As I know I've mentioned and everyone here probably knew about anyway, Gamestop had their pretty stupid magazine subscription and discount card that the stores were told to push.
On occasion it made complete sense, with enough trade-ins it would pay for itself and still give you some extra credit, or people we knew that came in and got used 360 or PS3 games we told about it since they would end up saving money in the long run. Those situations would give the store about five subs a month, and corporate wanted a minimum of twenty. Of course, with the lowest numbers in subs in the district the DM would pretty regularly threaten all our jobs, but no one ever got fired since we had the highest total sales and next to zero customer complaints ever, with selling perps with systems and getting almost top reserves since regular customers trusted our opinions with upcoming stuff.
Aside from the basic story of 'being a generally cool person can sometimes make up for retarded sales stuff' there's a more corny / heartwarming direct example. When our manager was trying to get a new store that was opening a lot closer to his house the DM told him if he could "motivate [us]" enough to get forty subs in one week by the end of the month it was his, assuming this would never happen. When we told this story to some of our more regular customers, they all bought subs, even those that already had them. The average subs per day that week was about 15. I'm pretty sure that wouldn't have happened if we were all pushing shit on everyone that walked in the door until they wanted to kill us.
