Wow, the anonymity of the internet strikes again. "Get over it?" Please.
Considering that Gamestop virtually shakes you down for your personal information every single damned time you buy something, regardless of the form of payment used, it would stand to reason that it should be a simple matter to use the same information to reverse the transaction. There is no reason why in this day and age Gamestop can't do that. And you know, barring a receipt or one's personal information, it shouldn't be too tough for you folks to offer store credit for unopened, GAMESTOP-labeled accessories/equipment. You know that the customer couldn't have possibly bought it anywhere else, and it's unopened, so why wouldn't you folks do this? I can see why you wouldn't do it for games, being that piracy is so rampant, but it's a damned guitar stand. Nobody is pirating that crap, and yet you tools act like asking to return it is a high crime.
Honestly, Gamestop is one of the worst, most reprehensible businesses out there. It's often staffed by disaffected children fresh out of high-school, who have no concept of good customer service and wouldn't care even if they did, because the dream job they idealized Gamestop to be turned out to be just another retail position like any other. However that doesn't stop them from acting like know-it-all dinks. The job could very well be done by trained monkeys, but your average Gamestop employee thinks he's hot stuff because he sells videogames, as if they're part of the industry they obsess over. You don't hear folks at the Foot Locker acting like they're part of the shoe industry, yet Gamestop employees have that little special something about them that makes them think that they're worth half a squirt, when they're just counter-jockeys like anyone else in retail. This is evinced by the tone of the responses you'll get from the average Gamestop employee online. They'll gladly parrot corporate policy and tell you how messed up you are for not agreeing with such outmoded and customer-unfriendly policies, all the while acting like uncouth twits.
The OP did nothing wrong but make the mistake of trying to do business with Gamestop. I can assure you had he received a similar item from say, Wal-Mart, he'd have been able to return it sans receipt open or not. Of course it would have been for store credit, but even so, that's an option that Gamestop just doesn't offer, for reasons that are mystifying to anyone with a brain.
As for you AngryLlama, I've noticed that you appear to have an awful lot invested in Gamestop complaints. Perhaps you're an employee? Whatever the case may be, that's no excuse for your piss-poor attitude. If you didn't hide behind a screen-name, I'd make it a point to contact your corporate office and let them know that one of their employees was making an ### of himself on the internet, thereby painting the company he works for in a negative light. I know that when I worked at Gamestop once upon a time, they made it a point to make sure that we knew not to do or say anything as a representative of Gamestop that might gain them negative attention, and that was before the internet was as well-proliferated as it is now. I'm sure that policy hasn't changed.
Besides, your response is laughable. The fact that you're pulling assumptions out of your nether-regions aside, if those low-wage clerks can be trusted to handle my credit-card to run the initial transaction in the first place, they can damn-well be trusted to look up my transaction history. That's an aside though, because you're projecting onto the OP, who stated very clearly (for the comprehension-challenged...) that he received the item in question as a gift, which is why he didn't have a receipt. Also, I'm oh-so-sorry that you have a job that challenges you, but that's no concern of mine, or anyone else for that matter. I don't care whether looking up a transaction in the system takes five minutes or twenty, the simple fact is that if that's what's required to get the job done, then that's what you folks need to do. However, that's also a non-issue because for some ###-backwards reason, Gamestop is one of the few business out there that doesn't have the capability to track customer's transaction histories in spite of the fact that you routinely engage in data-mining. Besides, if the customer receives the item as a gift, then chances are damned good (I'd say 100 percent...) that they're not going to be in the system anyway.
Still, the point stands that if you folks joined the rest of us in the 21st century, Gamestop would have allowed the OP to return the item for store credit, and that they didn't is hardly defensible. So take your snark somewhere else, it's not flying here.
Right, 1 or 3 extra dollars above and beyond retail to ensure that open-box game you've sold us as new doesn't crap out on us. Get real yepyep. Besides, that practice is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand, and would be even if it wasn't almost completely nonsensical.
The issue at hand is that Gamestop opens games and sells them as new. We don't want to hear excuses for it. It's an inexcusable practice no matter how Gamestop corporate wants you to spin it to us. The simple fact is that on the surface, it appears that Gamestop has absolutely no qualms with circumventing its own policies when it benefits them, while the rest of us are stuck with a game as soon as we open it.
