I remember when stores were friendly, games days, using tables, stores full of people playing and buying. Now ... tumbleweed...

Thats about right. Blame the manager for sales when there are 2 stores in walking distance with 20-30% off. Regional managers taking the piss😅

Nice surprise to see this update about how things are going with you and glad you have turned a corner as such and things are looking up

Very interesting listen mate. This video and the others. Your journey into and around GW and all the ups and downs that come with throw light on what really happens.

Basically you gotta be an immersed skaven player if you want to be a manager

I worked in a GW store in 1993, the guys in the store were great. The company itself was souless, head office was on our case every day. I used to dread the daily call from HQ asking for our figures. Two weeks after a bumper Christmas for the store i was let go. Takings were down 80% following the Christmas rush, in HQ's eyes this was our fault even though this is a normal retail pattern (thats why retail stores have January sales!). I was given the news after working an 11 hour day. I was told by the regional manager ( who pretty much lived there) "Head Office told me to let someone go, so you are now on your own time." I thanked him and shook his hand, he seemed shocked and i walked out. After seeing the company from the inside it put me off GW for more than a decade. I have only been in a GW store twice since, both times i was sujected to the hard sell as soon as i walked in. We had a bullet point list behind the counter with the 10 retail rules of gw it left a really bad taste, it seems nothing has changed since then.....

With regards to GW running a loss with a store in a mall/shopping centre. This is not that much of a surprise to me, I remember having a discussion with a McDonald's store manager back in 2003, where she had said that it costs McDonald's a cool £1m a year just to be on Southampton High Street, with the McDonald's in West Quay (a mall/shopping centre also on Southampton High Street) being double that, despite being half the size. And these were the prices in 2003, I would hate to see how much the rent has gone up since then. And, in my opinion, this video goes to show that the majority of staff at GW, or at least the creatives and those on the front lines, are awesome with real love of the hobby and the fans. Shame corpo-GW is as creative at screwing the fans. At least we're not hearing about a "frat-boy" culture at GW, yet.

Glad things have gone well... I've loved following this recount of yours. I will just say, as a teacher of 12 years, they can be one of the most clique-heavy and sour environments to work in. I've got everything crossed for you. Update again soon please.

Here in France, the few GW store are very small and almost exclusively situated in big cities, they've been full of kids for as long as i remember, you could not have a decent game in any i've visited. Local clubs were freaking cool though, they rent a place, everyone pitches in, everyone leaves a mat or a few terrain pieces, these clubs are the one who organise tournaments, not GW.

These videos are really interesting, thanks. Great hearing the perspective on someone on the inside. As a customer, I've always dreaded going to an actual GW store, just because the level of zeal and pressure from the staff is so offputting. But, on the flip-side, come to think of it, one of the best retail experiences I ever had was at a GW. I was in the UK (I'm from Australia) so was trying to make the most of the relative discount. I was willing to drop a decent sum and the local store didn't have quite what I was after (lots and lots of Cadians). But, they were happy to put in an order and have it delivered to the city I was visiting next. Got there the next day, order was sitting there waiting for me. Picked up my haul and flew home the next day. I know they were just pouncing on an opportunity to shift some product, but it was genuinely great how it all worked out like a well-oiled machine.

I was Staff and Manager too 2007-10, your two videos brought it back for me, Most of the memories were good I must say. But Oh how I hated the Nottingham crowd. Thanks for putting up your thoughts and experiences. I have a few good tales to tell but keep them to myself and to other Ex staffers. hahahah

Glad for the update! Enjoying your channel! I had a similar experience of let down getting a job as a developer at my favorite game studio.

glad you are getting well, not glad that your experiences followed my own back in the 90's early 00's for me the straw that broke the camels back was being refused compassionate leave by my manager because 3rd edition 40K was being launched. He actually laughed in my face in a shop full of people 10 minutes after I had the bad news. there were some top guys then though, and some real characters.

They always say never meet your heroes and I can hear how much it hurt. Congratulations on how well things are going for you! Thanks for sharing your story.

Man idk why but this just hit home from what ive seen and heard at our local GW store in Idaho. Such a high turn over there

Hey, it’s thumbs up from me. I’m teacher and 40k book lover of 12 years and now entry to model building and painting.

