Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

This article is from the official account of Wechat: game Research Society (ID:yysaag), author: sleep with algae

"Why don't you rob it?"

At 03:30 on February 1, Memphis police rushed to the GameStop store in the Winchester Road neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. The video shows a light-colored compact car backing into the front door of the store and five suspects swarming in and snatching seven PS5.

Shortly after 2: 00 a.m. on February 4, the police again dispatched the police ten kilometers away in Germantown, where the crime was still a GameStop store. Five cars came to the scene, seven suspects came out, and there was a clear division of labor. Several people on the lookout smashed open the front door with sledgehammers, took items worth thousands of dollars and left quickly.

In the early hours of February 5, another GameStop in downtown Memphis was hit by a car again, and several suspects removed a large number of game consoles and handles.

03:49 on February 6th, a GameStop on the outskirts of the city was also ransacked by 10 suspects, robbing an unknown amount of game merchandise and money from the cash register.

The above pictures are from the Memphis Police official Facebook, which occurred in several game store robberies in Memphis, Tennessee, in the first week of last month. In the same week, stores in Kansas were looted, and at least 12 game stores in Los Angeles were targeted by armed robbers. If you extend the time to the past three months, the total number of similar robberies in the United States can reach nearly 30.

Physical game stores, originally favored only by children and players, have suddenly become a new choice for American robbers. And there are far more behind these blurred surveillance scenes than we can think of.

1. "We're the target now." after the robbery, WREG-TV, a local media in Memphis, came to the GameStop in Germantown to ask for details, but several shop assistants explicitly refused to answer any questions about the robbery.

However, the owner of the shop next door gladly accepted the request for an interview. He said that in the year and a half since he was here, the GameStop had been broken into for the fourth or fifth time. The last time they were patronized by bandits, just before Christmas last year, we did not see them make too many effective measures.

After several robberies in Los Angeles, the local GameStop posted a reward order outside the store and solicited information about the suspects at a price of $5000.

Unlike the way other places break in late at night, the robbers chose to do it before the store was closed. With the dictation of the staff concerned and well-lit surveillance video, the police were able to restore the complete story of the incident at that time.

The three suspects, wearing hooves and masks, walked into the store without exception. For the first few minutes, they will pretend to be picky, just like other ordinary customers. Maybe the necessary conditions for committing the crime were confirmed in the process, or they stepped on it a little in advance.

As soon as the only clerk in the store opened the door of the backstage warehouse, they immediately started, rushed in, waved pistols and pushed the clerk away, then picked up a few PS5 and ran out.

Although the modus operandi in several cases are very similar, the police believe that the robbers are not the same group of people, and they also feel that these criminals must be related to each other.

Three days ago, Los Angeles police arrested one of the criminals, but there was no news that anyone else had been arrested. The shop assistant, who witnessed the incident, still refused to answer questions, but the head of GameStop damage prevention spoke to the local media. For their employees, he said, the robbers were armed, well-built and looked violent. "We're the target now, yes."

As for the reason why he has been repeatedly robbed, he thinks it has something to do with the fact that next-generation hosts such as PS5 are no longer out of stock. The market demand of PS5 is still not small, and the unit price of goods is high, which is very profitable for robbers who buy goods for zero yuan. More importantly, the gray chain of selling the stolen goods is still swaggering under the sun.

two。 "whenever someone calls to ask if PS5 is in stock, I'm a little worried." similar to the game stores that sell consoles such as PS5, TCG cards, whose prices have hit record highs, have also become a favorite of robbers in recent years.

Also in the week when American game stores were frequently broken into at the beginning of last month, the Japanese Police Agency also arrested two card thieves. They are suspected of breaking the window of a shop in Chiyoda district of Tokyo last year, breaking display cabinets and snatching a large number of Pokemon cards and game king cards.

According to statistics, they took a total of 539 cards that night, worth a total of about 2660 million yen. One of the Filipino men, who seemed to know nothing about TCG, claimed after his arrest that he had taken part in the theft only because he had "applied for a dark part-time job".

TCG cards, especially Pokemon cards, have been targeted by more and more criminals because of their record-breaking prices in recent years. The price of some rare cards, calculated in terms of "unit price per gram", is already much more valuable than many precious metals.

Last year, a card store was ransacked in Minnesota. The suspect patiently dug two big holes from the store next door and took two hours to remove a large number of Pokemonka cards. Although there is no sky-high price tag, it still contains a lot of rare cards, which cost the shopkeeper as much as $250000 in one night alone.

In contrast, the price of PS5 is not so exaggerated, but it is better than "unit price stability". On the threshold of committing a crime, there is no need for prisoners to be knowledgeable and remember complex rare card information. As long as you recognize the blue-and-white box with PS5 printed on it, you can steadily carry away $500.

There is another important reason why the prisoners began to target these game-related products-the security level of the game store and the difficulty of getting rid of the stolen goods are much lower than those of traditional valuables such as jewelry and precious metals.

When they sell stolen goods and resell gold and silver jewelry, they will inevitably be asked about the source of the goods. in such an alarming situation, buyers refuse to accept or lower prices, or report to the police to arrest them. But things like consoles, games and TCG cards rarely happen.

According to US police statistics, most of the stolen goods were resold through platforms such as Ebay, Craigslist and Amazon. Buyers will not ask too much about their origin, as long as make sure that the authentic, appearance is not too much wear and tear, the deal will end happily. Because nowadays, few people associate them with stolen goods.

These "zero yuan wholesale" goods are easy to go and easy to come. Compared with the tight security of gold shops and jewelry stores, the response of game shops and card shops is about equal to nothing. Even if the value of the goods increases, they still belong to the retail industry, and it is impossible to have a budget to install too sophisticated anti-theft equipment or to hire security guards 24 hours a day.

