@Shloobian
You’re talking to a former Gamestop/EB employee. I know how they work, and I know that a significant portion (but not majority) of their revenue comes from used games. I’m not “butt hurt” about trade-in prices. I just know exactly what happened because I was actually there when the decline started.
You adapt by understanding what customers want/need and trying your best to provide that level of service. You look at what’s driving customers elsewhere and you change your model to alleviate that. People love the convenience that they get at other b/m retailers and online retailers. Convenience was the opposite of what GameStop gives people.
I worked there right when a lot of the bad practices started getting pushed harder. We were told to aggressively upsell every single customer. I’m talking pushing 3-5 upsells per order. That pushed *a lot* of customers away. Head office didn’t care.
Trade-in values kept getting lower and lower, while we started charging just $5 less than MSRP for used games. People figured out they could get far better deals at other retailers, or on eBay/Kijiji. Again, that pushed customers away. Head office still didn’t care.
You can sit there and tell me how brick and mortar can’t adapt to the digital age, but it’s a bunch of crap. GameStop didn’t try to fix anything until it was way too late. You obviously don’t understand how bad things got at GameStop, nor have you ever tried to deal with the management.
There were plenty of opportunities to turn things around. And they were told every step of the way by their employees. They just didn’t care. They didn’t actively try to improve customer service/relations until they absolutely had to. All they wanted was to squeeze the customers they had left as much as they could.
