i love gamestop, for as much as everyone hates on it.
protip: get the discount card and wait for special offers either for trade in or buying. btgof is the best.

i hate my local gamecrazy. they dont know games, push the ps3 (worst game library of the 3), and they hardly run specials and have tried pully bait and switch on me.

Wow...usually I'm not impressed by company responses that involve "confidential actions" taken to "reprimand" the responsible parties, but this one went above and beyond. They reviewed the security footage, meaning they went to the store, did their homework, and, one would assume, actually spoke with a store manager or two about the issue. Bravo, Game Crazy district manager!

That District Manager was so into his job. Why is he so rare?

Having spent much of my life in service management, I have noticed that perhaps as a result of the economy companies are working harder at customer service than in the past. By "companies" I mean smaller businesses - NOT large corporations like Chase Bank which seem to have daily customer service crisis. My two cents on the big picture...

Kudos for being the one company who "takes this seriously" to actually follow through with the seriousness. I don't live anywhere near this companies area of operation, but if I did I'd definitely consider shopping there over Gamestop just because it seems like the higher ups will have my back.

This kind of thing goes on in other retail areas as well. Employees are under such pressure to meet targets that they can occasionally resort to such tactics. Where I used to work, at least one manager would advise the salesmen to claim the item wasn't in stock if it didn't have the appropriate product cover on it.

@Zombini:
Exactly.. if companies were more realistic about employee performance on shit that no one wants in the first place, we wouldnt have these kinda issues.. who REALLY buys GAME warranties anyhow!? Isnt it the position of most of these companies to have me turn around and trade it in? Thereby making the warranty useless?
Just like me, I work at Sprint and my quota continues to go UP, when the economy continues to go DOWN.. my quota went up 50% this month over last.. time to start hustling people again.

I wonder why people decline freebies offered by the accused store. You're not accepting a bribe from them. They are admitting they were wrong and they are offering you an item which you intended to buy anyway.

I know when I complain about bad service, if the company gives me something for free, I snatch it immediately.

Should have taken the game and sold it to them used.

But it's nice to see when higher ups take customer complaints more seriously than store employees. Happened at my Best Buy once or twice when I was there. Management got a kick in the ass for those.

@katstermonster: The way a company reprimands its employees is a private matter. You would not like it if your employer started talking about you to the papers.

@dancekat1: Larger companies have a larger customer base. 99% of customers remain satisfied but some slip through the cracks.

You don't see the big picture...

I like these corporate customer service numbers, because most of the time the people involved are actually courteous and understand the problems and don't have knee-jerk reactions.

When I was working retail, however, I have to say that I didn't really enjoy them. I worked at a Borders in New Jersey (about 10 years ago) as an assistant manager. We always tracked returns -- and part of the tracking was to get people's names and phone numbers to be sure if nobody was abusing the return policy.

I was the manager one morning when a woman who had, in the previous 6 months, returned more than $1,200 worth of stuff (remember -- these are books and CDs -- and that kind of money is a lot of returns and a lot of individual items), came up and wanted to return some things that she didn't have a receipt for.

Of the 4 books (I remember this like it was yesterday), one was out of print, two were well read, and one was something that looked new-ish. I was called over by the clerk when he saw the books and her ID, and I had to inform her that we couldn't take back any of it, and that, because of her history, we could not take anything back from her in the future unless the books were in new condition and they were accompanied by a receipt.

Well, she went ballistic. How dare I tell her such things?!? Didn't I know how much she spent here?!? Let met talk to the manager! It was a real scene.

I told her that I couldn't do anything for her but we had a customer care number that she could call. She stormed out of the place, still screaming (but she left the books behind).

She ended up calling the hotline, and, for her troubles, got a $25 gift card. I was pissed. I did nothing wrong, did exactly what my general manager and regional manager told us to do, and she was actually rewarded.

@Zombini: Sorry, I'm not clear what that means. From what you write, it sounds more like avoiding sales than pressing extras--is there a way in which this profits the store?

@PSUSkier:

I have to agree. I've been anti-Gamestop for a while now. But I can say this story has impressed me enough to want to check out my local Game Crazy store.

There is also the Woodinville location which is probably closer than Seattle.

I used to work for Hollywood Video, which is own by the same company that operates Game Crazy. The special promotions we were to sell in the stores were aggressively promoted, and there was a lot of pressure from the District and Regional Managers to perform, especially for non-commissioned employees making minimum wage. As a Store Director, I had to call my DM sometimes 3x a day or more to report results.

Unfortunately this level of aggression leads to tactics like what are reported in this story. The Store Director is under pressure, so s/he passes it on to the employees. I knew Store Directors that privately offered incentives to their employees to sell the promotions. Some employees resorted to shady tactics.

