Game Crazy Hollywood Video Lied concerning promotion to make "MVP card" sales quota Moline Illinois

I was a Manager for Game Crazy Back in 04'. My District Manager Ryan Tallion told me to use peoples store credit to pre order games, or get them an MVP membership without there permission or I would be fired. Guess what I was fired any way a couple months later for doing this. Also I was not paid for my last 2 weeks of work at the store.

Let me start by saying I personally refuse to cheat on any of the sales numbers we are forced to push.  However, I can also say from experience that this company is crazy when it comes to numbers.  They've gone through several CEOs and had so many corporate level personnel changes in the past year it's ridiculous.  The company is doing horribly and has been panicking for over a year now.  Things are looking grim and they don't seem to have any idea how to correct the problem.

That said, there is SERIOUS pressure put on store-level employees to achieve generally impossible goals.  The goals for MVPs and hardware attach (how much money you manage to add on to any system sales) are particularly bad.  For MVPs, the company recently went from ranking us based on percentage of MVP opportunities (sales on accounts that already had an MVP didn't count against you) to ranking us based on the percentage of MVPs versus your total sales.  This has made things much worse because if you are doing your job and selling a lot of MVPs you are essentially crippling your future numbers.

People are getting threatened constantly with write-ups and termination for not achieving these absurdly high goals.  When the economy is in a recession and jobs are so hard to come by, people start feeling the need to keep their existing job at any cost.  Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, this means that the employees cheat.  Sometimes it's harmless to the customer and it just means cheating the system in a way that is mutually beneficial (like perhaps marking a game down more to make the MVP free for the customer), but unfortunately in other cases it ends up hurting customers.

As for this disc buffing card, I get the feeling it might not just be in IL and WI.  I won't say where I am for obvious reasons, but I was never told we sold the cards.  We charge $2 each for disc buffing, and as far as I was aware the cards were only given to people as a perk for signing up for MVP.  The other day I was cleaning behind the counter and came across a disc buffing counter sign that mentioned the card cost $4.99 and I was really thrown off by that.

Honestly, though, my store never charges for disc buffs anyway because it does more harm than good.  Since everything we're ranked on is on a per-transaction basis, we'd all rather just do the buffing for free (also makes a lot of people really happy and we've earned a lot of new customers that way) and save the transaction.  That helps our percentages and doesn't kill our dollars per transaction numbers.  Despite the obvious fact that the company desperately needs money, it makes far more sense to the average employee to say screw the $2 because actually collecting it hurts your chance at being employed at the end of the week.

Still, there is never an excuse to lie to a customer and take advantage of them.  I'm all for cheating the system when the company takes the hit if they're the one causing the problem, but it's a totally different thing to steal money from a person that is not at fault.

In the interest of full disclosure I am a disgruntled former manager in the same district as this store.

I know several managers who are still working in this district and two of them confirmed to me that they have been instructed via conference call by Diane Walters that to them the 5-disc buff cards "don't exist" and they are only to sell MVP memberships to customers wanting disc buffing.

Be careful folks, if the company is willing to do something like this for relatively small things, what are they willing to do on the big ones? If they lack integrity here can you REALLY trust them to honor their service contracts?