GameStop appears to have canceled a company-wide contest that awarded Black Friday work hours in exchange for a TikTok dance. Yes, you read that right – GameStop was going to give two workers an extra short shift if they pulled off a synchronized dance. After many facets of the internet pointed out just how terrible an idea that was, the competition disappeared from the GameStop employee site.
We at TheGamer picked up on this contest yesterday from GameStop’s Conference portal. The site is a hub for GameStop’s annual company conference, but also has a section for employee contests. If you go to the portal now, you’ll see the usual competitions like selling the most copies of Watch Dogs Legion or building the best Xbox Series X display. Before, though, there was a contest that challenged store managers to get their employees to perform a group TikTok dance.
“The winner of the challenge will receive an Echo 8, Echo Auto, $100 VISA gift card and 10 additional labor hours to use during Black Friday week,” the post read. “Imagine what you could do with all those prizes.”
With “10 additional labor hours,” one imagines that the winning employees would win more work during retail’s most stressful weekend. Some pointed out that the wording was unclear, and maybe the winner would get 10 hours of paid time off. But to many users commenting on the GameStop subreddit, and several media outlets that ran stories on the contest, the leading interpretation was that GameStop was giving out shifts as a prize.
Now the contest is scrubbed from the employee portal. A Reddit user also claims it was removed from the GameStop Facebook group. All we have to remember it is the sample dance that was put on YouTube.
While piling on GameStop has been a popular trend for years (sometimes at the expense of its poor employees), 2020 has seen the company resort to some shady practices. Its response to the Xbox Series X pre-order demand was to create a fake queue to lighten its server load. Earlier, when stay-at-home orders were going into effect, the company tried to claim it was essential so it could stay open. The State of Massachusetts had to intervene to force the store to close. In light of all this, it’s not hard to believe that the company would ask employees to compete for extra store hours under the guise of fun.
It’s sad, because there’s some people doing really cool things at GameStop. Too bad they’re not the ones in charge.
Sources: Reddit, GameStop Conference portal
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Sergio is the Lead News Editor for TheGamer. But usually he asks people to call him “Serg” because he wants to sound cool like the guy from System of a Down. He began as a convention reporter for FLiP Magazine and Albany Radio’s The Shaw Report to get free badges to Comic-Con. Eventually he realized he liked talking to game developers and discovering weird new indie games. Now he brings that love of weird games to TheGamer, where he tries to talk about them in clickable ways so you grow to love them too. When he’s not stressing over how to do that, he’s a DM, Cleric of Bahamut, cosplay boyfriend, and occasional actor.
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