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My experience with Gamerush began innocently enough in Brighton, MI in early 2004. I often visited Blockbuster stores to buy used games, especially when they ran the buy 2, get 1 free sale. On this particular trip to Blockbuster, I was welcomed with a wonderous new setup, dubbed Gamerush. I returned a few days later with a few spare games to trade in, and was quite pleased when I got $18 in credit for Mega Man Network Transmission. Not bad, considering it was an $8 clearance game at Target. Now I’m really not one to trade in my games, I’ve got a huge collection and love owning the physical copies. However, I’d occasionally take a few games with me just to see if I could get a good amount of credit for them.
I continued to trade occasionally, though I never really accumulated any credit. Around the beginning of Summer 2004, I started hearing rumblings of a new trade-in deal starting at Gamerush. And so on a Tuesday morning I made a run around my favorite circuit of Gamerush stores: Wixom, Novi, and Farmington Hills. Wixom had signage up for the trade any 2 games, get any preowned game for $9.99 deal. The rest of the stores I had to inform of the deal. That day was like heaven, trading in a couple of old games to trade a relatively new release for $10. Shortly after this deal started and I realized that PS1 games were accepted, I bought up a good amount of PS1 games to use for the deal. While I flipped a little during the early days of the $9.99 offer, I quickly scaled back and got a nice variety of newer games. I spent the duration of the deal visiting mainly the Brighton, Wixom, and Novi stores a few times a week.
During my frequent trips to Gamerush, I started to look for rare games to spend any extra credit on. On one particular trip I was surprised to find some relatively unknown games selling for as much as $39.99. I assumed that these must have high trade-in values, and began to check online to see how much I could get them for. The first major game that I can remember is Drake and the 99 Dragons for the Xbox. I’d never even heard of the game before I’d seen it at a Gamerush, yet it sold for $34.99 used and supplied $20 in store credit. I went over the top on Drake, ordering about 8 from EBGames for $5 each brand new, and then making a trip to about 5 different Gamestops in the area, paying less than $10 for any new and used copies I could find. All in all, I probably traded in 20+ copies of Drake, gain between $20 and $22 for each copy. Since I spread them out well between Brighton, Novi, Wixom, and Farmington Hills, it was never looked too bad.
Towards the end of Summer 2004, I began to scan the Gamerush website to find additional stores in the area to visit. I found a store in an area called Commerce Township. About 25 minutes from my house, not too bad. Once I got there, I recognized a man browsing the game section. I remembered him as an employee that I’d seen working at the Novi and Wixom stores. He was always a really nice guy, and I always had conversations with him while I traded games in. Turns out he was training to take over the Commerce store. A month later, once Jim had taken over the Commerce store, he offered me a job. A disgruntled Best Buy employee at the time, I immediately jumped on the offer. No more pushing extended warranties and trial magazine subscriptions on annoyed customers!
And so I began at Gamerush; working about 25 hours a week until I started school again in the fall. It was a great job, dealing with video games and also getting first choice on traded-in games to buy during the returns of the $9.99 trade-in deal. As I rang through more trade transactions, I started to find more “loopholes” similar to Drake. A frequent EBGames update shopper, I began buying these games cheaply, and then trading them in at Gamerush stores in the area. As you can imagine, I quickly accumulated credit this way. I never filled up a giftcard though. Never had more than $500 at a time. I bought way too much to ever accumulate that much. I mean, sure, I’d pick up a rare game if I knew I could sell or trade it, but most of the stuff I bought was for my own collection.
In the winter of 2004, a new employee policy threatened my trading practices. Employees were now allowed only to trade in games at their “home store”, and were no longer allowed to place their credit on value cards to take to other stores. This message was clearly communicated to me, and I signed a form willing to comply. And so I stopped trading at other stores…for about a month. At this point I realized that most stores did not recognize me as a Blockbuster employee. I decided to no longer trade in games at the Novi and Wixom stores, as I knew most of the employees there from my previous trading. I resumed trading in games at the Farmington Hills and Plymouth locations. Though both were quite a drive from my house, it was worth it to be able to take advantage of some crazy trade-in values! I also traded at the Brighton store once in a while, when I could handle dealing with the jackasses that worked there at the time.
So with a steady stream of credit accumulating, I was able to preorder pretty much any game that I wanted to play and also pay off any hard to find games that I’d come across on my travels. I enjoyed sharing upcoming deals on this site with a good collection of some of the best Gamerush customers. And I genuinely enjoyed working a job for the first time. My co-workers were all good-hearted, interesting people and we always had fun.
It was all going great, until about 3 weeks ago. Our store received a memo stating that the trade accounts of 12 members had been closed due to excessive trading. I wasn’t on the list, though I recognized a couple of the names as customers from our store. Ten days I showed up to work and it began just like any shift. Helped a kid trade in a few games, discussed with a frequent customer some of the new programs he’d installed on his PSP. About ten minutes after my shift began my manager came up to me and told me he needed me in the back room. He said that people were here to talk to me about my trading and that he was sorry. I immediately knew what was up. My manager is a great guy, and he really felt bad even though I had brought everything upon myself. I had always known that this meeting was going to happen.
