TCGplayer Reviews

3.0

40% would recommend to a friend

(97 total reviews)

Robert Bigler

27% approve of CEO

38% positive business outlook

TCGplayer has an employee rating of 3.0 out of 5 stars, based on 97 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an average working experience there. The TCGplayer employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Retail and wholesale industry (3.5 stars).

Reviews by job title

97 reviews
1.0
8 Feb 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Lots of food, drinks and holiday themed snacks/goodies -Some people you work with can be cool -If you like gaming/tcg, this could be for you but it will also be boring

Cons

-Very low pay for the type of warehouse job this is. Amazon and other warehouse-competitors can start you at a higher wage than TCG. They also can offer better career advancement opportunities for long-term employment. TCG team leaders and upper level management promise this and 'believe' they can do this for you, but very much fail to deliver. It will always be 'next week' or 'soon' for you. -They are growing at a pace that they cannot keep up with. Often times, people are put into leadership positions that their professional work ethic and mentality are not ready for, but are promoted because they fit the clique that upper management has. Many people have come into the 3-month contractor role as an inventory specialist that they were overqualified for, and either left for a better opportunity or just because the job bored them. -Management and team leaders alike dangle the possibility that you can get hired early into TCGplayer if you 'hit the numbers'. Early as in, they don't directly hire you into TCGplayer, but rather use an external hiring service to 'contract' you in. This means you are on a 3-month trial period without benefits or PTO. This also means that they guarantee you nothing as far as employment after those three months are up. -The 'contract role' is very much abused during the busy seasons like Christmas. TCGplayer hires extensively during that time of the year and pays bottom dollar to contractors as they take in massive profits. I've seen countless, well qualified achievers come into TCGplayer and do very well, get promised the world, and then get layed-off when the three months mark hits. No explanation, no logical reasoning, just the door. -The job is unbelievably tedious and monotonous. Your job as a 'fulfillment center associate' consists of a couple different tasks. For most in receiving, your job is to invoice playing cards that you receive from other TCG companies and put them away. That's it, all day, for 10 hours a day. At first it seems fun and interesting, you learn the card sets and all the cabinets. But over the weeks and months, your feet and back start to hurt from standing and then bending over 90 degrees very frequently. On certain days, 'pull teams' are assembled for your 10 hour day. This means, that for the entirety of your shift, you will be gathering these cards for orders. Imagine you had a list of cards on a white sheet of paper that were inside 25 different cabinets. These cabinets are in a large room and all spread out. Some drawers go as low as the floor in these cabinets, and your task is to gather the cards from these 25 cabinets and put them in a pile. Once your done, you grab the next list of cards and start gathering the next pile. All day. The funniest thing about TCGplayer is the leaderships inability to properly assess your performance. For years they have been developing a 'system' to track your time on task while you are in the building. It keeps changing and they have no idea if it works well or not. They say it does, but I've seen many people abuse the system and get away with it and many still do. When they use a system developed on google sheets to track your time all day you just know its bad. I can't help but laugh at how awful it was. -I dont think this place is very covid safe. You will be touching so many things and surfaces many other people touch frequently. Lots of people in the cabinet rooms breathing the same air and standing very close together. Not a huge deal to me, but maybe for some. -People can be stinky here. No offense, but if you are a 35 year old man that can't put on deodorant, brush your teeth, or shower, I really don't want to hear about how you spent the last few months completing the Pokedex on Pokémon Gold. I love the game, but I don't want to smell your BO. How are you 30-40 years old and wear the same clothes to work all week? I'm sorry but seriously some of ya'll stink. -You are working in downtown Syracuse. There are a lot of sketchy characters down in the city. TCGplayer provides you with a parking pass to a local garage, but it can be VERY sketchy. Countless times I heard of a co-workers car getting broken into, damaged, or a license plate got stolen. I've personally been asked for money more times than I can count, and seen way too many needles on the ground for my comfort. Luckily nothing ever happened to my car, but I also drove a rust bucket piece of junk with no appeal and never left anything inside. Friends and co-workers don't like this garage, especially not at 8pm when its down two-three blocks. NO JOKE they literally make it mandatory in training to learn about how unsafe it is where you are walking every morning and night. You are very much encouraged to leave the building in groups to "avoid a possible conflict" with homeless and sketchy characters that may follow you to your car. So if you want to worry about being attacked each night or possibly something worse, TCGplayer will proudly hand you a parking pass to park in the distant, needle-infested garage while the higher management get a very safe and comfortable garage under the building with a private elevator. -Too many people come and go here. It really makes me feel like their business management practices are immoral. The people that promised you the world last week smile at you as they terminate your contract or employment for no logical reasoning. I wanted to make this as detailed as I could for those looking into this place for employment. I was a wallflower for three years here. I have only stayed this long because I've managed to play the system on them for easy income while finding the right opportunity. It really wasn't that difficult, I mean my team leaders and managers were 24-35 year old children infatuated with toys and cartoon girls with large breasts so I bet you can see why it was a joke to me. Bottom line, this place is one of, if not the biggest comedy show I have ever had the priveledge to experience and get paid from. It's ran by children and it really shows all the way up to higher management. You can find a way better job than this place where you'll have professional adults around and above you. I had to give my two cents on the way out, I really couldn't resist a good laugh. Honestly getting to the end now, I really gotta thank TCGplayer for not only the basically free income, food and drinks, but the experience of watching children who think they are adults try to play business. Ill never forget how juvenile this place felt and ran. If "The People Success Team" wants to rebuttal my pro's and con's of TCGplayer, that would really be the cherry on top of this experience. I would honestly kill to see what this comical, downright ridiculous excuse for a "People Success Team" will say. Please prove to me that you only want to mask the truth behind what this place really is just one more time, it would really make this job experience that more laughable.

