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GameStop Manager Suspended After "Games for Grades"
mikesd81 writes "A manager at a GameStop has been suspended for instituting a 'games for grades' policy. 'Brandon Scott says he started a unique new policy in his store to promote good grades in school but now his employer has sent him to detention for speaking out of turn. Scott says he's been suspended by GameStop in the wake of his unconventional "games for grades" policy at an Oak Cliff store.' Apparently, on his own, Scott decided to stop selling video games to any school-age customer unless an adult would vouch for the student's good grades."
I can understand giving kids a discount for good grades...had he done that and been suspended then that would have been wrong, but refusing to sell? That's just bad business.
"So that's World or Mariocraft at $54.95, Halogen World at $54.95 and ECCH Sofa Soccer '08 at $54.95, with tax is um $202.45"
"Duh, how many twenties is that?"
"How many do you have, ah 12 or 13 should do."
"*drool* Dar, don't I get some change back?"
"Oh Certainly, let's see here's 1, 2, 3, say, what grade are you in?"
"Duh, 10."
"Ah, very good, where was I, oh yes, 10, 11, how old are you if you don't mind my asking?"
"Dur. I'm 16."
"Ah, I should have guessed, so let's see, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, there you go have a nice day! Enjoy your games!"
"Duh, oh boy will I! Buh bye!"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
For some reason, Google News (and the original poster) are linking to an Austin TV station's copy of the story, which originated in Dallas -- site of the store and, oh yeah, GameStop's headquarters. Here are some links to the "breaking news story", as I'm sure Channel 8 is touting it:
Before (Sep 13): Store only sells video games to kids with good grades. Wow, great guy, good publicity!
After (Sep 14): GameStop manager suspended after 'games for grades' policy. Hey, bad boy, hurt sales!
Fortunately, I don't feel the need to stop in at GameStop anyway. Not when the Dallas area has independent stores like Game Trade, with a bigger selection, better prices, more knowledgable staff, and a LAN room in the back.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
So some idiot decides to abuse his power (for better or worse does not matter) and loses the company money? How is this remotely surprising? He's a bean counter, if he decides anything but which colour beans to count this week he gets kicked out for someone else.
I like muppets.
They can just say that they fired him for lack of sales and be done with.
There's a high probability that they don't have to give him any reason why they let him go. Honestly, while this might be great and all in theory, I don't see why GameStop wouldn't act the way they did, it would be different if this guy owned his own store and was instituting his own policy. When you work for corporate America you follow the proper channels or you end up like this poor bastard.
The lesson here is: don't try to be someone's Mom unless you are his Mom.
I wish more people in our society would learn this lesson. I'm old enough to not need a Mom to tell me what to do or not to do. Kids, on the other hand, already have a Mom and don't really need 50 of them.
No matter what 'system' he came up with, he should be fired for putting another step in the middle of the "Hi I want to buy this", "Here you go" process.
If anybody thinks this guy is a good Samaritan or should be rewarded, you're living in your own little hippy infested lovey dovey moron world. He just made customers go another block to the 'other of a million' game stores and buy there for the same competitive price.
He also took away a pretty basic freedom / right from all of his younger customers. So maybe he's the one that needs to learn a lesson. I wish I lived close enough to refuse to buy anything from this store ever again. If the government instituted the same policy for merchants - there would be riots in the streets.
Ace
Look, fools, you can't have it both ways. Either there are going to be standards, or there aren't. There's already a standard that you don't sell M-rated games to underage kids, this isn't any different.
If he's unwilling to sell games to kids who are flunking out of school? I TOTALLY LOVE THAT STAND. Seriously, think about it. We have major issues these days with schools being fucked up. If kids aren't making the grade, we may love games, but just letting them play the games is not going to teach them to take school (and work) seriously.
Fuck Gamestop for suspending him. They should be putting him on a pedestal and making this a nationwide policy.
Example: Someone has a car and good grades, but doesn't like to cart his mom with him. Result: No games for you!
God spoke to me.
The story is that a policy that's popular within the community where it was implemented was terminated with prejudice by upper management.
It doesn't have to be a legal or ethical violation to be news.
Chuck E. Cheese used to have something very similar. You bring in your report card, and you would get free tokens for each good grade. When I read the title I thought this is what the manager was doing and thought it was a fantastic idea. After reading his negative-reinforcement approach, however, I agree fully with his dismissal.
Um, I know this is Slashdot, but if you had bothered to RTFA or even just open the page, you might have noticed a photograph of Brandon Scott that appears there. I'm not an expert on racial definitions, but from the picture, it looks to me like Mr. Scott is black.
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
He hasn't the authority to be making those decisions. If the president of GameStop decided to do this it would be fine. When a peon goes behind the President's back and does it, it's a different story.
A manager is a person hired to oversee operations for someone else. He doesn't own the store, he doesn't make the policies, he just runs it. If it was his store, great, but pulling that at a place you don't own could even get you sued for lost revenue in addition to fired.
Also it is stupid because it really isn't a store's job to play police over what people buy. If parents don't want their kids playing games, that is their responsibility. It isn't his responsibility to make that decision for them. Maybe a parent decides that Cs are good enough. Maybe their kid isn't all that bright and Cs are all they can do, and that's doing well for them and thus they are rewarded for it.
