I witnessed a rather frustrating occurence over Black Friday weekend at Gamestop, which, thankfully, did not happen to me.

A middle-aged man was buying some used games for his young son. The cashier was a jolly looking older man who earlier described himself as a retired college professor who “loves video games too much.” The cashier asked the customer if he had the Edge card, Gamestop’s 10% off discount card for used games. It costs $15 per annum and also gets you a subscription to the Gamestop-owned magazine Game Informer, which tells you which games you should be buying at Gamestop. No editorial conflict of interest there, no.

The customer presented his card, and after the cashier squinted at it, he responded, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think you can use your card today. The ink has rubbed off on it. You’ll have to bring in your address label with your account number on it to get your discount.”

If this had happened to me, I would have gone nuclear apeshit. After all, this is a discount that you have to PAY to subscribe to, not like a coupon or some such.

Let me point out that the fading labels are what you would call a “known issue.” They print out your account number and barcode on the same ink and paper that they use on price stickers, so it’s not exactly durable stuff. These stickers can fade to be practically blank after a few months of normal wear and tear in your wallet. You can read a thread about it here at CheapAssGamer. Many employees know about the fading problem and will put tape or a sticker over the label, but I’ve heard some employees say that this hinders rather than helps.

To be fair, an employee can easily print you a new label if yours is dark enough to be legible, or if you have an address label from your Game Informer, as mentioned above. (This is how they replace lost cards.) In the last year, I have had to have my sticker replaced 3 times due to this mysterious “fading.”

My problem is that this customer was denied a discount that he flat out paid for to begin with, and even more to my horror, the customer seemed indifferent and just agreed.

A few naysayers may point out that perhaps his subscription was expired, and there would be no way to tell due to the faded card. But this could be easily verifiable if the stickers didn’t fade to begin with, and in fact, are well known to do so — almost like it’s on purpose?

To anyone at Gamestop: fix your stickers. While we’re on the topic, tell your employees to stop putting stickers directly on games’ paper inserts. Nobody likes having your tacky yellow pawn tags all over their RPG collection, nor do they like risking ripping their covers just to get them off. This is one of an arm’s-length list of complaints that Gamestop could fix for little or no cost that they just don’t bother to do. (ie., Stop selling opened games as new — Game Crazy can use custom inserts for display, why can’t you?) I guess they’re too busy paying customers pennies on the dollar for their used inventory in store credit which gets used to buy more inventory that they paid pennies on the dollar for. Follow that?

(Pictured is my previous deactivated Gamestop Edge card to illustrate what I was talking about. There used to be a barcode and account number printed on the yellow sticker — not that you can tell by looking at it. The tape placed over it obviously didn’t help either. A diligent employee wrote my account number in permanent marker, which fared much better. Note that the account number printed on the card has to do with credit you put on the card, which is separate from the 10% discount.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Retail gripes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.