I wouldn't really care about meeting any of the current white dwarf team, It would be about as interesting as meeting the guys who wrote a sales brochure for a window company. The guys from the 80's and 90's on the other hand...

You never told me about the teaching, well done mate.

Ah yes. All warhammer fans have a love/hate relationship with GW. We love the models, hate the company. Would never work for GW or buy my models directly from GW. Seriously their pricing is insane. I can buy models from Ebay at half the price and either strip or fix up their shitty paint job. The last box I bought directly from GW was the Indomitus, due to the insane deal it was. I have more than 7k pnts worth of models and the Indomitus is the only box I have bought from GW.

Glad everything is going well dude.

2018 was his lowest point. 2020: Hold my Beer!

At the end of the day you were never going to get rich working for GW. Duncan Rhodes was essentially the face of GW and worked hard and he wasn't getting paid enough so he left. It's a roulette if you get a good GW managers, in my city there are three small GW stores within 1 hour walking distance of one another, one GW store manager is a good guy, the other GW store has a manage guy which is a bit of a knob and the other has a GW manager who is a giant prick.

Oh my god I know exactly all of this I paid my dues in 2011 as a solo store guy and it literally broke me.

I cant think of another company that has so viciously shot themselves in the foot even with just the pricing model they have. Genuinely miss the days when heading to either of the two Dublin stores was like heading to the pub when I was a kid

Thank you for sharing!!!!

I´m starting to feel like a stalker, commenting on everyone of these videos, but hey, if the experiences match so well, i gotta chime in ;). First of all, it´s great you are doing well and got around for a better line of work, awesome! I too have found a new line of work after being in retail for my whole career until GW, and i really do not miss the working hours of a retail shop or unnecessary complaints from the customers, but the great customer experience and good sales numbers i do miss. But, what i found similar (3rd video, still spot on on things...) was the lack of support. Same thing with the Christmas decorations, we just got them ourselves, no help from the HQ. Funniest thing EVER, was the fact that the store didn´t have a vacuum in the shop. I brought one in, just because it was easier first to vacuum the floor, before mopping it, that was so odd....another memory pops in to my mind also, i was trying to get a simple door mat, to prevent all of the slush coming in with the shoes and it took months and months and couple of phone calls/internet orders to get it in. I could have bought it within minutes from the shop next door, but they shipped it from UK! I also found the experience of leaving the shop (in my case getting fired without telling me the reason) more devastating than i thought first. It really weighed me down for months, but with the support of family/friends i bounced back and now i wouldn´t trade my current job back to GW for any reason. I got also burnt out on painting. Whilst being unemployed, i painted like 30 Space Wolves with the same color scheme and after that, i have not liked to paint ever again. I will do it, if i need new models, but i actually hate it now days. I used to love (when it was quiet) to paint my models at the shop and getting paid to do it :). I still love MODIFYING the models or scratch build, that´s my n.1 thing i love after gaming, nothing comes before a good game of 40k. Funny, how some of us hobbyists like similar things, in this case, i love wrestling too :) :) :)

Met Rick Priestly on a couple of times. He told me after WM was released gamers played it like warhammer..3-4 units a side....not 15-20 !

Retail has always been like you described for any product. Pay etc has always been shite.

It’s really sad that the people there made you feel like you couldn’t continue. I have thought about applying for GW a few times in my life, but it’s my hobby and there’s a real risk that working for them would have spoiled it for me, as it did for you. On balance I’d rather work for an independent model/hobby shop that carries other stuff besides GW. I love history as much as fantasy and I’d love to tell customers about all the real soldiers I’d be selling, and the campaigns they fought, etc.

Like your first video about GW, this also reminds me of my work experience. Sadly, some of these things are universal. - You'd think if ppl are managed poorly they'd rebel against that and not make those mistakes and turn into a-holes! Most ppl however manage as they were managed. - If success at any workplace means you have to change who you are (I've literally been told to my face: "everyone likes you, you're too accommodating, be more of an a-hole") then that place is not for you and you need to move on.

