Last week Tesco and Asda revealed plans to enter the pre-owned games market; this week Argos has announced that they will soon be exchanging used games for in-store credit too. Put aside any thoughts of taking loads of copies of FIFA 2005 to your local though – they’re not going to take any old rubbish, only certain titles which appear on a list. You’ll also be able to see the trade in values on their website, which is handy. CeX are the only retailer to do this at the moment.
This news is a little surprising. For non-UK readers, Argos isn’t your typical high street store – it’s a catalogue store. You look through a catalogue, write down the number of the item you want and take it to the till. Then after five minutes or so, your item is brought down to you from a warehouse. How they’re going to sell these pre-owned games is a bit of a mystery. I’m guessing that they won’t appear in their catalogue and each store included in the trial will simply have a shelf/rack of pre-owned stuff. If that’s the case then it might increase the amount of people going into their stores.
