Unhealthy Work Culture, Abusive Upper Management
Pros
My coworkers liked video games. I got free shirts when we had dead stock. I only worked here for a little under a year, and had been planning to move cross country the whole time, but made some lovely friends! The job itself wasn't horrific, but because of the work culture I don't think I would have lasted much longer than that.
Cons
The job is very focused on sales, but there's no positive reinforcement for doing well; no tips, no commission, just an expectation to have a percentage of your sales be a membership acquisition, and a very see through intent to disguise it as "caring about the customer". You are given a disciplinary meeting if you don't hit the numbers. There are certain customer demographics you actually can't sign up for a membership, and I've seen those customers sent to other registers when an employee needs to boost their numbers. Everything is about getting the membership, warranties, and the customer to buy more, and I know that's pretty standard for retail (for transparency- I'm already a person who isn't into sales. [we do be disliking capitalism but ya know, needed job]) --but talking to my coworkers about it all year, I'm pretty confident in saying this company is particularly bad. I also know that both in and outside of work, my location's district manager was abusive. I didn't interact with him directly until the very end of my time there, but I witnessed my friends and coworkers who had spent more time with the company be consistently overworked, insulted, and on occasion, actually gaslit, while still being expected to provide a level of attention and service to the company that went way above their job description. I've come in on a day off, after a coworker with a few months of experience was scheduled to work alone, (which was not allowed within policy for our store) and be put in physical danger by someone from the public because of it. There were *many* times when regular employees (paid much lower rates) were filling in for managers who just wouldn't show up to work. We did have multiple managers the year I worked there, and I want to say there were some who were actually good people, but working under really difficult conditions. It was really bad, don't work for Gamestop guys :D