In another life, one that seems thankfully distant to me now, I was a recruiting monkey. My official title was “recruiting assistant”, but my job could have easily been done by a simian with decent logic skills. It tells you something about me that I got canned a lot from these temp jobs.
Anyway, 24/7 Wall Street does one of those surveys you hear about where they look at a company’s workforce statistics and figure out how much each of them suck.
Coming in at number ten? Good ol’ GameStop! And you’ll never, ever, guess why that is.
Employees appear to regularly complain that the company privileges sales above customer service. According to one review, “Priority is placed on sales instead of games and customers, pushing people to pre-order games can place them in a situation where they spend good money on a bad game with no possibility of a refund, business’ models place customers at a disadvantage.” It may also be the reason why the video game retailer made the Consumer Report’s annual “naughty” list for bad customer service in 2011. Likely adding to poor customer service, reviews point to high turnover.
In other words, employees hate bugging you to preorder a game just as much as you hate them bugging you to preorder a game. They hate it so much that many of them simply flame out at the job and quit to be replaced by some other teenager or college kid looking for discounts on his games.
There’s also the small problem of digital distribution wiping out their entire business model. 24/7 Wall Street draws comparisons to Blockbuster, which just isn’t flattering at all.
In other words, stop busting on the guys behind the counter and start busting on the executive suite. Besides, as we know objectively, they’re a lot better than Best Buy.