GAME UK lays off hundreds of retail-facing employees to not cause any issues

Things aren’t looking good for retailer GAME UK, laying off staff below the manager level across various stores in the country. Morale is reportedly at an all time low for the employees and the company didn’t help that feeling by offering them zero hour contracts after.

According to IGN, an announcement was made on April 12 that told employees that their jobs would soon be redundant and some of them would be laid off. While there were meetings that took place to discuss their positions, it seems that didn’t do much good in the end.

One anonymous employee told the website that this was the worst morale the staff at GAME UK has ever felt. Making things worse was the fact that staff were still expected to work in the interim after hearing about the layoffs and not getting updates for four days.

"It's not my first rodeo but I've never seen morale this low," the employee said. "Even the administration wasn't this bad. At least the administration started early in the day and we were shut by lunch."

GAME UK did offer the fired employees zero hour contracts, which doesn’t guarantee work on a week to week basis. Considering how outlandish that offer is, we imagine that a lot of people didn’t accept that offer, though some may have out of desperation.

Employees are starting to think that the company cares more about making a profit than anything else, which isn’t too surprising. Plenty of executives tend to make heartless decisions like this just to make a quick buck. We’ve seen various video game publishers do this, so we’re not surprised that a retail store is doing the same.

It wasn’t that long ago when GAME UK announced that they wouldn’t be buying used physical games anymore. Now the company is laying off their employees just to make some quick cash back. While expected, this is still disappointing behavior from the company.