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Sports & Games
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Cringe & Customer Service: The Story of GameStop's Infamous 'How to Talk to Women' Training Video
In the early 2000s, GameStop created a now-infamous training video to teach its male staff basic customer service skills for interacting with female shoppers. This cringeworthy relic, while well-intentioned, perfectly captures the awkward growing pains of a male-dominated gaming culture.
In the vast archives of strange corporate artifacts, few items are as perfectly preserved in the amber of their time as GameStop's early 2000s training video, “Selling to Women.” It’s a title that lands with a thud in the modern era, but it represents a clumsy, yet fascinating, attempt by the company to address a very real problem: its stores were often intimidating and unwelcoming places for half the population.
A Relic from a Different Era of Gaming
The video, which surfaced online years after its creation, is a masterclass in early-aughts awkwardness. It features two fictional employees, Chad and Bill. Chad represents the stereotypical clueless male employee who freezes up or becomes condescending when a woman enters the store. Bill, the seasoned veteran, is there to school him on the revolutionary concept of treating women like regular customers. The production value is low, the acting is stiff, and the scenarios are painfully on-the-nose. It’s a time capsule of a period when the idea of a “girl gamer” was still treated as a novelty by many in the mainstream, rather than the massive demographic it already was.
The 'Groundbreaking' Advice
So, what wisdom did this video impart? The core advice was, ironically, just standard customer service 101, repackaged for a very specific, and seemingly difficult, scenario. The video instructed employees to avoid hitting on female customers, to not be patronizing, and to ask open-ended questions to determine their needs. Are they buying a gift for a child? A spouse? Or—gasp—a game for themselves? As Polygon noted when covering the video:
At its core, the video's heart is in the right place, a corporate attempt at teaching its employees to not treat a massive part of the population with kid gloves or, worse, derision. The execution is just more than a little awkward.
The fact that a major retailer had to explicitly produce a video telling its staff “don’t be a jerk to women” speaks volumes about the prevailing culture within gaming spaces at the time. For many former employees who later commented online, the video was a cringeworthy but accurate reflection of a real training necessity.
Good Intentions, Awkward Execution
Why did this video even need to exist? It was created to bridge a cultural gap. The early 2000s gaming scene was heavily marketed towards a young male audience, and the retail environment reflected that. Stores were often staffed by enthusiastic fans who, unfortunately, sometimes fostered an exclusionary, gatekeeping atmosphere. Women who entered were often assumed to be lost, shopping for someone else, or not “real” gamers. GameStop’s corporate office clearly saw a missed business opportunity and a growing problem. Their solution was this video—a direct, if clumsy, intervention aimed at making their stores more inclusive and, therefore, more profitable.
A Reflection of a Changing Industry
Today, the video is rightfully seen as a humorous relic. The idea of a company producing such a guide seems absurd. And yet, it serves as a valuable benchmark for how much the conversation around inclusivity in gaming has evolved. While the industry still faces significant challenges with toxicity and representation, the overt, casual exclusion the video sought to correct is far less tolerated in mainstream retail environments. It’s a reminder that progress is often awkward and that sometimes, the first step toward inclusivity is a cringeworthy training video telling you to just be a normal human being.