Out of curiosity what would you tell them when they'd ring you up and give you a bollocking for not hitting your numbers? I had a trainee manager at a retail store I worked in ( not naming it). Miss targets every month for over a year but still got a promotion another store at the end of it because he was a brown nosing yes man. Even though he was shit at his job and was incompetent. I feel like if you were being honest and saying things like "well last year we had a really good month so it was always gonna be difficult to beat it this time around", or things such as "we've had a couple of really bad days that have dragged us down for the rest of the month" They didn't want to hear it. But if you sucked their dick and said "Yes we can do better and will do better. We can hit these numbers". Even though you know full well that you're not gonna hit some targets. They just want you to be a yes man it seems. Seen many people become managers that are incompetent but somehow get a promotion whereas the decent people who are realists seem to get looked past.

I find this whole saga so interesting living in a town 100 miles from a GW, but with a friendly local store owned by the nicest, most incompetent person you'll ever meet. He constantly gets my order wrong, even when I give him part numbers. He texts me that my order has arrived, and when I show up he says, "your item is on backorder, but I just send the same text to everyone". I would happily go for a beer with my man, but sometimes I just want to strangle him...

@Notthern Exile. Question: Do you have any idea why some factions get so much love and others do not? Why did GW ignore the Black Templar communty for such long time.. Would be VERY VERY intersting.

I started GW games in 2018 and was playing in the GW store in south Dorset. I had to leave and play elsewhere in the end, they sold me knights as I loved them and the lore but once painted them one of the workers said no one would ever play me as people hated knights 🤬. Recently given up 40K seeing what they are doing to the players and now play Specialist games like Necromunda

Dodged a bullet not meeting Ward...

You just need to open your own game store. Seems like it would be the best of both worlds. It's not like you haven't worked hard at running a business and you know what makes people want to engage in the hobby. Idk how things are near you, but my local game store manager has become a friend of mine who's passionate about everything he carries. Providing a space for games creates a community, which, in turn incentivises loyalty.

Been enjoying your videos and experince. I know the pain trying to do a good job despite having collegues doing their best to scare you off. Im sadly not shocked to hear GW acting like a cold hearted corporation. The smiley happy side of GW are people paid to do it after all, its all marketing.

I want to hear from ur trainer, how can we find him?

When you say "writing", what do you write about ?

