A GameStop at Gateway Mall in Lincoln, Nebraska was closed last weekend after all four employees walked off the job. A message taped to the glass told customers to shop for games elsewhere, listing several local businesses that "respects its employees" more than GameStop.
"We regret to inform you that we all quit," reads the message posted to the Lincoln subreddit. "Our District Manager has no respect for us as employees or as human beings. We have been told by our district manager that we were supposed to have had this store achieving sales quotas and running perfectly 6 months ago. Which was 3 months before a lot of us even got hired. Unfortunately, despite the staff’s best efforts, we are not god."
As reported by Kotaku, calls to the store were directed to a communications firm that refused to comment on the situation, although they did say that the store would be reopening soon. The store's former manager, Frank Maurer, was far more forthcoming with the issues he suffered while working at GameStop.
"For my health I had to leave," he told Kotaku. Maurer started working at GameStop in late 2021, but soon found that the job wasn't all it was cracked up to be. He said he was never properly trained as store manager and was also never given time to train staff. And then there was the district manager, who Maurer said was "abusive verbally" and would "constantly threaten people’s jobs" for not meeting unrealistic quotas.
This isn't the first time GameStop employees have quit en-masse in Nebraska. "There have actually been four walkouts since August 2021 because of him,” wrote a former employee on Facebook. "Two at each location. The first ones were kept pretty quiet though."
Maurer said that he started at $17 an hour while the employees under him made just $9--Nebraska's minimum wage. When asked if workers had ever considered unionization, he replied that the company's "churn and burn" philosophy made it difficult for employees to organize.
This report comes just six months after a similar report noted low morale, abusive managers and customers, long hours, and low pay among GameStop employees. Things seem to be only getting worse as the company continues to lose cash and pivots hard towards cryptocurrency as a stop-gap financial solution.