However, the management chain in the "good" regions was highly responsive as seen in this story. My District Manager always told me I'd better make my customers happy because if they got to him, he would just give them whatever they wanted anyway. That's part of why I liked worked there. Unfortunately working at a video store now is like polishing wood on the Titanic.

I think the seriousness given to the matter may lie in the fact that what was done was illegal, and that it was a deliberate attempt to get the store higher performance bonuses (based on up-sells) through fraud.

@floraposte: That is exactly the point, the higher ups are more interested in how many high margin add-ons that you can sell. When I managed a Sears, there were definitely cases where customers would be turned away because they didn't want a protection agreement. The associate/manager/store is graded on the percentage of warranty dollars to sales dollars. It creates an environment where no one cares how much money is made only about margin as a percentage.

As a side note, I often wonder how Sears has made it swirling in the bowl for the last 15 years without going down the hole all together.

Play N Trade, has a location in Kirkland and another location should be opening up in Redmond in the near future. Perhaps you can give them a try?

I am just happy that this got escalated appropriately without the OP having to track down additional numbers or email addresses. One call to the main support number got his situation properly addressed.

@OminousG: Corporate policy tends to burn them out.

Kudos to the DM. I believe his reaching out to the customer was honest and sincere.

Stores shouldn't create policies that would make a low level employee resort to things like this. It is one thing to ask someone if they want something extra, but to force it onto their transaction and then have the gaul to say that it was "free" when it really wasn't is just unacceptable.

Placing that much pressure on the employee to sell extras leads to things like this. It's just not right.

@floraposte: Not the store, no. But more often than not, big stores - certainly the ones I'm thinking off - get marked on how many extras I sells. The big cheese may be looking at overall profit, but the managers and sales staff get marked on how many boxes they tick as far as the extras go. So, absurd as it may seem, it can be in a manager's own interest to let a sale go rather than have a sale go through without those extras, which will affect that store's statistics.

Game Crazy did this to me before too. I bought four games from them and they added a $4 charge in "Gameguard" fees. I had to call them asking what that was and told them I never asked for this. I just went back and they took off the fees, however they acted like they added the fee on purpose.

@Kimaroo: Exactly. Another example of this was the Hollywood Video "Double Feature" promotion. For $10, you could get 2 for 1 rentals for a month. Employees were hounded to sell this thing, and some of them ended up tacking it on to people's transactions without saying anything.

The trick was.. sometimes it made their transaction cheaper. If they were renting six movies at $4 ea, adding the $10 promotion subtracted $16 from their transaction. In that case, was it ethical if the employee didn't say anything?

Glad to see Game Crazy made good on this. I'm a big fan of the chain of stores and can personally attest to that they look into nearly everything that gets reported to the customer service line.

Also, you should definitely try to pick up Dead Space again with that gift card. It's a phenomenal game.

Looks like I will be visiting a Game Crazy for my next purchase. I went in before and found horrible selection and complete lack of employee knowledge (though Gamestop's employee game knowledge is just as lacking) but I think I'll give it another shot for a more mainstream game.

"Seriousity" only matters when bad press brings this sort of stuff into the open. Had in not been for Consumerist (or teh intertubes, for that matter) I suspect that Lu would still be having a bad day.

@deadandy: I don't mean to be critical but wouldn't that only save 2 dollars? I mean without the double feature it would be 6 x $4=$24 and with the double feature it would be $10 + (3 x $4)=$22. Of course in that case it would still be worth doing, and as long as the promotion didn't automatically re-up I wouldn't mind if the employee didn't say anything about it.

Yep, it sadly happens when there's either too much pressure, or on the other side of the coin, too much incentive.

I used to work for Verizon landlines, back when there was still a land-line industry to speak of. Cruddy job, and there were sales requirements for customer service and billing calls. On the upside, the incentives for selling features - especially the major feature pack they called the Big Deal - were huge.

I eventually moved into Quality Assurance, where I listened to phone calls both live and recorded. I ended up catching one of our reps - whom everyone thought was amazing and would be a supervisor one day - adding features to peoples' phones without even mentioning it in the call.

He was fired, naturally, but it taught me to stay suspicious when people try and upsell me. I always wonder if they'll add the "feature" on anyway.

@Jason Murdey: Er, yeah. I clearly was not a math major.

@deadandy: Eh.. I still think they should tell them. I'm usually happy when someone points out that I could save money if it's done a different way.

It also depends on if it was an on-going thing, like Jason pointed out.

This company obviously understands the power of the 'blogosphere.'

It might just be my local game crazy, but I've always loved going there. I've gone there for 95% of my games over the last 5 years and have had no problems whatsoever. Once I got a copy of Lost Odyssey with them that had a circular scratches like the 360 ate it. I brought it in and they gave me a new copy of the disc, no questions asked, wasn't even asked for a receipt.

