Starting next week, according to managers who spoke with Kotaku tonight, GameStop will no longer monitor individual employees’ Circle of Life scores. Each GameStop store will now simply have a single COL number, for their entire store, which will help reduce pressure on individual employees to hit their quotas.
GameStop is also changing the way they calculate Circle of Life scores, managers say. Until now, a COL score had been based on four metrics: 1) pre-owned sales, 2) trade-ins, 3) pre-orders, and 4) rewards cards. Now, GameStop is adding a fifth metric: new sales, which will track each store’s sales numbers against their goals. This will—at least in theory—prevent employees from being punished for selling new games, as they had been in the past.
The changes are not official yet, but GameStop district managers informed some stores via conference call on Friday afternoon that they will be rolling out the new program on Sunday and Monday. From what we hear, the move was decided at a district leader meeting in Houston, Texas this week. However, news is trickling out slowly, and not every store is aware of the change yet.