28 Confessions of a GameStop Shift Supervisor

Over at The Consumerist they’re running a story written by a GameStop shift supervisor, who goes into lengthy detail about all things GameStop. It’s a good (long) read that both defends and perhaps inadvertently enforces some of the negative perceptions people have about the games retail giant.

The Gamestop trade-in business is based on on key tenet; we hardly turn down ANYTHING. For all the rage and screaming we take from people getting one dollar for years-old Madden games, you need to remember one key fact; we are taking in games that are often unlikely to EVER resell.

Most trade-ins we ever receive are not recent or desirable games. We take games in awful shape, without original cases, and that are years-old and so saturated that they will never, ever sell. Every gamestop is drowning in used Madden NFL 2001-2007’s as we speak. Old sports titles have no resale value, and we offer a small amount for them with the understand that we will probably never make that back on its sale. The point here is, simply, that there is no sense in decrying Gamestop’s trade-in values for games that you are unlikely to sell anywhere else.

Not all trade-ins are like this, however. Games in high demand are, appropriately, worth much more. This doesn’t just mean RECENT games like Bioshock and Halo 3. Super Smash Bros for the Gamecube is still trading in for fifteen dollars at the time of this writing; much more than any other Gamecube game. Games or items we are likely to resell are worth far more than ones that are incomplete, in poor shape, unpopular, or overly plentiful. Always bear this in mind.

Read the full story over at The Consumerist.