My older son and I went over to my local Gamestop the other day, thinking that we were going to get the code for the new Pokémon character Volcanion. Usually you either get handed a card with a code on it, and redeem the code in the game in the "Mystery Gift" section on the main screen, or sometimes it works by connecting to the Wifi at certain places and then going in the same part of the game. (McDonalds did that recently when the character Hoopa came out. Oddly, for that one you could just change the SSID of your own router to "McDonalds Free WiFi" and it would still work.) As we discovered later, Volcanion is not available in the US until October 10th.
There were a lot of people there trying to do trade-ins and other things, so we hung back while my son tried to go into the Mystery Gift section to see if it would work that way. After a while, we decided we were just going to wait in line, and we also noticed that they got in some of the new Lego Dimensions level packs and grabbed the Adventure Time level pack. (I would have gotten the Mission Impossible one instead if there was a Simon Pegg minifig.) They also had a Harry Potter Team Pack, the new Ghostbusters 2016 Story Pack, and some other team packs.
So, just as I'm about to be called up to the counter, a grumpy mom holding an Xbox One game, a receipt, and the arm of a not-quite-a-teenager walks in, and interrupts everybody to ask the clerk if there is anyone else working. He says no, but mentions there is someone else that is there, but on break. After a second or two, I recognize the kid as someone who was one of the people doing a trade-in while we hung back in the back of the store. The mom is mad that her kid had just a few minutes before traded in NBA2K16, which he just got recently, and only got two bucks trade-in value for it. Moreover, he traded it in to get NBA2K17, which apparently nobody mentioned to him was just about to come out when he was buying NBA2K16, which is why he wanted to return NBA2K16. She left in a huff, presumably to get satisfaction in some other way. So, let's go over the problems with this scenario.
1) The kid's copy of NBA2K16 had been opened. For the most part, no retailers will do a return for open new software. Gamestop does do returns for used software because sometimes you end up with a bad disk here and there, or maybe you just don't like it. The kid could have just walked away with his copy of NBA2K16, told his mom that they wouldn't return it (and she could have still rolled in the store grumpy the same way that she did).
2) Knowing that the kid really wanted the new version, the store employee talked him into a trade-in just so the old version wasn't "collecting dust and taking up space". Some people do that, so I don't know how to speak to that. I'm not sure if Gamestop has a policy about minors doing trade-ins.
3) I didn't remember if the kid had had anybody with him when he came in the first time - Grumpy Mom was definitely not there the first time, though. I wouldn't send one of my kids in to try to do a return on anything by themselves just yet, even with a receipt, just because in most cases it's not exactly as simple as ordering something, and often you get asked for ID, or have to sign stuff.
4) As far as not knowing when the new one was going to come out, that's kind of a head-scratcher. From the Gamestop employee's view, they would be ecstatic to be able to sell a new copy of NBA2K16 right before NBA2K17 comes out, so I really can't blame them for not saying anything. If the kid had asked them, they would have told him, though. Moreover, the series has put out a new version every fall for longer than that kid has been alive, and the last 10 versions have all been between mid-September and the first week of October. Despite how easy the Internet has made it to look things like this up, not everybody is going to know, or even think to check. What I'm really wondering is if when the kid bought NBA2K16, if the Gamestop employee asked if he wanted to preorder NBA2K17. My guess is that if they did, the kid said "no" by reflex and didn't give it another thought.
5) Sports games, especially ones that get released every year, have had historically bad trade-in value, so that's a non-surprise to me that it was only a $2 trade-in value. Of course, if Grumpy Mom was expecting a real return to have transpired, this wasn't even a thing that would have been considered beforehand.
I would have been a little bit more impressed with Gamestop had the employee offered to negotiate with Grumpy Mom, but I think that Grumpy Mom had already decided that leaving and taking it up with someone else was preferable to being in the store for even one more second. Clearly Grumpy Mom didn't want to go in the store in the first place, or she would have been present for the discussion about the trade-in, or perhaps she might have figured out about the new version had she been present for the original purchase.
So, what did we learn? If your kids are playing games, even a little bit of involvement will save you a lot of aggravation later.
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