As I said: If you want to open a store based on this, go right ahead. However don't be surprised if you find your business suffers for it. If you choose to work for someone else as their representative, your duty is to do what they tell you. If their policy is "Sell to anyone who has the money," it is your duty to do that. You were not hired to play morality police, you were hired to do a job. If they had a policy prohibiting all sales to minors, it would be your duty to do that as well, even if it was costing them money.
I get real tired of people trying to play morality police with others. How about you decide how you and your family are going to live your lives, and I'll decide for me and mine?
Next to my Uni, there was a pub, where you got a free shot of vodka if you shown your index and there was a fresh "exam failed" mark in it.
Those were the days...
At the moment, you have to pass a test to graduate to prove you actually learned something. Most kids don't have any real comprehension that slacking off today is going to have dire consequences tomorrow. So this guy decides to get their attention through something they actually give a shit about, and everyone here on slashdot calls him an idiot.
"It's not his job to be those kids mom". Yep, you are right. So mom could lie and say he got good grades, or just buy her idiot son (with a promising future in the fast food service industry) the latest game. Problem solved.
I don't have a problem with what he was doing, though I think he would have been in a better position to offer discounts for good grades.
I also don't have a problem with certain types of games requiring an adult to purchase them. Again, it's not the store deciding if the kid gets the game or not. The parent will make the ultimate decision. Without the limitation, the parent doesn't get any say.
Oh, for you idiot teenagers with mod points today that will be modding me down as flamebait or a troll. Kiss my ass. You'll have kids one day. Your entire attitude will change.
Note to dad: Uhm, you remember when I was a teenager and was a complete asshole. I'm sorry about that. You were right.
-- Will program for bandwidth
This guy is a fucking moron. I mean the guy from TFA, not the parent poster. I'll refrain from insults for now although I completely disagree on all counts. To get this out of the way, let's ditch the ratings too, they're bullshit. This way there shouldn't be any confusion about standards.
First of all, declining to sell the games to customers on random basis (he defines what "good grades" are, doesn't he?) is not what he was supposed to do. If he thought this would be beneficial to the business, he should've talked to the actual owners. He didn't and he got in trouble.
Secondly, the reason schools are all fucked up is NOT video games. I repeat, video games are not the reason schools suck. I'm rather big on procrastination, and I don't need any games to avoid working on the thesis. Neither do these kids. They'll find something else to do, which would be inevitably more interesting than doing homework. There are many options available, one could argue on slashdot, get drunk with their underage friends, watch paint dry, or, hell, even read a book.
And finally, even if we ignore the above two points, his negative approach is still stupid. Positive reinforcement would've worked just as well if not much better, without attracting any of the criticism. Simply give kids discounts for good grades. I've seen this done in a local computer hardware store, and while the discount wasn't huge, it was a nice touch. Maybe make each subject graded above X points worth a 5pp discount, or something. The more good grades the kids have, the more games they can buy. Everybody wins.
So in conclusion, fuck that guy. I'm glad they put a stop to this retarded policy before it could spread anywhere.
Okay, flat out denying sales to kids, because of bad grades is a bad idea.
Offering a discount to kids with good grades is a good idea.
So far a lot of slashdotters have stated the first, and many have stated the 2nd as a good idea (I think it's probably a good idea myself).
But what I haven't really seen is that denying sales to kids with bad grades might be a bad idea,
because bad grades are not necessarily an indicator of playing too many video games or being lazy.
My grades in high school were often bad (and at times very bad though sometimes I got pretty good grades),
because I hated being there so much. I hated all the busy work. I wasn't learning anything interesting
(I wasn't learning much at all), I was just being told what to do. It wasn't until college that I finally
realized why I did so bad in high school. I did pretty well at the junior college, and I'm currently doing
well pretty well at the university. Both of which are far more difficult academically-wise (my high school
before it was shut down was one of the worst performing schools in San Francisco).
So yeh, giving a discount to kids with good grades while neither rewarding nor punishing the kids who
didn't get good grades would have been a much smarter route to go.
You know what? There's an old saying: "It takes a village to raise a child"
Fat jokes aside, that's substantially true. It seems to me that before everyone went lawsuit-happy, other adults that didn't even *know* a kid would tell them to stop doing something (assuming they were being miscreants), and maybe even drag them home by the ear to their parents.
Now, we have one of the very first responses to an article about a guy that was worried about kids wasting too much time on video games and not enough on homework displaying an attitude that suggests that he not only doesn't have children, but that he doesn't give a crap about how any prospective children he might have will do in school.
I love that idea...of course, if my kids aren't getting good grades, they're usually doing a lot of homework and complaining that dad gets to play video games, but they have to do homework...
It probably doesn't make good business sense, especially in this day and age, for a manager to try and make that kind of decision on his own, and I have no problem with GameStop for firing him...social engineering isn't his job. I get that. On the other hand, if said manager opened a similar store nearby on his own, and with the same policy, I'd probably shop there instead of GameStop.
If you think this is a reward or punishment, you're nuts. And "socialists" would have made a lot more sense than "communists" in your bold declaration.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law