pointing out the obvious)
 
[quote name='Dam That River']

GameStop - for soccer moms and casual gamers who aren't informed enough to know that they really aren't the source for all things gaming.

(Okay, enough pointing out the obvious)[/QUOTE]

It seems that these are the customers that they are targeting now, they are not targeting the amazon/ebay crowd that many people including myself are now apart of (most things are just SO much cheaper on amazon and tax free!), they are targeting the gift giving soccer mom who does not know any better, unfortunately some of these people are even switching over to amazon/ebay customers through word of mouth. To spite them when we have to give the gift of video games and do not have enough time for amazon or ebay we go to either sears or kmart for the best selection of factory sealed, non played with games at retail or below prices. If you have a good product, service or store it will sell itself through word of mouth and you will not have to push and push it and force it on your customers like many gamestop employees are known to do. I now recommend shopping with amazon.com for video games especially if I know that person is a frequent gamestop shopper.

Oh well in a few years it will all be digital distribution anyways so might as well enjoy b&m game store shopping while you can!
 
The store that I used to work at had every employee but one of the assist. manager leave at the same time (three reg. employees and one assist. manager quit while the manager was fired).
 
i have seen the shuffle with eb games. this one dude would work all over, sometimes for a few months at a time or sometimes in a week. i would always stop in for n64 games, but now i have no need for them.
 
[quote name='monkeydeew']of the around ten gs i frequent, i only give a crap about the 3-4 pretty girls that work there. too bad they never last more than a few weeks.[/quote]

i mean i care for all cordial employees
 
Happened to a GS near me, manager got fired and all the other employees followed suit i believe.. totally new staff.
 
i think this happened to me

appleton, wi mall gamestop

i walked in there one weekend and was like.......well this is awkward.

not sure if i'll be going there anymore, i guess i'll just go to the ebgames by me now :\
 
It happened...to my local EB right after Gamestop bought them out. A shame too, there were some really cool guys who worked there. One guy, who sold us FFXI, actually gave his username and would powerlevel us, help us complete hard quests, etc. Now the store is employed with lamers.
 
It seems as if there is an employee purge going on right now here, today I went into the ebgames store I frequent to find 2 workers in there that I have never seen before. I also got carded for preordering a M rated game even though I am 25 years old, lol.
 
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