Beginning of the end for GAME?

[Chindie]

i see game **** their uk employees in the ass the very same way the **** the irish - no redundancy or payment for notice period

and this time they waited til they had everything boxed and sent back to tell them. classy.

No they didn't. Staff were aware of the redundancy thing pretty much as soon as administration was announced. It's one of the things that happens with administration, there's no money to pay redundancy. All employees have been sent a claim form to help with payments owed including applying for statutory redundancy via the govt. I got mine yesterday despite being ineligible for redundancy.

[timbaughan]

The investment group, Opcapita, will announce on Sunday it is buying a large part of the troubled Game Group out of administration, the BBC understands.

The deal will keep open 333 stores and save 3,100 jobs.

[Chindie]

The people who bought Comet. They'd been rejected once by the lenders. One party involved must have gotten worried.

[Chindie]

Things largely back to normal it seems now.

[b23avfc]

I really liked / like gamestation staff (surprisingly )

Seriously though I did/do. Game had nice people but an extreme of careless oiks, or absolute extremists like the xbox fanboy at the Bull Ring store. Gamestation seemed to have the better staff and from my dealings with Game when I was an account manager for a video games distributor, Game were an absolute nightmare to work with at that level.

Glad gamestations are still open. Hopefully I'll be able to use my credit there soon too.

[Rino8]

Went in to buy a wireless controller from them a few days ago, £40, £23 at PC World. I wonder if they're aware why they're going under.

[VillaGoMarching]

So what's happening with Game/Gamestations current stores? are the new company putting any money in? Can't say i've noticed if they're getting new release game or not.

[Ingram85]

Went in to buy a wireless controller from them a few days ago, £40, £23 at PC World. I wonder if they're aware why they're going under.

They probably had a second hand one at £45 to encourage you to subliminally grab the new one at a cheaper price. Bargain! Oh wait, its a clever business strategy that the customer wouldnt understand.

[Chindie]

So what's happening with Game/Gamestations current stores? are the new company putting any money in? Can't say i've noticed if they're getting new release game or not.

From what I know they're basically getting things going again, they should start receiving new stock again shortly if they've not already.

[Chindie]

Went in to buy a wireless controller from them a few days ago, £40, £23 at PC World. I wonder if they're aware why they're going under.

They probably had a second hand one at £45 to encourage you to subliminally grab the new one at a cheaper price. Bargain! Oh wait, its a clever business strategy that the customer wouldnt understand.

...sigh.

[Ingram85]

I wasnt being serious

[VillaGoMarching]

Might be worth people looking here, Game/Gamestation seriously getting rinsed. I traded in a few games but have no idea what to spend the money on. probably get some points for the Euro 2012 expansion for fifa. People on there saying they've got £100's in credit. Bit mental really.

[darrenm]

If they could only get Skylanders in to sell they'd be OK.

[VillaGoMarching]

they had it for £25 quid in gamestation by me.

[Risso]

Well, despite being saved from the brink of disaster, it seems that in my local GAME at least, no lessons have been learned, and that shopping there is still a miserable experience, and they are still staffed by useless c***s whose customer service skills extend no further than trying to flog pre-orders and add ons. I went in today to buy a Vita. As it's a bank holiday over here, town was quiet, and so was Game. I decided which package to buy, and bought a couple of extra games to keep the kids entertained on the flights when we go away next week. I also saw that they were offering a ten pounds voucher with the purchase of any handheld. I deliberately asked the spotty little twunt serving me if I could use the voucher in this transaction, as essentially it was two purchases, ie Vita plus free games, then two full price games on top. He replied in the affirmative, so off we toddled to the till.

Well first, the little eejit couldn't work out how to put the package through, and got the price wrong on three occasions (all too high) and had to call his manager to help him. Between the two of them, they took 10 minutes to get to the correct price for what I'd bought. Then, the little idiot gave me a ten pound voucher at the end of the transaction.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Your ten pound voucher" came the reply.

"But I wanted to use that in THIS transaction"

"You can't, it has to be two separate transactions"

"But I specifically asked you about that not ten minutes ago"

"Oh yeah, so you did."

"Well then, I want my ten pounds back please"

"Erm, I don't think we can"

"Well, either you do, or you refund me the whole lot, and I'll go and buy the same items from HMV"

Back comes the manager, and another 10 minute faffathon ensues while they press random buttons on the till to no avail. Eventually, I had to suggest to them that they refunded the two games, then charged me them again, minus the ten pound voucher, which eventually they did.

Then, at the end of a good 25 minute mess around, the bum-fluffed little scrote DARED to ask me if I was interested in any sodding pre-orders, "as there are some pretty sweet new titles on their way mate!" MATE, do I look like I want to be your friend?! You've just wasted most of my lunch break with your utter incompetence you little wazzock!

[lapal_fan]

You don't seem like a nice person. That's the only thing I can take from that entire post. Well done.

