GameStop employee closes store and leaves for good
A former GameStop manager couldn’t take the company’s unreasonable – and unsafe – demands any longer and quit on the spot by closing the store. Taylor Neubert was supposed to be working from 10 a.m. through 11 p.m., entirely by herself, while she finished serving her two weeks’ notice, but Neubert told Kotaku that she decided enough was enough.
She and some sympathetic customers encouraged the remaining shoppers to finish their business, and Neubert closed up for the last time, posting a note on the door that read:
“GameStop overworks and underpays! They don’t care about their employees! I quit!”
The note made its way to the GameStop subreddit, where other employees congratulated Neubert on making a stand.
The frustrations the fueled Neubert’s decision to quit stretched back months. She was previously a store manager and, like others, was forced to manage two stores simultaneously – without an accompanying payraise or, in many cases, even other employees to help her work either location during her 11-hour shifts.
Then, GameStop cut managers' overtime pay. Neubert demoted herself to an assistant role and took a $6-per-hour paycut while still having to run the store herself and deal with corporate’s increasing demands and sales quotas.
“I’m not getting paid anything right now, you know,” she told Kotaku. “So for me to be working these long days, and they took away our bonuses, they took away our incentives and stuff like that, I got angry at that, because I was like, I’m working all of this for a paycheck that barely pays my bills right now.”
Neubert read the story of another GameStop manager being fired after thieves stole $5,000 worth of PS5 consoles and, after having no one available to help her cover yet another 11-hour shift alone, she’d had enough.
Stories such as this are becoming more common as GameStop places unreasonable demands on its employees and invests more time and money into shaky ventures such as meme stock and its failed NFT market.
