#GameStop loses second senior exec amid shakeup

Ryan Cohen’s GameStop overhaul continued with a second executive departure on Tuesday.

The video game retailer’s chief customer officer Frank Hamlin will resign from the company on March 31 — second top executive to leave GameStop since it brought on Cohen to spearhead the mall-based retailer’s transition to an e-commerce company.

The departure comes as Cohen, GameStop’s top shareholder and Chewy.com co-founder, has vowed to revive results, helping fuel a massive rally in GameStop’s shares by a group of amateur investors on Reddit who have banded together to boost the stock’s price.

Hamlin, who had been in his current position since June 2019, was in charge of marketing, customer loyalty and GameStop’s “omnichannel business,” to the company website said. He followed chief financial officer Jim Bell out the door last month.

Since Cohen joined GameStop’s board in January, the 35-year-old entrepreneur has reportedly been obsessing about customer service, contacting customers late into the night to solicit feedback, pushing to upgrade the company’s website.

According to Reuters, the billionaire recently returned an email to a GameStop customer from New Jersey, who complained about the slow shipping of an order.

“I just got your email, I’m so sorry this happened. Let me get to the bottom of this,” Cohen wrote to the man.

Cohen also hired Kelli Durkin, who spearheaded initiatives at Chewy that included written personal notes to customers, as the retailer’s new senior vice president of customer care.

In the case of the New Jersey man, Durkin reimbursed the customer, even though he had not requested a refund and was only complaining about the tardiness of his order

The anecdote is a clue into Cohen’s vision for GameStop, namely to transform it from a brick-and-mortar retailer to an e-commerce firm that can take on big-box retailers such as Walmart and Target, as well as tech firms like Microsoft and Sony.