What did Taylor Neubert do? many GameStop employees was just dreaming about: leaving in place. Tired of working 10 hours alone between video games and husband Pokémon selling for less than $15 an hour, she closes her store in the middle of her shift, hangs a sign on the door saying GameStop doesn’t care about its employees, and quit forever.
“I’m like, I’m not getting paid for anything right now, you know,” she said Kotaku in an interview shortly after it happened. “So for me when I had to work these long days, and they took away our bonuses, they took away our incentives and things like that, I was furious about that. , because I think, I’m doing all this for a paycheck. barely paying my bills right now and I’m missing out on hanging out with friends and experiencing life. GameStop has really taken away a lot of that from me.”
Formerly a manager, Neubert voluntarily demoted late last year to an assistant role after becoming exhausted from running two stores at once for just $1.25 an hour. tpay the $20.50 she earned before. “I was mentally exhausted, I was very stressed,” she said. “I can’t make my staff feel appreciated because I don’t get to see them often because we’re just reporting alone. And so morale is very low. They gave up.”
How to quit at GameStop
She decided to give her two weeks’ notice earlier this month, but was concerned about the remaining shifts. Things got tense on February 4th, another Saturday, she was scheduled to work alone from 10am to 9pm because her manager was on vacation and no one else was available. ready for replacement.
When Neubert stepped down as a store manager, her pay dropped from $21.75 an hour to just $14.25, but the hours were still long. “I was exhausted all the time,” she said. “I don’t go out because I’m too tired to do anything. Because I work 11 hours, even 8 hours a day, like my social battery drains at the end of my shift.
Neubert called a former GameStop manager to vent. Instead of quitting, he was fired a month earlier after two men stole $5,000 worth of PS5s from his store, an incident where he wasn’t even on duty. and has nothing to do with, and which Kotaku reported at that time. Neubert says reading that story during her shift that Saturday pushed her to the brink.
“I was so angry and I just think about all the bad things GameStop has put us through, especially over the holidays, it’s just awful,” she said. Neubert said she tried calling five other GameStops to have someone take over the rest of her shift, as well as several nearby store managers, including her own, but no one pick up the phone. “It made me angry because no one answered the phone.”
Her regulars, on the other hand, responded and seemed delighted. “I’ve been texting all of my clients and saying, ‘Guys, today is my last day, I’ll try to make it to the end of my shift, but I don’t even think I’ll do it,” she said. speak. “And they all said, ‘That’s great!’ Like, ‘We know how miserable you are.’ They are all really proud of me.”
One of her regular customers in the store at the time even helped get the few remaining people out so she could lock up. It was just after 2pm, it wasn’t even the middle of her shift, she posted a sign on the door explaining the closure, then a friend took a photo and uploaded to Redditwhere it quickly spread throughout the GameStop community to cheers and applause.
“I’m not doing this for any other reason than I don’t like the direction GameStop is going as a company,” Neubert said. Kotaku. “Like GameStop, you just have to understand their problem and stop putting so much on their employees that they don’t get paid well.”
Executive Director at GameStop receive millions of dollars worth of gold parachutes And stock investor meme reap great fortunes. Store workers, tasked with putting together a hold on GameStop’s crumbling video game retail empire as digital sales eat away at the underlying business, face insultingly low or cut wages altogether. Keep an eye on aggressive sales targets for PS5 bundles and new game warranties while under the influence of the inventory system, confusing warehouse shipment, and hours are cut, it seems like things are always as bad as they can be. Then they get worse with no end in sight.
A meme stock company with no strategy
While it was ultimately a spontaneous move, Neubert’s sudden decision to leave was rooted in a series of increasingly uncomfortable moments. For example, during the holidays, she said that her store was suddenly told that it had to schedule extra hours despite cutting staff. She said: “I could barely make use of those hours, but you know, they were like, you have to figure it out for me to figure it out. “And then, before the whole week was over, they called each of us and said, ‘Hey, they’ve cut their hours, you have to cut 30 hours from your schedule.’ And I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And they say, ‘Effective immediately, figure it out.’
GameStop also recently cut the overtime pay for store managers, consistently making them a few hundred dollars more a month doing the work they were supposed to get done every week anyway. New sales initiatives launched at the beginning of the year have also increased the pressure. A new metric measures every customer who leaves a store without buying something. And in a particularly grim twist of fate, stores are expected to sell customers at least three additional games and controllers whenever they buy a new console, even if it’s a completely digital board that can’t read the disk.
There are many other disappointments, many of which are detailed about GameStop subredditand endorsed by many employees Kotaku have talked to in recent months. Many pre-orders are still missing. Regular shop there are not enough copies in stock release date as big as NBA 2K23 and Dead space redo. And managing customer expectations during the messy console transition has been especially exhausting as the PS4 and Xbox versions of popular games like Hogwarts Heritage delayed. This all while secret shopping call grill lone employees on the sales stage in between juggling online orders and in-store exchanges.
Strikes in these cases are becoming less common, but they don’t seem to have been adopted by GameStop management. They may even be part of the plan. After all, everyone who quits on their own loses their bonus, including the company’s first batch of meme shares that just launched. given this week. Many current and former employees say Kotaku that closing the store was necessary and would be a way to theoretically regroup the teams and give them more resources and pay. Instead, GameStop continues to spread them thinner and thinner. Whatever the strategy, or lack of thatit is no longer Neubert’s problem.
“You know, it’s great that I don’t worry about anything like I’m just living life,” she said. “I want to travel, I want to do a lot of things and like for the first time in a long time I am excited about my future.”
