This whole debacle really stands out as one of the worst examples of corporate hubris I think I have ever seen or been a part of. They simply put far too much faith in the boom bubbles that the business was caught in at the time; whether it was the Playstation Era (Circa 1995-2006) or the Wii/DS explosion.
A lot of folks have hit it right on the head when they said they werent forward thinking enough and its true they werent. At all. On a very general level, they had little or no grasp of emergent market trends and utterly failed to find any sort of balance instore in regards to marketing their pre-orders (which took up far too much of the space they were meant to be selling actual product in), preowned (took far too much new-release space and wasnt priced sensibly) and finally, back-catalogue (which suffered because of the first two and almost utterly killed of the PC side of things completely).
On a store management level, they started fucking things up a LONG time ago ever since they enforced far too much conformity amongst store management practices. They effectively took Managers sales skills away from them (yknow, one of the KEY FUCKING CRITERIA that got them the position in the first place) by making them follow the exact same layout and template format that the other 400 stores did. If you didnt have any political favours to call in (read: backs to stab), you couldnt get away with trying to manage the store anywhere near to halfway as uniquely as you would like to.
I actually recall when I first started back in 2000 (yes, I am an old and withered husk), that store managers were actually granted a significant amount of autonomy as to how they managed their store they had freedom to arrange displays how they saw fit, POS, staff rotas etc
so long as their figures backed up their management styles which more often than not they did. Dont get me wrong, they werent given absolute free reign over their store for obvious reasons and had to adhere to some fundamental procedural things, but by and large it made every store unique and genuinely gave customers almost completely different shopping experiences.
Of course the upshot of everyone following identikit plans and creating identikit stores, was that it took that much longer to root out the idle, useless managers from the genuinely hardworking ones who had their creativity and innovations suffocated. So as you might reasonably infer, what started as snowflakes of incompetence soon turned into a great big motherfucking rolling snowball of ineptitude that slowly dragged each region down with only a few holdouts still managing to look decent.
Then on-top of this forced unilateral conformity came the mismanagement that pretty much sealed the deal for staff and customers alike. The suits at head office went far too big on incentivising and which resulted in hard and often desperate re-training of staff to achieve what were hugely inflated and sometimes just downright unachievable targets. As we all know, this made the staff miserable as sin because GAME never could properly analyse the individual strengths of store staff (some were better at fast throughput at the till, while some were better at succinct and effective up-selling on the shopfloor) and so naturally everyone struggled and little by little (despite how nice these staff may have been previously) the misery and disinterest gets passed onto the staff (often compounded by hour cutbacks which meant you couldnt properly staff the shop floor anyway) and so you have a classic shit cascade where everybody was miserable and you only turned up to work because your friends were there and you enjoyed games, but no longer enjoyed selling them.
In a classic case of life imitating art, it was like living in some twisted GAME version of Clerks it really was. We all got hooked in because we had such a deep-seated and innocent love for games (we wanted everyone else to know about our favourite hobby; thats why we were such good sales people for the most part because we just wouldnt shut the fuck up) that it seemed like the dream job. For just about all of us, at least in the early days, it started out that way and then gradually, through conformity to common-sense barren practices, an over-zealousness to incentivize extra-curricular bullshit and just reams and reams of suffocating bureaucracy our love for the job (and some us our hobby) eroded and we just stopped giving a shit quite frankly.
From the suits getting paid their 6-7 figure salaries (and then jumping off the ship when it all went to shit due to their chronically abysmal mismanagement *cough* LM *cough*) all the way through to every single bad and pointless thing that fucked up a job that originally was pretty enjoyable, the only thing that remained as I said were your friends and at that point you just knew, you KNEW, however far in the back of your mind that something would start to give. Im just surprised its taken this long and like I have said before; I feel genuinely sorry and impassioned toward each and every friend that I made at GAME who was shit on by the senior management and who will also lose their jobs as the end result of their accumulative incompetence.
Its cliché but it holds true; many of those guys in my experience were too good for that place and I hope theyve all found (or will find) opportunities beyond the purgatory that GAME has turned into for them.
The quick-buck suits on the other hand, who didnt give two shits about the product or the people who initally worked with such a bright enthusiasm (likely to never be seen again at bricks n mortar retail), I hope all of those detestable fuckmuppets drown in the afterbirth of their collective incompetence and immorality.
