Taylor Neubert did something many GameStop employees only dreamed of it: quit on the spot. You’re tired of working 10-hour days all by yourself between stacks of video games and stacks of video games Pokemon Were doing less than $15 an hour, she closed her shop in the middle of her shift, put up a sign on the door saying GameStop doesn’t care about its employees, and left the job forever.
“I thought I wasn’t getting paid right now, you know,” she said my city in an interview shortly after it happened. “For me to work these long days and they took away our bonuses and our incentives and stuff like that, I got mad about it because I thought I’m working all this for a paycheck barely paying my bills right now and I’m missing out on mine hanging out with friends and enjoying life. GameStop really did a lot of that for me.”
Neubert was previously a manager and voluntarily demoted to assistant late last year after burning out running two businesses at once for just $1.25 more an hour Than the $20.50 she previously earned. “I was at my wit’s end, I was so stressed out,” she said. “I couldn’t make my staff feel valued because I couldn’t see them all often because we were single coverage. And so morale was low. They gave up.”
How to quit your job at GameStop
She decided to hand in her own two-week notice earlier this month, but was already dreading the remaining shifts. Things came to a head on February 4th, another Saturday when she was scheduled to work alone from 10am to 9pm as her manager was on vacation and no one else was available to fill in.
When Neubert resigned as store manager, her hourly wage dropped from $21.75 to just $14.25, but the long hours remained. “I’m exhausted all the time,” she said. “I don’t go out because I’m just too tired to do anything. Because I work 11 hours, even eight hours a day, like my social battery is drained at the end of my shift.”
Neubert called a former GameStop executive to vent. Rather than quit, he’d been fired a month earlier after two men stole $5,000 worth of PS5s from his shop, an incident he wasn’t even on shift for and had nothing to do with, and which my city reported at the time. Neubert said reading this story during her shift this Saturday pushed her over the edge.
“I got so angry just thinking about all the shit that GameStop did to us, especially over the holidays, it was awful,” she said. Neubert said she tried calling five other GameStops to find someone to cover the rest of her shift, as well as a few nearby store managers, including her own, but no one answered. “That made me angry that no one answered the phone.”
Her regulars, on the other hand, responded and were obviously delighted. “I had been texting all my clients and I was like, ‘Guys, today is my last day, I’m going to try to make it to the end of my shift, but I don’t even think I can make it,'” she said. “And they all said, ‘This is amazing!’ Like, ‘We knew how unhappy you are.’ They were all very proud of me.”
One of her then-regulars at the store even helped usher a few remaining latecomers out so she could lock up. A little after 2 p.m., not even halfway through her shift, she put the sign up on the door explaining the closure, which a friend took a picture of uploaded to Redditwhere the GameStop community quickly cheered and applauded.
“I didn’t do this because I don’t like the direction GameStop is taking as a company for some other reason,” Neubert said my city. “Like GameStop just needs to figure out their shit and stop charging their employees so much they don’t pay well.”
Executives at GameStop Get multi-million dollar golden parachutes And Meme stock investors reap great fortunes. Store associates tasked with keeping GameStop’s crumbling video game retail empire together while digital sales cannibalize the underlying business are confronted offensive low raises or outright pay cuts. Committed to aggressive sales targets for PS5 bundles and warranties for new games while at the mercy of inventory system snafus, incomprehensible warehouse shipments, and slashed hours, it seems like things are always as bad as they can get. Then they get worse and worse with no end in sight.
A meme corporation with no strategy
Although it was ultimately a spontaneous move, Neubert’s decision to leave so abruptly grew out of a series of increasingly frustrating moments. For example, over the holidays, she said her business was suddenly told it needed to put in some overtime despite a reduced workforce. “It was almost impossible for me to use all of those hours, but they were like, you have to find out, so I found out,” she said. “And then, before the week was out, they all called us one by one and said, ‘Hey, they reduced the hours, you need to cut 30 hours off your schedule.’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ And they said, ‘Effective immediately, find out.’
GameStop also recently cut executive overtime pay, a consistent way for them to earn a few hundred dollars more a month for work they have to get done every week anyway. New sales initiatives introduced earlier in the year have also added to the pressure. A new metric measures every customer who leaves the store without making a purchase. And in a particularly cruel twist of fate, stores are expected to sell customers at least three additional games and controllers when they buy a new console, even if it’s an all-digital console that can’t read discs.
Other frustrations abound, many of which are detailed the GameStop subredditand confirmed by many employees my city has spoken to over the past few months. Many pre-orders are still lost. Saves often don’t have enough copies in stock the day of big releases like NBA 2K23 and the Empty room make new. And managing customer expectations during the messy console transition has been particularly stressful as PS4 and Xbox versions of popular games such as Hogwarts legacy are late. This all the time secret buyer calls Grill individual associates in sales pitches while juggling online orders and in-store trade-ins.
Strikes in these circumstances are becoming increasingly rare, but they don’t seem to be reaching GameStop management. You might even be part of the plan. After all, anyone who quits alone loses bonuses, including the first batch of corporate meme stock that’s up just now broadcast this week. Many current and former employees tell my city that store closures are necessary and would be a way to theoretically reconsolidate teams and offer them more pay and resources. Instead, GameStop spreads them thinner and thinner. No matter what strategy or lack thereofit is no longer Neubert’s problem.
“It’s so beautiful, simple, you know, I don’t worry about anything like I’m just living life,” she said. “I want to travel, I want to do things and for the first time in a long time I’m very excited about my future.”