Consider this; I buy a game and take it home. I open it up and play it once, and find out that it's an utterly ### waste of sixty bucks. So I bring it back to you in pristine condition. Now what happens? You folks tell me that you can't give me my cash back since I've opened it, and that you can only give me a small fraction of what I paid for it in store credit as a trade-in, and something like 20 percent less if I want cash for it. Now see, therein lies the issue. It's apparently alright for you folks to open a game for various reasons and resell it to me for the full price of an unopened copy, and it's your assertion that this practice is okay as long as the game is in pristine condition, but apparently what's good for the Gamestop goose isn't good for the gander. If you can't see why that would put some people's dander up, then you're drinking too much of the Gamestop Kool-Aid.
Now I know why this is. Folks brought a class-action suit against Gamestop sometime in either the late 90's or the early 2000's, because they were allowing folks to return games and then reselling them as new. Your policies aren't about combating piracy, or any other heavy-handed justification. It's simply a case of a vocal minority ruining things for the rest of us. However, being that the suit was never about the condition of the games, but was predicated on the very issue that's being addressed now; that you folks were selling open-box items as brand new, then it would seem to me that it would be in Gamestop's best interest to find a new way to display games, and to discontinue their employee check-out perk lest it find itself in the same boat once again. If the rumblings from a few months back have anything to say about it, these practices may very well be found to be in violation of that class action suit.*
Anyway, I don't think that any of us really give a ### about the condition of the disks we're being fraudulently sold as new, especially when the same schpiel wouldn't work in reverse, so you can drop that worthless defense. If I'm buying something new, I want it unopened, and free of the possibility that one of you took it home and played it. You can bring the games back in pristine condition, but that you opened it and took it home is the very definition of pre-played no matter what the condition it's returned in, and if that ### doesn't fly for us, it shouldn't fly for you.
Oh, and the car analogy? That doesn't apply. Buying a new car is hardly the same as buying videogames, and besides, the car industry has provisions in place to account for miles accrued during test-drives. You don't have those same provisions in place. In fact Gamestop doesn't have any provisions in place to account for its practices at all.
As an aside, I don't know why a company that treats its work-force so poorly has such overzealous employees. Yet every single time I read a complaint against Gamestop, it's invariably accompanied by a response by one of you, and you always defend the company like it's the best thing to ever grace the Earth with its existence. It's mystifying to me why you folks would go out of your way to speak in favor of policies you know to be complete ### at all, much less do it so zealously for a company that only treats you as well as your numbers. Yet you do. All the damned time. It's amazing.
Now what's really sort of pathetic is that almost none of you have any grasp of how to speak to people amiably. In fact many of you straight-up trash-talk your customers. Hell, look at you. Instead of simply pointing out policy and being done with it, you go on to tell folks to quit complaining. Forget for a moment that it's their right to complain about it, it's highly inappropriate of you as a representative of Gamestop to speak to your customers that way, whether you're on the clock or not. That you feel that it's appropriate to go online and treat them so poorly is highly indicative of just how ill suited many of you are to a retail position. Which is all that it is. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Gamestop isn't a foot in the door to the videogame industry. I wish Gamestop would stop hiring kids fresh out of highschool and start employing people who not only have a working knowledge about videogames, but who also know what it takes to work in retail, but I digress.
Now I don't know what Gamestop's policies are about representing the company online these days, but in my time as a Gamestop employee back before they went downhill, they were very adamant about making sure we watched what we said and did as a representative of the company. For all it's faults since, I can't imagine that the company would like to hear that its work-force is being uncouth [censored]-bags online, and contributing to the public's negative image of them. If you weren't hiding behind a screen-name, they just may have had the opportunity to address this case of it.
* http://kotaku.com/5254827/gamestop-class-action-attorney-investigating-latest-used-as-new-claims
Uh, wow.
You know, I've read some complete ### written by Gamestop employees before, but this takes the cake. No, there's no basis for a lawsuit if you deny trades for any reason. You don't even have to be blatant about it, as your limited imagination seems to have you thinking you do. You simply tell the customer that you can't accept the trade-in, and that's that.
