You may have heard that Sainsbury’s cut the price of Xbox 360 and Wii consoles this week by £30 a piece. But if you’re struggling to find one, then don’t blame Sainsbury’s staff for snapping them up – Game, GameStation and other high street stores have confessed that they sent out store managers to pick up a few to supplement their own stocks. Which is out of order, and greedy, really.
Keep trying though – Sainsburys have hinted that more price cuts may be available soon.
please read the comments of the forum-by clicking on it-regarding Game and Gamesation
http://www.officialnintendomagazine.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?p=1047731&sid=0f0e1578dc0b35569b364f072f0406eb
I don’t know about the UK, but in North America, this would actually invalidate the warranty for the unfortunate sap that winds up buying the system from GAME.
How so, you may ask? Well, in order to minimize loss due to theft in the shipping channel, manufacturers keep track (by serial number) of which systems are sent to which retailer.
So, let’s say you buy your console from GAME and they, in turn, bought it from Sainsbury’s. Your console RRoDs (let’s face it, your Wii isn’t going to need warranty replacement. Neither is your DS.), and you send it back to the manufacturer. Somebody in the warranty return department is actually paying attention, and they look at the sales receipt that you sent in with the console, and it says GAME at the top, but their computer says this system was shipped to Sainsbury’s. Uh-oh! Red flag!! Through no fault of your own, it appears to “the man†that you’re involved in some shady activity. Good luck with that warranty replacement – you’re gonna need it!!
So they want to give their customers choice by taking an option away and good value by selling a cheaper sold console at an higher price?
This sort of thing shouldn’t be allowed and RubyMars in the comments to this story at GoNintendo has made a good point –
Im currently working in GAME and i have to say they are absolutely ruthless. At one point the managers had a meeting and said that even though theres a credit crunch on and companys are going out of business, GAME is still making money because they dont have customers they have fans, and fans will always be around to buy games.
It is true in a way, its similar to football. We dont just buy games for the any old reason we have an actual passion for it, so there will always be a demand for computer games.
Someone brought Perfect Dark Zero for a trade in the other day guess how much we offered them for it? 20p! 20 f***ing p! Elder Scrolls Oblivion was only £5. Its now company policy on trade ins to roughly allow them a fiver off of games and then treble the price for resale.
The worst one was the Wii and Wii Fit. Our manager said that people are so desperate for them that we bundle in as much as we possibly can like extra controllers, crap games, accessories, so we can get as much profit as possible. He said packages end up coming to over £300 but it doesnt matter because someone will always buy it.
Now i have worked there i dont think i want to spend my money in there anymore. So im going to milk my employee discount as much as possible and find an independent game shop.
I heard a long time ago that when GameStation sold retro stuff they used to get their staff go out to local carboots on a Sunday morning and pick up all the retro stuff they could find.
I actually feel sorry for the staff sometimes, like when they have to tell them that their entire PS2 collection is only worth £8-odd trade in. Or as you pointed out, 20p for Perfect Dark Zero.