Gamestop's 'trade Anything Day' Has Some Employees Bracing For The...

GameStop's latest promotion is a catastrophe in waiting, but some employees are encouraging customers to do something good with it instead.

If you've ever had a burning urge to make a fellow human being miserable, GameStop's latest promotional idea seems perfectly designed to accommodate such antisocial ambition. It's "Trade Anything Day," an obviously bad idea cooked up by the disconnected braintrust at head office, during which customers will be able to trade in (almost) anything for in-store credit.

GameStop is famous for its trade-in program, of course, but historically it's been limited to games: buy one, take it home, finish it, bring it back, trade it in for a tiny bit of store credit, and perpetuate the cycle. The rise of digital distribution has put a fork into it (and GameStop) but there was a time when it was a very big part of the biz, even for PC gamers: I bought plenty of pre-owned games back in the days when driving to the mall was an integral part of the 'buying a game' experience.

This promotion is an absurd, one-day revival of those glory days: On December 6, you can bring in any old piece of crap and trade it as though it were a videogame you played but did not enjoy enough to form any attachments to.

As noted by documentation shared on Reddit (because I don't see the promised "more information" on the GameStop website), customers are limited to one item traded in, for which they will get $5 store credit, and they won't take things like hazardous waste, drugs, booze, guns, and animals, dead or alive, unless they've been properly stuffed and mounted. Not joking about that.

As you'd expect if you've spent any time at all in retail, GameStop employees are absolutely dreading this day. "I'm not prepared for the 'bring anything to trade' day," one employee wrote on the GameStop subreddit (via Polygon). "I just know I'm going to have to handle some nasty shit. And not only that, we're probably going to have to reject some of the things because they're a biological hazard.

"I'm gonna have so many customers asking me 'HoW cOmE yOu CaN’t TaKe iT iN' cause we can't bro? Please for the love of every single GameStop employee READ THE GUIDELINES. I may be over-exaggerating it, but I have a feeling it'll be a bad day in general."

I was a long-term retail employee myself, in a business not entirely unlike GameStop, and I can assure you of this: You are absolutely not exaggerating it.

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Source: PC Gamer