Despite doing everything in its power to stay open amid the coronavirus pandemic, including telling employees to ignore law-enforced shutdowns, GameStop has finally conceded. As of today, the retailer has officially announced that it will be closing all of its storefronts, starting tomorrow, March 22, 2020.
When tomorrow comes, all transactions with GameStop will only be possible through its website and app. During this time, GameStop will focus its business on processing digital orders and delivering goods through eCommerce for the foreseeable future. It will also set up curbside pickups at stores and deliver products straight to people's homes.
As for the GameStop employees in the US that will lose their paid hours to this shutdown, the company will continue to pay them for the next two weeks. These paychecks will go off of an employee's regular pay rate based on the average number of hours they've worked for the past ten weeks. On top of this, GameStop will reimburse employees with one full month of employee benefit contributions.
And since curbside pickups will still be an option for customers, GameStop would also like for its employees to know that they don't have to come to work if they don't feel comfortable doing so. It also asks for anyone feeling even remotely sick to stay home.
Following this, GameStop Executive Officer, George Sherman claimed that GameStop's number one "priority has been and continues to be the well-being of our employees, customers, and business partners." He goes on to say that the company will continue to be devoted to local government ordered and CDC-guided safety guidelines.
Understandably, some people don't agree with George Sherman's assessment of GameStop's actions over the past couple of weeks. If the retailer had been keeping up with CDC guidelines and local government orders, it would have closed down its storefronts a long time ago. It also doesn't help that some employees have claimed that GameStop's cooperate management didn't provide any cleaning supplies or sanitizer like the company said it would.
In all honesty, it's hard to believe that GameStop had the best interest of its employees and customers at heart when it took so long to do something that most other retailers didn't hesitate to do. While it's true that GameStop's future has looked bleak for a while now, the decisions it's made to stay open have been fairly excessive. Hopefully, however, this new policy will work for everyone involved.