1.0
5 Feb 2021

Awful experience. Stay far away.

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Free food and snacks occasionally.

Cons

This place is a joke. The disconnect between the lower-tier employees and the upper management is astonishingly horrible. The amount of false promises, lies and negativity pushed me far away from this place. If you want to start a career, this isn't for you. All they care about is how fast you can put cards in a cabinet. Overnight shift is literally pulling cards out for orders for 10 straight hours. Day shift in receiving is also bending over in cabinets for 10 hours. The team leads don't care about you, only about your numbers. Don't be fooled by the overwhelming free stuff, it's all a mask for the painstaking boring job they make you do.

avatar
TCGplayer Response
5y
Thank you for the feedback - we love free stuff too, but only if everything else is humming along as well. With a large and growing Fulfillment Center team, spread across our powerful 24/7 operation, we understand the importance of communication. We have several established communication channels and standing weekly meetings where questions are asked and encouraged of all the team. We continuously strive to improve and add to the channels we have in place to ensure everyone has a voice direct to management and the People Success team if needed. Communication is hard but we aim to get it right. And yes, we have crunch times where we pull together as a team, to get the job done. To most, that is empowering and energizing. We are working towards cross-training the team to provide variety and challenge in their work, along with building new skills. This also gives us the ability to flex our teams as the business flexes and grows. And we continue to develop and hire fantastic leaders, who really care about their teams, aligned with our core values. While delivering on our goals is important, caring for our teammates is more so, as evidenced by our creative and compassionate leave programs put in place to address COVID concerns. People “as a number” just isn’t in our vocabulary. We’re sorry to hear that the job was not a fit for you but fortunately our teams are growing and thriving, with people enjoying and feeling challenged by their work each day. - The People Success Team
2.0
16 Aug 2022

All surface, no substance

Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

-Very cool office space. Lots of items around to create a cool environment to work in just based on decorations -Downtown location nearby lots of restaurants and close to both major Syracuse Highways (81 & 690) -Coworkers in the Authentication Center are very nice people at the entry level, and some at Operations Lead level -Remote Teams and Remote positions are the best parts of the company to work for -Health, Dental, Vision, Pet Care, Life Insurance, 401K w matching. Some amount of Health is covered by company. Parking off site but paid for via company stipend -some local discounts available at restaurants & local shops for employees

Cons

-Operations Leads, Operations Supervisors, and upper Management all do not care about the employees. They make decisions that negatively impact employees and are unwilling to take feedback to improve situations. They may give you a chance to give feedback but in most cases nothing will be done to implement feedback and the decision will move forward as they have made it. This can include taking away employee spaces for relaxation and then giving pushback when told legitimate reasons why these spaces are important to employee health. -Compensation is the minimum they can give you to be slightly ahead of minimum wage and therefore “progressive” -Tenure is not considered in any meaningful way towards promotions/compensation. -There was a Union scare that occurred just before the pandemic which then caused a hiring wave of external management which has rapidly caused the decline in culture and employee morale in the Authentication Center -There was an escalation pathway for disciplinary action previous to 2020 that went Teaching Moment, Verbal Warning, Written Warning, Final Written Warning, Termination. THIS IS NOT FOLLOWED IN THE AUTHENTICATION CENTER. They regularly give Final Written Warnings to employees with no prior disciplinary record regardless of tenure. -TCGplayer has decreased employee benefits and regularly falls short on promises they make in company meetings. This could be how the new office space was set up, to free monthly lunches for employees being taken away. -TCGPlayer rewards the “get ahead at the expense of your peers” mentality which was not always the case. They used to foster the “it takes a whole village” mentality which allowed more people to succeed and grow within the company more often -Feedback is often lacking and unstructured, especially after being declined promotions. This leaves employees unable to identify skills they need to work on in order to grow within the company -The most meaningful thing the HR department has done post-COVID is rebrand their team to the “People Success Team” which has nothing to do with how they operate at all. Their presence is not at all felt in the Authentication Center and they do not facilitate any sort of meaningful employee growth -Operations Supervisors are mostly hired based on their connection to one of the higher ups in the Authentication Center, further limiting opportunities for employees to grow within this space -TCGplayer is so concerned about keeping their employees paid as low as possible that they regularly have “reminders” about how the “benefits” they provide create the entire package that is your compensations -TCG provides just above the minimal Sick/Vacation Time they are legally forced to provide. -the Core Values are often not followed by upper management but are heavily used against entry level employees to remind them to “stay in line with the core values of this company” -Multiple Supervisors have been reported by entry level employees for various inappropriate behaviors and Incompetence in their role. Many of these entry level employees have been retaliated against by upper management/People Success with disciplinary action -Diversity hiring is not high on TCGplayers agenda and you don’t have to look any farther than their predominantly straight white management team to see that fact. Not limited to just Authentication Center

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TCGplayer Response
3y
We appreciate your feedback but wish you had shared your understanding of our programs prior to departing so that we could have provided clarity and transparency on our programs, policies, and intentions as we strive to do with all our team members. While we respect all views and opinions, much of what you speak to above is mischaracterized and misunderstood. We have over 600 team members that find deep purpose and meaning in the work they are doing to deepen our commitment to the collectibles community, and they feel that TCGplayer is a great place to do it. - The People Success Team
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Glassdoor has 106 TCGplayer reviews submitted anonymously by TCGplayer employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if TCGplayer is right for you.