Now this could all be resolved by simply doing what every other pawn shop does (And let's face it, you're a glorified pawn shop), which is that you take personal information with every trade (which you already do...), and you set it in "pawn" for the 15 to 30 days that other establishments do in order to allow time for the item to be reported as being stolen. That way if the item comes up stolen, you've not only got the information required to aid in the police investigation, but you've got the item to return to its rightful owner. Nah, that's insane, right? I mean, how could you guys keep business moving if you did that?
By the way, you're awfully bold behind that screen name, aren't you, AngryLlama. Why don't you step out from behind it and give us your real name kiddo? Maybe then we could help free of that burden of working for Gamestop, where every customer seems to piss you off way more than is reasonable. Why not? Or are you too afraid to expose yourself? Chicken ### ###.
@ Stealth Pilot (user blocked)
The thing you seem to have missed is that Gamestop uses these freebies in order to entice people into preordering their games there. If they can't follow through on the promise of that freebie then they shouldn't offer them, or at the very least should make it clear when you preorder that you're not ensured the pre-order bonus due to limited availability. They never do that though. No matter how limited the quantities may be, they continue to push these pre-order bonuses on each and every customer who pre-orders a given title as if they can in fact just ### them out upon request. That's shady business through-and-through.
Unless this manager is a totally inept [censored], he should have been aware of the bonus. I'm sure that he told plenty of people about it when they preordered the game. He also probably should know better as a manager than to leave shipments to be handled by a ### who throws away ### without maybe checking in to why they received it. Assuming of course that they didn't in fact just get plucked by the clerks. His attitude sucks, his excuses are thin and flimsy. You were right to complain. Thanks for the head's-up.
@ CCBP
Of course they're encouraged to push the sub on you, but turning it down does not preclude them from selling you an individual copy of their ###, store-owned rag if you're too stupid to see the conflict of interest inherent in it and want one anyway.
Also, the folks who are justifying the sales of pre-orders to anyone but the person who put money down for it, let us please stop pretending as if it's a "storage" issue. FYI, if you have to make ridiculous and intellectually vacuous comparisons to things like renting a storage space, then you're probably too stupid to be having this conversation in the first place.
We're talking about a videogame store here. They can hold a title for more than 48 hours, folks. I'll grant you that asking Gamestop to hold preorders indefinitely would be ridiculous, but that they only hold a pre-ordered title for 48 hours is an arbitrary decision meant to justify selling someone's posession to someone else as soon as possible if given the opportunity. They'll do it whether or not five dollars were paid for it or if it was paid off in full. They could just as easily hold it for a more reasonable seven days if they wanted to, but the problem is that after that seven days interest in a given title tends to drop off pretty quickly, what with all the alternatives to Gamestop available out there. You can't sell a hot new game to someone as easily seven days after it's hit than you can within 48 hours, so that's why they consider the preoder vacated after that small window of time.
It's a ###, shady business tactic, but I guess it's not illegal. You'd be better off preordering your games from Amazon from here on in. You can still get most of 'em on release day, and the ones you can't you'll get shortly thereafter. And most importantly, they'll never sell your copy to someone else after 48 hours and tell you to go piss up a rope.
As much as I loath Gamestop, I don't really see the problem here. Once you take off the shrink-wrap it's considered used. Of course the same thing ought to said when Gamestop does it to gut their games, but that's neither here nor there. This has pretty-much been store policy since that class-action suit a decade or so back, and is pretty-much the policy at any store you go to anymore. Once you open it you can't take it back for a full refund. It sucks, but that's why it's more important than ever to do your dilligence as a consumer before you spend your hard-earned cash on a game.
You know, if it were just misinformation that would be one thing, but I've heard them blatantly lie to people on so many occasions that it's hard to chalk it up to that. A lot of folks will say that you shouldn't give Gamestop's employees any crap for having to carry out store policy, but when I worked there years ago it was never policy to lie to customers.
I too have had a great customer service experience with these folks, just today in fact. I e-mailed them asking why (at the time of the e-mail) it had been 12 business days and I still hadn't received my order. Within ten minutes they'd not only e-mailed me back with a tracking number for the order, but they had issued a replacement order sent overnight with delivery confirmation. When I asked what to do with the other order should it arrive at some point, they told me that I could either use the prepaid shipping envelope they would include with the replacements to return it, or if I wanted to I could just keep it. I'm going to send them back should they show up, simply as a thank you for their awesome customer service.