[Stevo985]

Somewhere, Chindie is posting about how rude the customer he had to serve today was!

I'm aware that Chindie no longer works for Game, and even if he did, he wouldn't be serving Risso

[Risso]

You don't seem like a nice person. That's the only thing I can take from that entire post. Well done.

I'm a lovely person who normally walks round in a state of Zen like tranquility! But bad and rude service is one thing that really does my head in, and even in the Isle of Man where good customer service is seen as carrying on a conversation on a mobile phone while serving, GAME stand out as a beacon of terribleness.

[Chindie]

Having had experience of Game/station till work, I'll say this...

The package you wanted will have thrown together by head office and usually require you to do something that doesn't make any sense or will require some other special treatment. For example, the usual way to do bundles was to scan the items, whack in one or both of 2 seperate 'When Bought With' codes which tell the till to reduce prices in line with offers, and pray when you hit the total it worked.

However sometimes they'd **** it up and you'd have some items that when bought together auto-discounted, and if you put in either of the WBWs it wouldn't work at all. Sometimes offers would come down with a new 'WBW' code that would only work with certain circumstances - for instance during my time we got sent down an offer that let you buy anything in the store to get 20% off any Gamestation brand accessory. That threw up problems when working with other special offers and especially with console bundles.

The really popular one, and I bet this is what happened to you, Risso, is a bundle deal clashing with other items to purchase. You would buy a bundle and some other stuff and because the till only knows to do a discount when the WBW codes and certain items are in the same transaction, you'd often find the extra games are part of some other offer and the till preferred doing that offer to the bundle. And the only way you could find out if that was going to happen was to do it.

What I bet then happened is the bloke on the till was starting to get concerned that he'd **** up the transaction so much he forgot about your £10 discount voucher... and then it's really, really hard to fix that after the fact - refunding discounted/bundled stuff is a pain in the arse, especially if it comes with a voucher. The manager will have been pissed off that he's had to sort the sales assistant out and so the sales assistant has then been really, really aware that he needs to be doing the preorder/'the customer is a walking wallet' bullshit because the manager is definitely paying attention to him now he's **** up so he best jump through all the hoops.

The voucher itself will throw up a problem too. There were at least 3 different ways I can think of that discounts from a receipt (i.e. a voucher or a preorder deposit) would work. Sometimes you just scanned them and they would autodiscount. Some had to scanned with the till in a particular mode. And others had to be scanned with the till set up in another mode after you've hit what amounts to the 'Checkout' button.

For what it's worth, if I'd served you, I'd have completely disregarded the extra games and said to you 'We'll do those as a seperate transaction afterwards so you can use your voucher straight away' (secretly also knowing that it's better for me to do that because chances are your extra games will **** something up, and you'll go away happy either way despite having to stand around for another couple of minutes and get out your credit card again, and it makes my figures look better at the end of the days takings). I'd have put your bundle through the till, checked that it worked before I even asked you to get your loyalty cards or whatever, if it hadn't worked you hit the keys to get you back to 'Tilling' void off the WBW, try the other one, if that doesn't work try no WBWs, and if that doesn't work call the manager. Chances are you won't need to call the manager in that case. Whilst I'm doing all that I'll chat to you about the games, let you know anything I know about them you might be interested in (DLC, what people are saying about it, whatever).

Then get the sale done, say to you 'and theres your voucher, lets get these put through', and pray I know what method the voucher needs to be used in, which is unlikely because the manager wouldn't have told me and chances are it's the first of these vouchers I've had to use. Hopefully it's one of the autodiscount on scan ones.

After that, with a Vita purchase I might mention if theres a big release for the Vita coming up for preorder if I know the manager is listening or I'm in his bad books for whatever reason, more likely I'd just mention trade in's for when the kids finish the games and are bored with them and say have a good day.

Basically, it's not so much the sales assistants fault, it's the tills and the company. The tills are shit and the company occasionally cobbles together new offers that just add another layer of complexity to doing what should be really simple things. Bundles should always auto discount. Vouchers should always just be scan to redeem. But instead they make it more complex and then throw in the bullshit sales schtick (everyone is monitored on them hitting certain things at the tills - you're supposed to mention loyalty cards, add to the sale, preorders, trade-ins and preowned purchases to every customer and you get in trouble if you don't) which means everyone gets muddled or pissed off when things go wrong.

[hogso]

Man, the tills in Game/Gamestation must be properly shit then. Having worked on the till in a supermarket and been a customer at them ofc, they are able to cope with multi-buy discounts and the like perfectly well. It can't be too hard to get it right in a retail store too surely? From the companies point of view I mean, obviously if they mess things up there's not much the operator can do about it.

If you ever got anything wrong on a till when I used to work in a supermarket you could just void it off, and put the item through again and adjust the price on the fly, for single or multiple items.