GameStop Is Changing up the Shady Circle of Life Program to Make Meeting Quotas More Accommodating for Employees
GameStop’s shady Circle of Life program was doing more harm than good. The close supervision of sales under this program started causing employees of the video game retail and resale franchise to use dishonest tactics in order to meet certain quotas. The GameStop performance score program was enacted to monitor employee performance by tracking the percentage of new and pre-owned games that they sell and comparing them to their overall sales percentage, but it actually forces them to lie about the availability of new game titles.
You can find out more about their shady sales tactics in our article covering the GameStop Circle of Life program.
This ended up as a bit of a scandal, as GameStop employees were threatened with termination if quotas were not met. Not wanting to lose their job, employees began to lie about availability of new games in order to keep their sales percentage in balance.
GameStop corporate issued a statement about the issue, letting both employees and consumers know that they were working on correcting the issue, and managers have started making reports to Kotaku that there are going to be some changes happening to the program. When the new changes to the program roll out on Sunday or Monday, the Circle of Life program will still be in place, but GameStop corporate will no longer be monitoring the scores of individual employees, taking some of the weight off of the shoulders of the employees themselves. Instead, each GameStop will have a single CoL number for their entire store.
The program will also be evaluated differently. Instead of primarily focusing on a percentage score made up of the combination of pre-owned sales, trade-ins, pre-orders, and rewards cards, GameStop will also be evaluating new sales, which intends to fix the issue of employees being punished or terminated for selling new games.