Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ordinaryperson | Hacker News Reader

Years ago I wrote a letter to Paul Raines, then the CEO of Gamestop.

Mainly I complained how terrible the store experience was. Whereas Apple stores feel like an avant-garde museum Gamestops feel like the inside of a Chuck E. Cheese circa 1987 -- games everywhere, no real organization, no marketing of individual titles or genres, it's just grabbag nonsense of plastic container after plastic container.

Days after I sent the letter, his secretary called me and scheduled a phone call for the next day.

Paul could not have been nicer. He said he appreciated the criticism and offered to have his district manager tour a location with me so I could share in greater depth my concerns.

I declined (too busy) but was obviously taken aback with his generosity and patience.

Sadly, he passed away in March of this year from brain cancer at the very young age of 53.

He had no real incentive to respond to an angry letter from a random customer, but he went way out of his way to at least listen to me (even if the stores haven't improved much).

R.I.P. Paul.

I'm impressed but not surprised he responded; that sort of clear, actionable feedback can be surprisingly difficult for a CEO to get, especially in retail.

Most retail CEOs don't reserve much time for popping into stores and talking to customers, and store and district managers tend to dislike it--feels like micromanaging.

But at the same time, store managers and district managers are often not eager to feed a list of their stores' shortcomings up the chain of command. IMO it's a rare retail manager who is willing to stand up and say, "my store is bad and here is what I need to make it good." Most focus on putting the best possible face on things, internally. It's so hard to make good numbers in retail and there is so much pressure to do so... relationships between the management layers can often feel more adversarial than collaborative.

It seems like a hidden success factor of organizations is alignment between the success of each individual within the organization with the success of the organization. At the size of a large retail operation that seems exceptionally hard.

GameStop is sorely in need of some micro managIng. I was in there with my daughter the other day looking to buy a Nintendo Switch and some Pokémon cards. The place was a cramped disorganized mess. And the neck beard working the counter grunted half hearted responses to our questions for about 5 minutes before we left with nothing. About 20 minutes later I spent $350+ at Amazon using my smartphone while we ate lunch in the food court.

Food courts are the best part of the mall experience.

As malls disappear it would be nice if the multi-restaurant open and shared dining experience was preserved.

I love how you simply declined the offer. What a balsy move.

I would have taken him up on it. If an issue is important enough to me to write the CEO of a company then it would have most likely been important enough to me to respond pro-actively to a meaningful response. Otherwise what's the point of writing such a letter in the first place?

Yep. "Call my doctors office and cancel that triple by-pass. I have a new plan for Monday!"

Being too busy is of course a legitimate reason. Without knowing why he declined it is silly to criticise it, I think.

Not too busy to send letters to the CEO.

I never get this: you start a conversation and then when the other party engages you disengage. The CEO's response was about as good as you could wish for and would give an opportunity to influence the view of the company at the level where it matters. That's what you intend when you write to the CEO, you do that because they are the people that can make stuff happen, including putting you in touch with the right person further down the org, not because you want to chat with the CEO. They're just a very visible access point and writing them a letter is a way of saying 'this really matters to me'.

If you are too busy to follow up on such a response then maybe you could save everybody time by not writing the letter in the first place.

To be fair, I don't think the district manager would likely have been totally engaged in what he'd view as babysitting an irate customer. Now if Paul had also offered to accompany the tour, there you're getting meaningful engagement.

I don't know about that. If it was just to 'babysit an irate customer' that would be one thing, but there is a fair chance that the CEO would have required a debrief after the tour to get a handle on whether the letter writer had a point. A district manager's time isn't free and you don't throw away resources like that as if they are customer support.

Also: Paul may simply not have been the right person to be there because he's too far removed from the floor to make a meaningful contribution. Delegation to the right person in the org is the hallmark of a good manager.

An "irate customers" time isn't free either. Plenty of reasons why one might take the time to write a complaint but decline the opportunity to provide free consultation in person.

The company should be grateful for whatever "help" (or pointers to improvement) they can get - even if it's just a letter - way more preferable than a rant on the phone or slating on social media.

Agreed. That was my perception of the offer.

It's one thing to complain about poor service, it's an other to brainstorm with district manager to improve the location. It's hard to know exactly what was being proposed without more details but the way it's described by the parent I think I would've refused as well unless I had a genuine curiosity to visit a videogame store with a backstage pass.

I mean it's a bit as if you complained in a restaurant that the food was bad and they proposed that you visited the kitchen and told them what you'd do differently. I don't want to do that, actually I'm probably not even qualified to do that and if I was I probably wouldn't do it for free.

It's very kind and considerate for the CEO to take time to schedule something like that but I don't find it weird at all that he declined the offer.

Yes. This, exactly.

To elaborate on why I declined:

The District Manager left a voicemail for me asking when he could schedule a tour with me. He was 100% polite, but it sounded like he was gritting his teeth.

Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I interpreted it as, "My boss's boss is forcing me to give an idiot like you, someone probably with no experience in retail economics, a tour while I patiently pretend to listen to how you tell me to do my job better than me, a person with decades of experience in selling video games."

If the situation were reversed I wouldn't want some rando customer coming into my job and telling me everything he thinks I'm doing wrong.

Plus, I got the feeling (again, just my perception) that it would just be "here's what's wrong with this store" instead of "here's what's wrong with all of your stores."

Maybe it was all in my head and they would have taken me seriously, I don't know. But that was the impression I got.

And I was legitimately busy. Writing a letter takes 10 minutes, a tour and presentation of my ideas would obviously take a lot longer.

You're probably not wrong. The internet's go-to description for CEOs and other executives is sociopath but I've found most leaders at the top to be humble and accommodating. If anyone fits "sociopath" it's more likely to be a middle manager, I find.

> I've found most leaders at the top to be humble and accommodating.

They are just incredibly effective sociopaths.

I'm not even sure if I'm joking.

I suspect this is exactly why the CEO reached out to you in the first place--because they know how hard it is to get open and honest feedback from the store and retail managers.

Whether the district manager liked it or not, they absolutely would have had to report the results of your visit back to the CEO. And they would have had to be honest about it, since they knew the CEO could just call you back to check the accuracy.

I don't blame you for not wanting to get in the middle of that, but I bet the CEO felt like it was a missed opportunity.

"hey! Long time no see. We should meet up!"

"Definitely! How's the day after tomorrow sound?"

seen: 4 days ago

> "the compound annual return of the respondent group is 8.97% greater than the non-respondent companies."

That's a promising punch line.

this is an incredible story and has personally made an impact on me

i didn't know paul before he died (on my birthday even), but because of your comment, i researched his story

i work in sales, so rejection and silence are very frequent. it is rare for anyone to connect through writing or through voice, and quite often i feel like nobody desires to brainstorm and have fun thinking about ideas in a low pressure environment

i wish you well in life and i hope that we can both live every day to the fullest-- because not all of us have the luxury of time

Your username caught my eye. Anon or a non ? Regards, Jim

If you don't want your name next to a coment on theregister.co.uk, you get that username

Anon coward is a slashdot innovation I believe.

Thanks!

Haha that's funny! Anon coward, as in anonymous coward. The other user that replied to you is correct :) :)

Thanks for writing Jim :)

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