is feathering when you pull wet paint from one area to another, using a second brush? I like doing this. looks great on horns and stuff. I realised my main disadvantage most of my hobby-ing life was not having the internet. The last time I picked up the brush (in 2019) having the internet as a resource made me become a far superior painter than ever before. I was always just winging it when I was younger. Learning stuff from people that know what they are doing is the best way, and my preferred learning method is to watching something being done, then copy it, s I'm in my element now. I'm at the point now where In could safely take on commissions for both converting and painting, but it's something I have never really fancied, as it would suck the life out of my own stuff. You have to be careful mixing work and your own hobbies, or at least I do. I suppose people that are diehard about 40k and nothing else are fine, as they won't become disillusioned as easy as myself. I find my attention span is a bit more fickle, and I will go nuts on it for a few months and then probs get bored. So I spent a few months to half a year doing nothing but table top stuff, and then I'll end up putting it away till the following year, or maybe 2 years. I do think if I got more into the wargaming side though, it might help to pad it all out for me. I haven't played 40k since second edition though as I haven't actually managed to finish an army since I was a kid. I am far too much of a perfectionist now to ever call anything "finished" and varnish it up for table top use. I am bloody trying now though. I have 2k list that can all be built with out of the box models, theres no reason for me to have to convert anything, as the new DG stuff is gorgeous. Then once I have this 2k points list on the table, I will then allow myself to start working on things like Daemon Princes. When I started my Chaos up again in 2019, I got far too wrapped up in DP conversions as they were just s good for any 40k chaos army at the time. By the time I started to hide my stride on my soup list, some of the key pieces of my list were nerfed into oblivion, and it meant the 90 plague bearers I'd been working on were now going to be useless in competitive. Really I could have just carried on and learned to play with this list, but it was a gigantic horde list with 90 PB's, around 60 blood letters, 40 pink horrors and then I think 3 Tzeentch DP's, ahriman on flying disk and that Slaanesh Mirror DP thing (it's bloody nasty, or at least it used to be) oh yeah and I had a few nurgle herald's like sloppity bilepiper, which also became more or less useless. I have learned my lesson anyway. this time I'm just working from one book, and then it's most more expensive options so the list isn't quite so massive (mostly terminators and war machines, led by Morty) and 40 stink zombies for objective sec. I do really like that entropy canons are good now though, as it means we can have a good backline without having to buy expensive FW dreadnoughts. That was the other thing that sucked about nurgle in 8th, the tanks we had could only realistically be taken as assault vehicles, because the long range weapons were turd. as I understand this is changed now. anyway I have high hopes for this edition, it seems each book has flavour baked into the rules for real (so far anyway) and the stuff that looks cool from a painters perspective, also is good on the table. thats good business if you ask me. more often than not, you not some obscure list with FW options to be competitive, but now their cool looking boxed sets actually work well. I am thinking about getting an AoS army as well at some point. although I like that game better when the players bring full mele armies. the shooting is a bit broken and that doubler turn stuff is shiesty as hell. I seen some great gentlemens games though, where they take out some f the OP BS and just fight with mele units. I don't know, for some reason I feel like playing more fun lists in AoS, and tinkering with the ruleset, but in 40k I want the best thing that will annihilate my opponents at all times. I don't know why I feel this way. it might be because of playing in events for WHFB as a kid, and it was always loads of fun playing as the skaven. in 40k I got into that when I was a bit older, and it was all about having the hardest unit (bloodthrister in 2nd edition 40k was unkillable before the vindicare assassin came out) which was a bloodthrister and 2 units of chaos terminators when I was a wee lad. this would flatten anything, providing you actually summon it in time. I seen a guy at a, event absolutely wreck so many points worth of stuff with this, I instantly fell to chaos there and then, and have never looked back. I have been a chaos main since around 94/95ish (when the Tyranids came out, this was the event it was at) I playing Blood Angels on the day in question though. I was into Death company a lot. I took a land raider too, but the land raider had just been taken off the shelves for some reason, so I wasn't allowed to use it. it meant my DC had to footslog across the table for both games I played. I did get to go first in both cases though, because of the special rules. I mostly just was fodder for the first attacks from the nids/orks and chaos (baddies side of the table) it was to this date the biggest 40k battle I've ever been part of. They just didn't bother counting pints, as it was absolute madness, we had far more points than them, but they had some cool stuff. The star of the show being that guys chaos stuff. I didn't even realise you could have Daemons in 40k till this dude stars using a bloodthirster and bloodletters with his chaos termies. The Bloodthrister was hard back then, bolters didn't even hurt it (basic level weapons had no effect it on the lad) I honestly went home just wanting to start a chaos army ASAP. I think the next thing I got was a couple of blister packs of bloodletters. OK, sorry. I have written a small story here, and it probs won't even get read. probs should stop it now.

Really insightful. Would make a really cool coming of age film.

I think maybe it's time Games Workshop was put out to pasture. I don't know much about the world of gaming or Warhammer books, but I do know that people (mostly men) enjoy it because it's an outlet to express themselves and to socialize. If GW has become more about KPI's and "the products" then it's no longer a world of models and games made _by_ geeks _for_ geeks. Let it die.

Sorry to bring this up, but basically after listening to all these related posts, that terrible manager who said you weren't managment material was essentially correct. I'm glad things worked out for you. Merry Christmas

Top vid, although watching emperor text to speech would be the most heretical thing a manager could find you doing these days :(

You get bad management when weak people are given power and there are ALOT of very weak people.

Matt Ward? 🤣 I wonder how he takes his fame?

19:00 This bit makes no sense at all. If someone's personality is so abbrasive he's even a piece of shit to customers, what are they actually keeping him around for? I don't believe in the whole "the customer is always right" thing because there are a lot of shit customers, but being a piece of shit *to* customers is way worse from a business standpoint.

I wonder if there'll be a video two years later how you burnt out in teaching

I know this is a year old video so you wont read this, but you sound more than a bit like a domestic abuse victim. Making excuses, focusing on the positive times. The bad thing is that GW isn't unique in this. A lot of retail runs like this. And most of the blame goes on business school graduates that have never been working the floor, and have to justify sitting a a computer hitting refresh on their email, and the sales tracking software, most of the day.

It REALLY sounds like a CULT!!! (Is their Business Plan based on SCIENTOLOGY???) Considering THEY are selling PRODUCT to (mostly) little kids that's DISGRACEFUL... (You're better off out of it, Mate...) xx SF

It must be humiliating for one of the sales staff to be beaten by somebody in a taster game (I've done this to sales staff a few times).

If you stop moaning for five minutes you might get somewhere. I would never hire you.