"No. No, man. sh*t, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' something like that." I don't think you searched long enough.

That said, no, I don't work there, and I will leave it to those who do to elucidate.

Don't do it. I used to be a manager for Game Stop and it's the worst thing you can ever do. The company doesn't care for you on any level. Anyone that works there is expendable in their eyes and typically the brown noser's get promoted first regardless of their poor work ethics. The days of gaming retail chains being cool has long since past. no longer do you get free games from companies on a weekly basis. If you want customer service experience try to get into a service advisor position at a car dealership's repair facility. Same amount of people yelling at you but you paid more.

Indeed, short of being a high-school senior looking for a summer job you don't care about, this isn't a position for someone wanting either money, time or respect. You are a cog in a machine, and a poorly oiled one at that. You're likely to be paid criminally low compared to the work you're expected to put in, and you will be under the constant gun of sales goals.

It's extremely hard to recommend working for Gamestop.

For the record, this phenomena is not limited to Gamestop. This pretty much describes every job I've ever had.

Got arms? Try getting a job in a warehouse. I always enjoyed the work, though it's not something you'd want to do long term if you could help it.

Seriously (and this is coming from someone who has been screwed over by this company), work for Best Buy before EB Games. They at least have a better corporate culture and do tend to reward hard work to a certain degree. EB Games is just horrendous and you'll be miserable your whole time there. You can get a job in the Media department at Best Buy which does involve selling games (I believe they recently created a "Games Specialist" position) and while there is a department budget to meet, there are no used games to push, no pre-order pressure to apply and no stupid game protection plans to push. If you choose to look into Best Buy, try to get into the Ottawa East store as it has the least useless management.

I worked for a Babbages (now Gamestop) from 97 - 2000. At times, it was the coolest job ever. I had a bunch of regular people that would come in to gossip about the latest gaming news. I got to play the latest stuff. Met a cute gamer chick. I got to sign out games to play at home. It was a great job to come into after slaving away in fast food during my high school year and I rose in rank from a sales associate to the third string manager.

But it's not all fun & games (pun!). Christmas is a nightmare... We had two cash registers going non-stop trying to ring up swarms of customers. You have people dropping their kids off in front of demo units to act as a babysitter for hours on end. There were even a couple times where we had to call mall security because it was 8:55PM and their parents were still missing. Thankfully, their parents would eventually show up to reclaim them.

There's also the constant pressure from corporate to push "MSTs". Multiple sale transactions. Stores and individual employees are judged on how many sales consist of more than one item, especially on high profit items like accessories and strategy guides. There were quite a few of my coworkers that were terminated because they kept falling behind in the MSTs week after week. At one point, our store manager was terminated because of this and a replacement brought in.

And then there's the criminal activity and I don't mean shoplifting... Maybe I just worked in a crummy shop but I've heard enough stories over the years to believe that my store wasn't an isolated case. Quite a few of my fellow employees were caught or accused of stealing games & memory cards. At one point, I was even accused of theft when the assistant manager attempted to frame me for the theft of 20 PS1 games that mysteriously went missing the night he closed the store. The bastard even had a confession printed up for me to sign stating my crimes when I was completely innocent. I told him to F Off and called the District Manager. Two days and 1 survailance tape later, he was fired and arrested when the tape showed him leaving the store with a bag full of merchandise. And that was just 1 tape. An inventory was performed and we found that the store was missing thousands of dollars in merchandise.

So yeah, when it's good, it's good but when the bad stuff happens, it can get pretty bad. Just make sure you keep yourself "clean" and enjoy it when you can.

Seriously, moving things from one place to another is never a skill that will not be in demand.

I say work construction for a while. The pay is generally decent, the work is rewarding ("I schlepped 2 tons of lumber today and we built half a house!"), you can learn actual useful skills (like using powertools), and you can sometimes get a job via the highly complex procedure of walking up to a site and asking if they need help.

"General labourer" is synonymous with "pack-mule and cheap lackey", but it can be a lot of fun, especially with a decent crew.

If I were to work in retail, I'd rather go to a place like Home Depot.

I worked for FedEx as a package handler for a while. They offer tuition assistance, and if you don't mind early mornings, it's likely you'll be done doing your work for them by the time your classes would start. It's a high turnover job primarily because it's manual labor that usually gets tense, especially if those boxes start to back up. But, I got my first raise after three months (sadly, a week before I left for the job I have now). My supervisor was nice and not pushy, just be willing to help, come in a few minutes early, stick around for a few minutes after all of the major moving is done and ask if they need you for anything else, and you'll make yourself known there pretty quick.

I worked there for about a year around the Dreamcast launch. I got a 10 cent raise and it was largest of anyone in the store. 10 cents! That said, if you don't mind not making any money or having any chance for advancement and if you don't mind selling out your gamer brethren and generally making their game buying experience miserable then the discounts and check out policies rock.

I don't know of any retail jobs (at least in corporate chains) that are that appealing. If anything I'd try to get a job in a bookstore, at least it's a little quieter and seems less pressure driven. I don't know what sort of chains there are in Canada, but I'd go for one that doesn't push paid memberships (for example, Borders over Barnes and Noble) since many stores use memberships/credit cards as the sole metric regarding employees.

I've also heard that UPS and Fedex can be good gigs for short periods, but that might just be during the holidays.

I've worked short stints during the post high school/college break times in the hardwood flooring mill near where I live (my dad was the HR guy, so it was pretty easy). If you can get into a manual labor/manufacturing job it's kind of nice for short periods of time; typically the pay is better than retail, fast food, etc and you're too tired to go out and spend the money you earned at the end of the day.

Stop doing that. It's a bad habit, it's almost never warranted, and you're burning bridges. Even though it's not likely, you never know if you will want to go back to a particular company or if word will get around that you are unreliable. Just be an adult and tell the owner/manager that you are quitting.

Good luck.

So other than checking out games, they have pretty much no redeeming qualities.

If you need a job for a few months, why not?

Not discounting anyone's opinion that has worked there, but a "McJob" is pretty much a "McJob," regardless of where you work. If you're not looking at this as a long term time commitment, things like "slow/no raises," "corporate culture" or "people get promoted ahead of you" don't really matter much either. Go in, get out... keep your head down. Beats working fast food.

Most higher paying jobs aren't going to look at you twice if you're only going to be there for two months... you could always lie, but that depends on your own sense of morality/ethics/etc.