Gamestop enters the fray!

Utnayan said:

I think his point is that when he says no, quit pressing. If a waiter asked me if I wanted to upsize my beer for $2.00, I would be an idiot for saying no, but if I didn't, and they kept asking "Are you SURE???" 50 times I would punch them in the face.

Same thing happened to me when I went to Best Buy. I was there with my wife buying a printer. In the check out line...

BB guy: "SO! What brings you in today?"
Me: "I am buying this printer?"
BB guy: Launches into a crusade to have me buy a warranty.
Me: "No thanks - it's 99 bucks. If it breaks I'll buy another one if it falls out of manufacturer warranty"
BB guy: "Those are a pain to deal with. With us, you can just bring it in and get a new one! Sometimes even a new model!"
Me: "No. Please ring me up."
BB guy: "One thing to note, the wireless cards on these are kind of flaky. You may want the warranty for that alone"
Me - Fed up at this point: "Are you telling me Best Buy knowingly sells defective product models?"
BB guy: "Oh no no... I meant wireless in general, not this printer"
Me: "Ring the damn thing up. Now."

Click to expand...

Well by Hatorades account, they didnt push him 50 times, they ran through a bunch of other options.

Have a card?
No.
Let me check your number...nope no membership, want one?
No
Ok, How about the camera
No
Disc Protection?
No
Ok well if you change your mind we can still give you this deal later.

Pretty fucking mild and standard pitches.

to keep with the restaurant analogy, Hatorade and his black gay lover sit down to eat at Waffle house.

Can I get you a drink?
Water Please
Any coffee or juice?
No
What can I get you?
Pancakes
Do you want fruit or whipped topping on that?
No.
Anything else? Side of Bacon?
No
*goes home screeching and posts on FOH*.

No harm no foul on their part. Dont shop at gamestop or eat at waffle house.

Edit - And to clarify, hatorades lovers isnt black in this scenario for any reason other than to explain why he would be at a waffle house.

You act like the employees at gamestop are master salesmen or businessmen. The qualification for getting a job there is a willingness to make minimum wage and an obsession with video games...

I'm sure the people who actually know how to do customer service style jobs that happen to work there do, in fact, do things similar to your example of how it should go... but let's be honest, 99% of the people who work there (at least at the ones I used to go to) do not have the capability for this.

yeah gamestop is apparently a nightmare to work at. like if you don't meet certain numbers for subs sold, used games sold, disc warranties sold, etc then you get fewer hours to work. So the shit heads who are good at conning people get the choice shifts and get 40 hours a week, and the nice guys who just stay quiet and do the sane thing get cut to 20 hours and eventually quit cuz who can survive on a part time job.

feels bad man, but i guess at this point its a miracle gamestop is still in business with best buy GCU and amazon and digital sales

spronk said:

yeah gamestop is apparently a nightmare to work at. like if you don't meet certain numbers for subs sold, used games sold, disc warranties sold, etc then you get fewer hours to work. So the shit heads who are good at conning people get the choice shifts and get 40 hours a week, and the nice guys who just stay quiet and do the sane thing get cut to 20 hours and eventually quit cuz who can survive on a part time job.

feels bad man, but i guess at this point its a miracle gamestop is still in business with best buy GCU and amazon and digital sales

Click to expand...

Ahaha, 40 hour shifts? Maybe if you're a manager. If you're a GA, you're lucky if you get like 15 hours a week IF you did well that week. SGAs get a bit more. But my friend was an assistant manager and didn't always get 40. If you're a manager. you're salaried and I think my manager made about 30 grand a year, and you're ALWAYS on call. Oh hey, you have a day off? That's cool, wanna use it to help another store reset? Oh hey, you have a different day off, how about you use it to help us do a different stores inventory. All this to appease the district manager.

I always felt bad for my manager, because I knew he was getting fucked. Only solace was that they'd fly you out to vegas for a few days for a Gamestop conference or whatever. Then they opened it to the public, which kind of made it suck.

Utnayan said:

Let's walk through what Hatorade said.

(Here he staves off the question and clearly states he only wants to buy the game)



Attempt 2. Customer says no.



Attempt 3.



Attempt 4.



It annoys anyone going into that store. Their sales process needs to be revamped.

"Phone number please?"
Gets Phone Number
If not a member, Explain membership.
Customer: Yes/No.
If Yes, sell membership. If no, ask if there is anything else they would like help with, conclude sale.

And get rid of Disc Protection in the process at all. It is insulting customers intelligence.

Click to expand...

Better post about Car Salesman selling the undercoat or advanced warranty.

Gamestop was absolute shit to work at. My old store manager finally left the company after being given the run around for years. I think he made like 35-40k, but he was always next in line to go to corporate, or become a DM.

Apparently, about 6 months ago it got super cut throat. Like, you push this shit successfully or you're out, not just getting less hours. I feel for the guys stuck behind the counter, but why the hell would you shop at GS over Best Buy/Amazon (unless you have $4k in store credit like spronk )

Hatorade said:

So I wandered into gamestop hoping to find PS4 Just Dance 2015 for my daughter for cheap and they actually had it for 14 bucks. Sold.

