“Trade-in Deals”
GameStop’s trade-in policies and prices have been subject of ridicule for an exceedingly long time. However, what isn’t often touched on is just how unfair and ridiculous their random trade-in deals can be. These trade in deals often come in the form of trading in a game to cut the cost of it’s sequel or trading in a specific number of games to get a large bonus to the final amount. What they don’t tell you is how the company accounts for the cost loss on their end.
In order to prevent major loss on their end, GameStop likes to play with the trade-in numbers. Essentially, when a “deal” is about to hit, the company will go through all or most of the games that are applicable to the deal and will slash their trade-in amounts. This effectively lessens the impact of the “deal” and while the customer will generally benefit higher than just trading the games in during a standard time, the gain is quite minimal. Meanwhile, the customers are happy to be scoring a “deal” and GameStop looks like the good guy. So be careful when trading in that handheld the next time Nintendo announces a new 3DS model.
