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I peruse a few forums regularly, and every now and then someone inevitably feels the need to vent about Gamestop. There are usually a litany of complaints; the used games cost too much, they give you practically nothing for trade-in. More often than not the initial topic will grow into a behemoth of a thread as gamers trade war stories. It makes me feel fortunate that I can't relate. Unlike what seems to be most gamers, I have never really had a bad experience with Gamestop. My local staff are a nice bunch who tend to know their stuff. They spout the party line as required, but are quick to leave it be when it's made clear I'm not interested. Reading people's stories and complaints, it leaves me with the conclusion that a lot of people just whine too much.
It's as if everyone seems to forget that Gamestop is a business. Of course they're not going to give you a lot for your trade-ins; no one does. After getting an iPod, I brought my CD collection into FYE and got around a dollar a CD. I had spent around twenty dollars a piece on many of them, yet you didn't hear me complaining. If you're holding a garage sale do you charge very much for the stuff you're selling? No, because it's all been used before. Try trading in a car even just a day after you bought it and see how much money you lose. Gamestop is hardly the only company that does this and if it bothers people so much, they always do have the option of keeping their games. Besides with Amazon and eBay easily available to most, there are ways to get more cash for used games. Gamestop is hardly the only option.
And yes, it is a bit of a gip that a used copy of a game is barely cheaper than a new copy, but again, it's more than possible to shop around. If you want a bargain, use the internet. The very fact that you can read this editorial is proof that you have some access to the web. When it comes to finding cheap games, most any of the countless sites online are a better bet. Gamestop is there if you value the convenience of being able to walk in, buy a game and then play it in the same day. When it comes down to it, that is what is more important to me. When Metal Gear Solid 4 and Final Fantasy IV DS were released I went straight to Gamestop because I wanted to them then. I didn't want to wait for the price to drop, or for some hapless guy on Amazon to decide it was a convenient day for him to finally ship my order.
Gamestop employees are far from pushy in my experience. A few years ago I was buying a laptop at Circuit City. The sales clerk tried to ring up a two hundred dollar Microsoft Office software pack without asking because, as he put it, "I think you'll need it." That is pushy; asking you if you want to reserve an upcoming game is child's play. There is of course always the occasional example of someone acting truly out of line, but really when you consider it every retail company has anomalies such as those. If people boycotted Wal-Mart because of all the wierdoes that were working there, it would have long since gone out of business.
This is not to say there aren't legitimate criticisms of Gamestop. You occasionally hear stories of how a customer having reserved a game comes in to find out that despite their reservation, the game was sold to someone else. This has never happened to me, but the occurrence of things like this is too frequent to be one of the aforementioned oddities. If you put money down on something, it better be there when it should be. There is no excuse for things like this.
I also hate the practice of selling open games as brand new. I understand that on some level, if a game hasn't been played it's technically new. But I, as a consumer, have no way of knowing that if it is genuinely new. Rumors abound of the shoddy condition many games like this are kept in. For all I know the PS3 game I'm buying could have been used for an early morning frisbee match. Display copies should be sold as if they are used.
In the end, what it all really comes down to is who happens to be manning your local game store. Any store, selling any product can only be as pleasant as the people running it and to accuse any franchise of being shoddy as a whole tends to be a poor strategy. The exception of course being Circuit City. Those guys are just commission hungry jerks...
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