When the supply shortage of PS5 is over, physical game stores like GameStop always have a few off-the-shelf for people to buy, which is what the robbers would like to see. Frequent robberies have made a lot of GameStop clerks have similar anxiety about what should have been a normal inquiry: "whenever someone calls to ask if PS5 is in stock, I am a little worried."

They are still at the forefront of physical games. But the industry is going from bad to worse, and apart from taking away their salaries, there is no guarantee for their safety.

3. "I was robbed, and then I was fired." as the undisputed leader in the field of physical games, GameStop is not doing well under the dual impact of the transformation of players' consumption habits and the epidemic. Although stock prices soared back to a wave of blood in 2021 due to the battle between Reddit users and Wall Street short sellers, the decline did not stop. In its latest earnings report (third quarter of fiscal 2022), net sales fell 30% from a year earlier, with a net loss of $19 million.

In order to make the results look good, GameStop has been trying to find ways. In addition to the partial move such as entering NFT, if you can't open source, you can only do something about reducing expenditure. In their 2020 results, they achieved savings of $409 million in sales and management costs through "continuous cost optimization measures." When it falls into every store, this "optimization" is called layoffs.

After the recent robberies of GameStop NFT games stores in the United States, foreign media Polygon interviewed a number of anonymous GameStop employees. According to company regulations, they have no right to speak to the media, so they have never been seen in previous reports of robberies.

These employees believe that in addition to sufficient inventory of mainframes such as PS5 and Xbox, the reduction of the company's staff is also one of the causes of frequent robberies.

If a store needs to be on duty, employees are likely to need to watch the store alone, which can easily be seen as an easy target for robbery. In the past, their standard configuration was a manager and an assistant manager. However, after "optimization", the position of assistant manager has been massively cut, and the manager has been "promoted" to become a regional manager, requiring one person to be in charge of two or four stores.

In fact, GameStop is not unprepared for robbery. A former employee revealed in an interview that they had actually done "robbery response training", but only stopped in areas such as "do not visit the bank at a fixed time". When only one person stayed in the store, the training was all meaningless, unable to keep the company's property and making it difficult for them to keep themselves safe.

Looking at the robberies in GameStop over the past few years, some people were hit to cause a concussion, others were tied up in a store, and the assailant attacked the shop assistant with a hammer, causing the victim to be pushed into ICU to reduce blood pressure.

The reward list for the killer of the hammer, a former employee with nine years of service, also told his story in the comments section after reading the Polygon report.

He spends half a day looking at the store alone, and the shop he works in is often a target for theft because of the ethos of the neighborhood. He applied for additional security measures, but was not supported by the company. On the contrary, the continuous loss of products affected the profitability of the store, which in turn affected his salary.

Until one day, a robber attacked him with a taser and took away a lot of things. Then he was fired for "mishandling". HR claimed that there was no stun gun at the time, he was the provocative of the robbery, and then froze his unemployment benefits, forcing him to go to court.

Similar to this description, the team-building scenes of former GameStop employees can always be seen under the reports of related cases. GameStop's unkind affection to its employees has made most of the former employees have nothing nice to say about it. And in the mouth of current employees, you can also see a lot of unhappiness between them and the company.

4. "the basic salary is not as good as that of McDonald's next door." A few months ago, GameStop announced that it would offer stock incentives to store managers. This makes employees who have experienced the impact of the epidemic with the company feel that there is finally a dawn.

According to officials at the time, they would issue shares worth up to $21000 to store managers based on performance. Other ordinary shop assistants will also get different salary increases. The intention is to "instill a stronger sense of ownership throughout the organization by improving the remuneration of employees."

Only a month later, when the benefit was about to be implemented, the employees found that it was not as beautiful as they thought.

An anonymous employee told foreign media Kotaku that the standard salary increase for regular employees is only 0.50 US dollars (hourly wage). In an email reply, another employee mentioned that he had received an even lower increase of 38 cents-his 10th year at GameStop, and even after the raise, his "base salary was still much lower than the $15 at nearby McDonald's."

It is true that the managers' salary increases are even higher, with an average raise of $1. But as a result of the above-mentioned "promotion to regional managers", they have to face almost exponentially increased jobs and pressure while raising their salaries.

As for the promised equity bonus, it will take another year to start paying out in installments. Work in a low-salary and high-intensity environment for another 3 years before you can take away the full amount. Many employees have also come to realize that when the promised employee equity is gradually paid, it is unclear whether they will still be valuable, and it may be better to add an extra dollar or two an hour.

With long-standing grievances, stress, complaints and resignation have become the most discussed topics in the subreddit community where current GameStop employees gather. Even people who are obviously passionate about the job always "have to leave".

Unlike the complaints of employees in other companies, when they talk about their resignation, they always mention their enthusiasm when they first came to GameStop. Like games, but also like to wait with customers for new games to arrive, looking forward to discussing games with them, so that they can accept less generous pay. But in the increasingly heavy work and stress, GameStop obviously does not leave much room for these superfluous things.

Recently, because of the frequent robberies, they began to discuss related topics again. Tell the story of being robbed, ask whether the killer was caught, share your own risk aversion guide, or complain about the company's inaction.

A long time ago, GameStop put up a reward list as one of the few ways to deal with robberies. But beyond the $5000 reward list, GameStop doesn't seem to be spending more on the bad situation for the time being.

Last year, on the window of a GameStop in San Francisco, a reward was posted after three thefts in a week, and what is even more distressing is that this phenomenon, which includes PS5 and GameStop, has nothing to do with games-replacing "games" and "GameStop" with other industries and companies, the story is still true.

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