The guys by me know quite a lot about games and stuff, particularly my chosen specialty of RPGs. I've never once had them try to slip gameguard onto one of my purchases, although they do ask. Altough their selection isn't as big, in the end going to pretty much any game crazy is going to be better than any gamestop.

Game Crazy does respond well to the corporate complaint line. Unfortunately their buisness practices are such that these associates at the store level are under tremendous pressure to hit silly sales goals. For example, if I did not sell preorders to 20% of my customers in a day, MVP memberships to 15%, Service contracts on 100% of the consoles, and add a boatload of accessories to every purchase I would have my job threatened on a daily basis. I would call the numbers to the DM at 4:00 and get screamed at over it. I was told if I was not in the top 10% (in the 90th percentile) of the company on those metrics I would be fired, and if if I did not find a excuse to fire employees under the top 30% of the company in those numbers I would be fired. Minimum wage workers should not be expected to work under that pressure.

So what if the DM oils the squeaky wheel when someone finally complains? How many others had that store ripped off with nobody the wiser?

At Game Crazy you do what ever you need to do to get your E4 metrics where the boss wants them, cause you can choose losing your job for sure if you dont hit those numbers, and POSSIBLY losing your job if someone blasts it all over the internet or calls customer service.

What's sad is that kid probably got fired for adding the game guard on without authorization, but the DM, regional management and everyone else will just hire some more grist for the mill and continue the poor management that leads to these situations.

@katstermonster: I don't think of this as "above and beyond" what he ought to do. If he has a clerk defrauding customers, that could lead to legal problems for the company.

@natsirt: The Woodinville Game Crazy is my local store. I've had very positive experiences there, the employees I've talked to are knowledgeable about games, and they offer all the services they have to without being too pushy about it.

@Josh Ray: Indeed Josh. That's a sad state of affairs. Plus, it has to be a kick in the pants for some folks to find out that the job they idealized all through high school turned out be more of a nightmare than a dream-job...

@RCheli: Did you get punished? If not, then you can chalk the gift-card up as a standard "customer satisfaction" measure.

At my place of work, even if the customer is a dyed-in-the-wool thief and a douche-bag to boot, we almost always give them something anyway just to placate 'em. It's outright extortion by my point of view, but if it'll keep 'em happy, the company will do it.

If you did get punished, then that's just straight-up bullshit.

Taking it seriously, done properly.

@Kimaroo: I think the main thing is that the employees are doing this without telling the customer. I'm usually happy to save a few bucks so when it's pointed out I'll take the bait, but finding out later that it was just added without my knowledge would make me angry.

"I specifically did not want to call the actual store". The OP is 100% correct on that note. You never speak to the local store or restaurant manager when you have a problem. ALWAYS save your comments, note who you dealt with and then CONTACT CORPORATE.

As stated, it is often the local management that is the cause of the problem and calling them does nothing to resolve that as they will cover their tracks. Corporate must know about problems down the chain.

That said, I am lost as to why the OP "reluctantly said yes" to a gift card. You were due compensation for your time to resolve this if nothing else, take it!

@deadandy: i used to work at a Hollywood, and the manager and some employees would regulary offer to pay the difference to make a bundle sale. we ended up with quite the stockpile of paid for popcorn under the counter...

@OminousG: I interviewed at Movie Gallery (parent company of Hollywood Video and Game Crazy, for those that don't know) and everyone I spoke to was totally into their job. I eventually decided finishing my education was more important than getting a full time job but I sure would've like to feel that group morale at a job.

@RCheli: I work at Borders now, and let me tell you, clones of her still exist. Except now I can tell them that we haven't been taking returns without receipts for a year and they just storm off.

But, before the return policy changed, I definitely could (and still can) feel your pain.

@RCheli: And actually, now that I think about it, a woman last night tried to return (without receipt) a book that had significant water damage. She acted like she had bought it that way, but who would buy a book like that?

@katstermonster: Generally speaking, I have to concur folks, whenever you are shafted by any local person in retail and don't trust onsite management, district management is ALWAYS the way to go.

There are two ways to go about this.

1. In my experience, the less effective and longer wait- way, is to call an 800-number where an offshored cust. rep. will take the complaint and escalate it if you are lucky. 60% of the time in my experience I never hear further going this route, though.

2. I call another location and ask for the store manager, then ask who is the district manager for location x (offending location). That gets me a name and number, and that way I don't have to count on the shenanigans and shell games like in number 1.

Almost without exception, when I make the time to find and talk to a district manager, and the local store folks hear back they KNOW they are in trouble, because the district manager knows a customer were unable to deal locally, which is generally unacceptable.

@aen: You don't read the Ars forums, do you?