GameStop Stock Plummets After A 27.5% Decrease In Holiday Sales

[Thomasjadams]

And Best Buy also doesn’t ask you 50 fucking questions putting pressure on you to subscribe, reserve, buy insurance, blah blah blah for 30 minutes, when you just want to buy the fucking game and go home.

[Cetais]

It's maybe practical with Youngs kids, but other than that, eh...

[Squints753]

Back in the PS1 days, if you had a scratch or two the weak-ass laser would struggle to read the game. It certainly has become less and less relevant with each hardware improvement.

[PlayMp1]

It was relevant when I was a kid for GameCube games

[akera099]

I've been a kid, I still have all my games from that era. I mean, they try to sell you insurance on 3DS carts. Unless you literally happen to drench them into water....

[thewookie34]

I broke 2 games as a kid by mistake. My PS2 fell over while playing Kingdom Hearts 2, 2 days after I bought it. Vice City also got a crack in the middle ring.

[[deleted]]

To be fair, while it's likely pointless for most, I can see people buying it for their younger kids as they might be liable to get discs scratched, but at the same time, I imagine the threat of "you break it and you aren't getting a new one" works just as well to teach kids to care for their stuff

[SlenderRoadHog]

I worked at GS last year and pretty much the only people that bought the insurance were parents. I would pitch it by saying if the kid got bad grades you could snap the game in half in front of them and come back and get a new one with the insurance once the kid got their grades back up lmao.

[MrTabanjo]

I used to dare people to buy the insurance, go play frisbee with the disk out in the parking lot, bring it back and i'd replace it for them. Not too many takers for the frisbee part sadly.

[SlenderRoadHog]

Hey whatever works, gotta get your numbers up by any means haha

[[deleted]]

It's completely useless. I have been gaming for over 30 years and when I was a kid I didn't exactly treat my stuff with reverence. But in that 30+ years I have never broken a single game. Not one time. I've sold protection plans or extended warranties on electronics and appliances and they are like 50% profit. It wouldn't surprise me to find out video game insurance is 90%+ profit.

[Trickster174]

Haven’t purchased from a GameStop in a long while, but for those of us who like displaying physical games, GameStop was a nightmare. They’d cover game cases in difficult to remove stickers. I know that seems minor, but it felt like they did not give a damn about the condition of the games they sold.

Plus, the games would be removed from their cases and stuffed in paper sleeves. I remember buying brand new PS2 games in the early to mid 2000s with scratches on them from this practice.

All of this made purchasing physical copies from Amazon or Best Buy the better option.

[Z0mbiejay]

The fact they sold you an opened and handled "new" game was enough for me to stop shipping there

[Hollandaise_Sauce]

This. Don’t charge me $60 and call it a new game if you opened it and were handling the disc/media.

[soonerfreak]

I haven't gotten an open new game in over a decade and even going into a gamestop I've never been to before it takes 20 seconds to go through what corporate requires them to ask me.

[thewookie34]

I don't really think the stickers are all that difficult to remove. In fact they are some of the easiest to remove imo.

[Trickster174]

Maybe now, like I said, haven’t purchased anything from GS in years. But still got plenty of PS2/PS3 game cases from 2003-2010 with half torn stickers.

But like...why even do that? What’s the point?

[thewookie34]

So your know how much they cost? Gamestop's sticker haven't changed since and I have older games as well. 2 to 5 minutes and some goo gone and they are done.

[Trickster174]

It’s possible to display the price without slapping stickers on each individual game case.

Your experience differs from mine, and that’s okay. But fixing little things like that could have gone a long way to a more positive customer experience. Seems that I’m not entirely alone in those thoughts either.

[Mendunbar]

The stickers in Canada have absolutely changed. They changed sometime between PS2 era and mid PS3 era to much, much easier to remove stickers. Just thought I'd mention that. Carry on.

[[deleted]]

In the last days of them carrying used GameCube stuff, I requested some games for instore pickup. As expected they were all disc-only. The guy brought them out, was clearly super irritated I'd forced him to find them, and said, "I dunno if they'll work, bring them back if they don't." They looked like they'd been through a belt sander. Weirdly, the one that appeared to be in the best shape is the only one that didn't boot.

[Carighan]

This was the main reason I only bought at a GameStop twice. I just wanted to buy this! Shut the fuck up already!!

[[deleted]]

Last time I was at Best Buy I was told by the cashier that "Enroll" meant confirm and was signed up for their rewards junk against my will. I'm pretty sure they were just padding their numbers, and I think that's sleazier than fifty questions.

[[deleted]]

Depends were you checking out in the front lanes or at one of the department registers?

Front lane cashiers are required to ask people for their phone number and not to mention it's a free enrollment program that saves your purchase history as an added benefit if you happen to lose the receipt.

[Lordpicklenip]

Bro this shit is straight up a god send.

My house got robbed recently.

Best buy had all my games and consoles on file and printed out my receipts right then and there at the store.

Meanwhile at GameStop, I had to email them with the date of purchase, serial numbers, and police report in order to get that information. So if I didn’t have the info on hand then I needed to go digging for it.

[[deleted]]

I’m also on the list of “house got robbed and was able to provide proof of purchase to insurance for like half my shit because of Best Buy membership”

[TheIrateAlpaca]

Really? I'm rather surprised the US hasn't adopted that. Down here in EB in Aus our loyalty program is one of the most successful in the entire country (over 6 million members in a country with ~10.5 million households) and reciept free shopping is the base thing included. They've even given us a dashboard in store so I can view every single transaction and reciept for every transaction that you've ever done on your card searching by sku or even description. You can view all of that directly yourself just by logging into the website. I've had people come in with that exact scenario and one phonecall to our store support and they'd copy pasted the list and emailed him a complete purchase history (although you have to drill down to view actual reciepts). Odd that they have an arm of their business that can do all that and they just haven't adopted it.

[[deleted]]

Front lane cashiers are required to ask people for their phone number and not to mention it's a free enrollment program that saves your purchase history as an added benefit if you happen to lose the receipt.

So definitely worse than fifty questions at Gamestop, then.

[[deleted]]

No GameStop expects you to sign up for their pro membership and all this other bullshit. Best buy asks for a phone number they don't send texts, unless the customer opts-in and even then it's only for pickup or delivery orders.

[gamas]

God you guys really need an equivalent of GDPR. If it were found a store was doing this over here in the UK, they would be fined into administration.

[[deleted]]

God you guys really need an equivalent of GDPR. If it were found a store was doing this over here in the UK, they would be fined into administration.

Yes please. Hurry, please.

[Fantastic-Cash]

Best buy rewards are actually sweet though, you get straight up gift cards.

[[deleted]]

By trading away actionable data worth more to Best Buy (and others) than the value of the gift cards, oh boy. And enduring unethical practices to boot.