Winners never quit, and quitters never win…

But if you never win AND never quit…

Well, I quit.

I’ve been unhappy with my job for a long time. I wasn’t going to quit until I had a better one or to avoid another hellish holiday season, but yesterday really gave me no choice.

Things were mostly okay in the morning. I was working with Mike, the assistant manager, and no one was really hassling us. There wasn’t a bunch of annoying garbage to deal with.

At about one o’clock, this guy came in with a DS, a bunch of 360 controllers, several DS games, and half a dozen PS3 games. Everything had been opened (controllers were out of the packaging, games weren’t in plastic, etc.), but I probably would have been suspicious if Mike hadn’t greeted him with familiarity. The DS looked like it had never been used, and when I asked why he was getting rid of it, he said he’d gotten bored.

So, he took his money and left, and I commented to Mike that I couldn’t understand how people could have enough spare cash to buy expensive electronics, barely use them, and sell them back to us for a fraction of what they’d paid.

Mike informed me that this guy is an employee of Best Buy, and he just grabs this stuff out of their shipments, opens it up (because he knows we don’t take unopened stuff), and sells it to us. In fact, he’s done it for years.

I was aghast. It’s one thing to cynically suppose that half of our customers are crooks, but to KNOW such a thing beyond a shadow of a doubt and still condone it?

Mike’s reasoning was that he’d just sell the stuff somewhere else if we didn’t take it, so we might as well benefit from it. Basically, it makes our store’s numbers look good. He then informed me that, aside from turning away unopened product because that’s GameStop’s official policy, I had to take all trades, even if I knew they were stolen.

So I quit.

I thought this seemed like a pretty simple moral quandary to solve, and I was shocked that Mike didn’t see the problem in the first place. He’s a good guy, and one of my only friends around here. Almost no one else I’ve spoken to has understood, though. “It’s no skin off your back!” “Why do you care?” “It’s not like you’d get in trouble.” “He’s going to steal anyway.”

I’m not even going to get into arguments like “accepting stolen merchandise brings thieves into our store”, or even “if ALL GameStops cut this out, he wouldn’t have such a convenient way to dispose of stuff he steals.” I could bring up the fact that if I wanted to fence stolen property, I could do a lot better than $7/hour, but, the truth is that, $7 or $700, I’m not doing it. Maybe $7 makes it an easier decision, but the fact remains that I absolutely refuse to do it, period.

When I was a little girl, my father lost his job at Eastern Airlines, and he couldn’t find a job with another airline because he was a scab. He had two kids (this was before my little brother came along) to take care of and a mortgage to pay. A cousin of his got him a job at a Chrysler dealership that seemed like a godsend. He quit within two days because they wanted him to lie.

My dad approves of my decision, at least.

So does Peter.

Beyond that? Well, Mike, the old manager who got fired, thinks it’s great that I gave GameStop the finger, but that has nothing to do with integrity. No one else understands it.

Am I just incredibly naive?

Don’t answer that.