I go to check out.
Clerk: Find everything ok?
Me: Yes, thank you.
Clerk: Phone number for power card?
Me: Just want the game. I Haven't had a power card since it was called something else and gave me a magizine subscription.
Clerk: Phone number should stil work.
Me: OK...number is (phone number).
Clerk: Don't see you here, do you want to sign up for power reward card? It earns points.
Me: No thanks I just want the game for my daughter.
Clerk: You sure, we can deduct the savings on this purchase towards the price of the card. Oh and that version works with the camera any interest, we have some used as well.
Me: I'm sure and No thanks I have all that already I just want the game.
Clerk: Do you want the 2 dollar disc protection?
Me: No
Clerk: Ok that will be 16.23, if you change your mind you we can credit your next purchase towards the cost of the card.
Me:...
Clerk: I am also including a coupon for 5 dollars extra on any trade ins.

Fuck you gamestop, fuck you for making your employees do all of that bullshit. Fuck you for making everything far harder than it should have been.

Click to expand...

I had pretty much the same experience a couple months ago. I was at a strip mall with my nephew and his mom and we walked by a Gamestop. My nephew got a gold star or whatever the fuck in school, so his mom said he gets to pick out a game. I volunteered to take him in and buy it for him.

Time spent picking out game: about 2 minutes.
Time spent in line while the Gamestop drone tried to upsell every single person in line 5 times: a good 10-15 minutes.

First he tried to push a preorder for some game I've never heard of. "No thank you, I just want to pay for this game". He started with the "are you sure? this will guarantee you get a copy on release day!" and I wanted to say "bitch, I have a 5 year backlog of shit to play and watch already, why would I give a fuck about release day for some game I've never heard of?". Since my little nephew was standing next to me I just said "No thank you, I just want to pay for this game."

Three attempts to get me to get their stupid reward card.
"No thank you, I just want to pay for this game" x3

Disc protection?
"No thank you, I just want to pay for this game"

And of course the same upsell after I paid that they can credit my next purchase. "Next purchase", heheh, that's a good one!

I kinda felt bad for the clerk because you could tell he didn't like going through the whole upsell script, and I'm sure they get shit from plenty of customers over it.

if you have a gamestop PUR account (doesn't need to be PUR Pro) you can get a free copy of the game deformers for PC or PS4 (or both, just do it twice)
DigitalCode - Coupons

enter your PUR email address and the offer code DEFORMERSGAME and you will get a steam or PSN key emailed to you. You can do it twice, once for PC and once for PS4 and get two codes. You can leave the phone field blank. The email must have a PUR account but not PUR pro.

This will probably be shut down by gamestop soon since they are basically giving away a $20 game that isn't out till tomorrow and I don't think they really meant to do this

It's annoying when its stuff that I'd no way want. Asking me if I want whipped cream on my pan cakes is fine. Asking me if I want a game stop card or want to get stabbed with an AIDs needle SUCKS.

Fast food places and Best Buy trying to guilt me into donating into a charity is completely FUCKED too.

They force employees at Chick Fil A to say "my pleasure" if you say thanks. That's fucking annoying too.

It's the fact that it's required. They have dank shakes and food ya.

I used to work at Electronics Boutique forever ago (before Gamestop assimilated them). The upselling is annoying, but it is standard retail practice in these types of places. All the warranties/replacement guarantees/etc are pretty much pure margins and the majority of people never even end up using them after buying them, or if they do, the value of the item has depreciated to the point that it isn't unprofitable to do a swap out. Later on, they usually pushed that we swap out with refurbished rather than new. I imagine the companies try to sweeten the pot for the employees by giving them a commission for every warranty/credit card/etc they sell (I can't remember, we used to get 10 or 20% of the price of the warranty as a commission, so if you were good at it, it did pad out your normally shitty paycheck a bit more so it wasn't as shitty). Used games also had big margins, especially considering that for brand new games they typically only sold them for 2-5$ under retail and gave maybe half the retail value in trade (60% if they really wanted the game). Expectation was that more than half the sales in the store had to be used and they pushed the goals up higher every year.

It wasn't too hard to sell the warranties, you just needed to tailor your pitch to your audience. Family with a bunch of small kids/a baby? Little Timmy spills their juice on the system or yanks it off a table, or their friends are the ones who do it, we can replace it! College age students? If you have a party and someone spills beer on it, knocks it over, etc or gets messed up at your dorm, we can replace it! Selling warranties on the Gameboys was easy as shit because it didn't matter what your situation was, everyone could envision accidentally dropping them.

On the flipside, while it is annoying, as others have pointed out they track all the numbers for employees and if they see Employee X is not meeting quota for the upsell shit, then they aren't "doing their job" (ie, make the store a lot of money) and put themselves at employment risk. We used to lose really knowledgeable people that drove loyalty to our store because of dumb shit like that/hour budgets being slashed.

I agree, when I bought a couple of guitars the other day, the sales rep tried to get me to get a warranty three times. I asked about the hard sell and he told me they have to find a way to ask three times per customer or they get written up.

Yah, that's why I only buy games digitally nowadays. Fuck whole bunch'a that bullshit.