Chewy co-founder Ryan Cohen and GameStop’s largest shareholder joined its board in January and became chairman last month. He is all set to change the fortunes of GameStop. Cohen has been calling for a company shake-up since late last year, pushing for a shift to digital sales. He bought a 12.9% stake in the company in 2020 through his investment firm RC Ventures. He has brought about some major changes in the company with some new C-suite hires and some fires.

Earlier, GameStop announced that Cohen would chair a “strategic planning and capital allocation committee” to figure out the company’s future. 

GameStop to use investment money for store revival

Three people with first-hand knowledge of his strategy said he plans to breathe life into the stores by investing in what customers want and improving how employees can serve them.

To better understand the situation, Cohen has been turning up in stores around the United States unannounced, or “ghost-shopping”.

The task is uphill. The pandemic has wreaked havoc with the already rundown stores—most closed for business in the early months of the coronavirus spread. The close-downs and late payments further constrained workers who were already drawing a minimum wage. Said one worker Pandiscio-Ferrero,” We got our hours cut to the point where it was only the manager and assistant manager working by themselves for about three weeks.”

DJ Hill, the manager of a GameStop store in a strip mall close to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, resigned in June after 18 years with the company. He was not happy with the direction the company was taking. 

Cohen wants to turn GameStop into a gaming and entertainment retailer or the “Chewy of gaming”, with lower prices and faster delivery times on online orders than its rivals.

But GameStop is not an online store, unlike Chewy, the online pet commerce venture that he sold to PetSmart for $3.35 billion in 2017. Most of the gaming store revenue is generated in stores. Over the last 15 months, it has closed 811 stores, leaving it with about 3,000 U.S. stores and 1,600 stores abroad.

The 35-year-old has been met with dusty rundown stores with empty racks on his surprise rounds of the stores across the country. The employees, he said, were disinterested in selling. The “only differentiator” for GameStop was customer service and that needed to improve, Cohen has told executives and staff.

He has earmarked some of the investment funds for redesigning the stores and training staff, sources said.

Cohen plans to focus on customer experience and create specialized sections that would cater to hardcore video gamers and even youngsters with mothers with some gaming sections aimed at them. This would be in addition to GameStop’s traditional merchandise. 

GameStop also plans to extend opening hours to serve gamers who tend to be night owls. The prices will be brought down to compete with Amazon and Walmart.

But not many are convinced that these plans will work. The retail industry is already experiencing hard times due to the Covid, and online transition to shopping.

Mark Cohen, the former CEO of Sears Canada and no relative of Ryan Cohen, said it would be hard for GameStop to reverse the trend of most video games being bought or downloaded online.

“It is an irrevocable move to technology-based acquisition of products. These folks (at GameStop) are not likely to be successful in the mid to longer term,” he said.

Wall Street analysts are skeptical as they believe the so-called meme stock rally has massively over-valued GameStop. Its market capitalization has surged to nearly $15 billion from a little over $1 billion at the beginning of January.

Also, GameStop has not reached the sales, supply and delivery efficiency of its online competitors. Cohen has started the process of hiring warehouses to ease the distribution process. In the last few weeks, it has signed up leases for a 530,000-square-foot facility in Reno, Nevada, and a 700,000-square-foot facility in York, Pennsylvania.

There are plans to bring back its customer service in-house. It was outsourced to the Philippines and Mexico. It is close to signing a lease on a 30,000-square-foot call center space in southern Florida.

A former Chewy executive, Kelli Durkin, has been roped in to overhaul the handling of customer queries with new recruitments and intensive training. 

These changes are deemed necessary to turn around the failing retail chain that has a lot of nostalgia value for the gaming fanatics. But gaming has moved almost totally online, and for Cohen to attract new customers with fierce competition from online giants is an uphill task. And he may just lose the old believers too in the process.

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Moreover, according to a Wall Street Journal report, eight of its incumbent board members are to retire after the June annual general body meeting, as reported in their securities listing.

The planned exits include Reggie Fils-Aimé, who was appointed to the board last March and who had previously become a gaming industry celebrity as the long-time president of Nintendo’s American division. Kathy Vrabeck, a former executive at Activision. Her plan to exit was announced in January. The others are Lizabeth Dunn, Paul Evans, Raul J. Fernandez, William Simon, James K. Symancyk and Carrie W. Teffner. This means now the company will have very few gaming experts on board.

“Turnover among our Board may disrupt our operations, our strategic focus or our ability to drive stockholder value,” reads the filing. “If we fail to attract and retain new skilled personnel for our Board, our business and growth prospects could disrupt our operations and have a material adverse effect on our operations and business.”

Their exit affirms that Chewy co-founder Ryan Cohen, will chart the company’s new future. Cohen has been calling for a company shake-up since late last year, pushing for a shift to digital sales. He bought a 12.9% stake in the company in 2020 through his investment firm RC Ventures. He has brought about some major changes in the company with some new C-suite hires and now some fires.

Earlier, GameStop announced that Cohen would chair a “strategic planning and capital allocation committee” to figure out the company’s future. None of the eight departing board members were on it.

The board members left now are Cohen, his former Chewy colleagues Jim Grube and Alan Attal, activist investor Kurt Wolf, and current CEO George Sherman.

It was reported earlier that Jim Bell, the CFO, was pushed to resign from his position. Soon after, CCO Frank Hamlin too resigned.

Cohen has been openly critical of Sherman and his top executives’ handling of Gamestop. In an open letter to the board he wrote, Sherman, “appears committed to a twentieth-century focus on physical stores and walk-in sales, despite the transition to an always-on digital world,” Cohen said. He added that the board lacks “the type of strategic vision” necessary for GameStop, “to pivot toward becoming a technology-driven business that excels in the gaming and digital experience worlds.”

In his letter, Cohen said the company “needs to evolve into a technology company that delights gamers and delivers exceptional digital experiences – not remain a video game retailer that overprioritizes its brick-and-mortar footprint and stumbles around the online ecosystem.”

Since Cohen joined the board in January, he has made a string of high-profile hires, including former Amazon Web Services engineering lead Matt Francis as the company’s new chief technology officer. Former Amazon fulfillment director Jenna Owens of Amazon will now be the company’s new chief of operations.

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The news of Robinhood IPO comes as the trading platform finds itself in hot water for restricting some stock trades as amateur investors rallied for “meme stocks” like AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and GameStop Corp, leaving seasoned professionals in a tizzy. Robinhood had to restrict trading in GameStop, along with other names involved in the trading frenzy and has been subject to congressional hearings.

Robinhood did not disclose the size of its IPO, or where it plans to trade its stock. It was previously reported that the company was planning to file for an IPO this month. The company has picked Nasdaq as its venue for listing while Goldman Sachs will advise the platform on its plan to go public.

Robinhood IPO: All you need to know 

The company based in Menlo Park, California, filed the paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in the midst of battling scrutiny from federal financial regulators over temporary trading curbs imposed during the rally in shorted stocks earlier this year.

Despite the challenges, Robinhood raises billions of dollars from its investors so it wouldn’t face liquidity issues in the future.

According to estimates, the brokerage app added 600,000 users in a single day, more than six times the typical number of new users during the month before the GameStop frenzy took place.

The company found success – as well as intense criticism – for its business model making stock trading easier for amateur investors. The company’s brokerage app allows investors to buy a fraction of a share in a company.

Image credit: Hanson-L / Shutterstock

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