GameStop Manager Suspended After "Games for Grades" 539
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."
Where's the story here? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if he had made it a discount, it could have been a win-win. It would save the kid some money (and possibly be an incentive to work harder) and make good publicity for his store. But just stopping is bad business sense. The customer will just go elsewhere.
Re:They can just say that they fired him for lack (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where's the story here? (Score:5, Interesting)
It doesn't have to be a legal or ethical violation to be news.
really? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gamestop is famous (or infamous) for having generally odd store managers. You typically get the Simpsons Comic-Book Guy variety, the hyperactive upseller, or you get the nutjob that tells you that he spoke with the Bungie devs and that "Halo 3 is TOTALLY coming out on the Playstation 3 in Q4. You should really pre-order it". So a gamestop manager that wants my kids to have good grades is a welcome change.
I think Gamestop was justified in firing the guy, but I applaud him for at least sparking a dialog on the issue. If GameStop is smart, they'd find some way to turn this into a promotional deal ($20 off with a straight-A report card etc., etc.).
Re:This guy is an idiot (Score:3, Interesting)
Not necessarily (Score:2, Interesting)
Do NOT condemn the salesman... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:GREAT Business, GREAT sense (Score:1, Interesting)
Faulty logic? (Score:2, Interesting)
Bad rap (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
Re:GREAT Business, GREAT sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Invent a promo in your own business.... (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sure the kids who buy the most are not the ones who have the best grades. Inventing something like this at someone else's store is not acceptable because it will kill sales.
He is not a marketing expert there and this special promo is definitely not a good promo to be honest.....
just my 2c
ps: yes I also felt like making a lot of changes
So how old was this educational marketing genius ? That will suck on his resume, unless his next application is in education...
Where's the grades for SEX initiative? (Score:3, Interesting)
Prostitution? Please... this is just business. I am such a capitalist, sometimes I scare myself.
Speaking seriously though, I can see things like Virginia tech not happening if guys had a sexual outlet to deal with stress. I've often wondered if we should legalize prostitution and have laws regarding involuntary celibacy (i.e. government sponsored sex, to keep men from turning into rapists / pedophiles)
Re:GREAT Business, GREAT sense (Score:3, Interesting)
PLEASE tell me that was sarcasm. When he was talking about daycare, he WAS talking about everything from 3 years to high school graduation. I just graduated from high school, and it would seem that school only exists now to serve two purposes: 1) to indoctrinate kids with the belief that authority is beyond reproach and 2) to give kids a place to go for 7-8 hours a day.
Honestly, I was constantly harassed by the tougher kids. Whenever a teacher would see it and report it, the principal would always say "Oh, well, we can't fix him, so we won't even bother." I hated school. I hated the fact that the kid who copied his homework from someone else 2 minutes before class and then failed the test got the same grade as me, just because he did the homework. high school isn't about learning to think; now it's about rote memorization and busywork.
Re:GREAT Business, GREAT sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, I studied for some AP tests and audited college classes until I could get into a university as a math major. I'm 16 now, in my senior year in college as a math major.
So let me get to the root of my anger. If someone had tried to make me "get off my ass and get responsible" when I was a 14 year old based on my grades, they would have not known that I skipped my Algebra class to sneak into Calculus lectures at a nearby university, or that I poured over Physics and Economics textbooks at home instead of performing pointless county mandated busy work at home.
I invested a lot of thought into my choices, and if he has any advice I will be happy to take it into consideration. But I highly resent any attempt to actively discriminate against me and make my life more difficult solely on the basis of something that does not affect anyone else but me.
The grades of his customers are not the business of this Manager, and I'm glad he was suspended.
Re:GREAT Business, GREAT sense (Score:5, Interesting)
You may not think so now, but you'll be glad later that school was like that in terms of authority. Yes, schools try to indoctrinate kids that way, but thankfully they do it BADLY. You've been blessed with a healthy skepticism and disrespect for authority that will hopefully serve you well through the rest of your life. It's one thing to get it from a cultural perspective, it's another to see first hand that many adults really don't know what they're doing, and can't always muddle through.
Re:Bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
This mentality goes directly against the sense of community that forms civilization.
Parents now, nor at any point throughout history, are not able to watch their children 24/7. Much in the way that animals play and socialize to learn how to fit into the pack (and hence survive), we have evolved as a social species for much the same purpose.
When I was a kid, if I was playing in a neighbor's yard uninvited, you bet I would be chased off by an angry property owner. Even more, I could expect the owner to have a talk with my mom or dad later on. When I was in high school, a bunch of my friends and I went swimming in a privately-owned pond one summer night. We had apparently awoken the guy who owned the pond, and he chased us off with a shotgun. He never shot it, and he never pointed it at anyone.
In those days, and they weren't THAT long ago, even if we had complained to the police about the old man and the shotgun, they would have laughed and asked us what the hell we were doing there anyway. Today, he would be in some pretty serious shit, despite doing nothing to harm anyone.
These days, we are so scared of repercussions, that we let kids get away with whatever they want. We let other adults get away with everything they want. Everybody's so willing to play the lawsuit lottery that we'd rather let the guy at the bar make inappropriate comments than to shove a beer bottle up his ass sideways.
We'd rather let kids run riot than to step up and place community limits on what they can get away with.
I'm certainly not suggesting that someone else should discipline my kids, but they can yell at them all they want if it's merited.
my 2 cents (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
It takes a village to raise a child (Score:3, Interesting)
And you guys wonder why many people think of the stuff as digital crack.
Face it, these things are going to be so immersive in less than twenty years that they'll have to be a controlled substance. Otherwise, when the apocalypse comes, no one is even going to notice until their controller stops working.
Re:MODULATE PARENT RATIO (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:GREAT Business, GREAT sense (Score:3, Interesting)
-Rick
Re:GREAT Business, GREAT sense (Score:2, Interesting)
I have two in high school and aside from learning math, English, history (yes event the correct history), science, engineering, and music; they are having fun at it. Sure, they admit it is work, but, they see the end goal of it.
My boys may be unique this way but it is the reason for high school.
Re:Where's the grades for SEX initiative? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's also ways of making prostitution illegal without locking up prostitutes. In Sweden, the laws against prostitution effectively make pimping and being a john illegal, but the prostitutes themselves are not criminals and are given resources (drug treatment, job training) to help them out of it. They've significantly reduced the levels of prostitution and sex trafficking is almost nil, while the neighboring countries that have legal prostitution have huge problems with sex trafficking. It's not perfect, but it's done a lot of good.