So in the back room I’m greeted by the district manager (a grumpy man with the looks and personality of a serial killer) and a man from loss prevention. Over the next two hours I was grilled over my trading practices. Among the false accusations made over that time period were as follows: I was a retailer, I sold my value cards, I was a big reason why our store wasn’t profitable, I was the reason that employees didn’t get enough hours, and I flipped games. I told them the definition that I was given for flipping was buying games from Blockbuster and then trading them back in for a profit. They decided to expand the definition to include games bought at other locations. They had printouts of all my transactions I’d ever done at all Blockbusters. All in all I bought from the Novi and Wixom stores. I was a regular trader and customer (once every other week or so) at the Brighton, Plymouth, and Farmington Hills stores. I’d also visited stores in Waterford, Bloomfield Hills, and Rochester once or twice. They had printouts of every game that I’d ever traded and how many copies of each. I must say, even I was surprised by the 26 copies of Zoocube (GBA) that I’d traded in. I admit that at the end of the day, I had abused the deals. However, is it my fault that Blockbuster did not introduce restrictions or monitor trade-ins for odd cases such as Galleon? Under the current restrictions of 2 per title, 20 games total per day, I had never broken the rules. The only thing they had me for was not following employee policy by trading at other stores and possessing gift cards. At one point in the inquisition they asked how many gift cards I had. I told them the truth: I had one single gift card in my wallet, with less than $100 on it. I informed them that all the credit I got from my trades I put directly back into the stores. The district manager didn’t speak much the whole time, except to ask me on three occasions, “What do you think should happen to you?” Each time he asked I told him I should be fired. At this point I knew I no longer wanted to work for the company. When I was asked if I had any final comments, I explained for a few minutes how I had great relations with employees, strong bonds with many of the customers, excellent preorder numbers, impeccable knowledge of video games, and put an extraordinary time into my job despite only working two days per week during school. In fact, about a month before I left I designed a preorder book with over 100 Powerpoint slides, each one detailing a game that was coming out later this year.
At the end of the meeting the district manager told me that he wanted to fire me on the spot, but that he’d have to run it through human resources first. So I was suspended without pay. Before I left, the loss prevention guy asked me if I felt that I owed Blockbuster any money. I found this to be ridiculous, and responded no. As I got up to leave, he told me I could do whatever I wanted with the giftcard and looked at me expecting for me to hand it over. I simply said “OK” and walked out the door. I returned three days later to talk with my manager and quit the job. Being the great guy he is, he said that it was probably be best for me to do that, and said I was always welcome in the store and I was free to use him as a reference once I’ve graduated from Michigan State. A couple days ago in the mail I received the infamous “letter” that informed me that all of my trade accounts had been closed. Way to completely blackball some of your most loyal customers, Blockbuster. Oh yeah, and yesterday I spent the $75 remaining on my giftcard.
So if you’ve read this entire story, I feel for you. So I’m providing this: a list of all the games that you should be trading in at Blockbuster stores along with their trade-in values. This list was accurate as of 2 weeks ago. Enjoy!
XBOX
Galleon $20
Curse $13.50
Power Drome $10
Steel Battalion Line of Contact $25
Gungriffon $18
V-Rally 3 $12.50
Dead to Rights II $30
GCN
Dinotopia $13.50
Auto Modellista $20
Road Trip $25
Tube Slider $13.50
PS2
Inuyasha Secret of the Cursed Mask $20
G1 Jockey 3 $25
Kuon $25
Echo Night Beyond $18
Whiteout $12.50
Death By Degrees $20
GBA
Road Rash Jailbreak $10
Matchbox $9
Turbo Turtle $12
Zoocube $12
Robotech $8
Robopon (Ring and Cross versions) $9
Super Duper Sumos $9
X-Bladez $9
Aero the Acrobat $9
Car Battler Joe $12
Defender $9
NHL 2002 $9
So many GBA games are at the $9 mark!
I continued to trade occasionally, though I never really accumulated any credit. Around the beginning of Summer 2004, I started hearing rumblings of a new trade-in deal starting at Gamerush. And so on a Tuesday morning I made a run around my favorite circuit of Gamerush stores: Wixom, Novi, and Farmington Hills. Wixom had signage up for the trade any 2 games, get any preowned game for $9.99 deal. The rest of the stores I had to inform of the deal. That day was like heaven, trading in a couple of old games to trade a relatively new release for $10. Shortly after this deal started and I realized that PS1 games were accepted, I bought up a good amount of PS1 games to use for the deal. While I flipped a little during the early days of the $9.99 offer, I quickly scaled back and got a nice variety of newer games. I spent the duration of the deal visiting mainly the Brighton, Wixom, and Novi stores a few times a week.
During my frequent trips to Gamerush, I started to look for rare games to spend any extra credit on. On one particular trip I was surprised to find some relatively unknown games selling for as much as $39.99. I assumed that these must have high trade-in values, and began to check online to see how much I could get them for. The first major game that I can remember is Drake and the 99 Dragons for the Xbox. I’d never even heard of the game before I’d seen it at a Gamerush, yet it sold for $34.99 used and supplied $20 in store credit. I went over the top on Drake, ordering about 8 from EBGames for $5 each brand new, and then making a trip to about 5 different Gamestops in the area, paying less than $10 for any new and used copies I could find. All in all, I probably traded in 20+ copies of Drake, gain between $20 and $22 for each copy. Since I spread them out well between Brighton, Novi, Wixom, and Farmington Hills, it was never looked too bad.
Towards the end of Summer 2004, I began to scan the Gamerush website to find additional stores in the area to visit. I found a store in an area called Commerce Township. About 25 minutes from my house, not too bad. Once I got there, I recognized a man browsing the game section. I remembered him as an employee that I’d seen working at the Novi and Wixom stores. He was always a really nice guy, and I always had conversations with him while I traded games in. Turns out he was training to take over the Commerce store. A month later, once Jim had taken over the Commerce store, he offered me a job. A disgruntled Best Buy employee at the time, I immediately jumped on the offer. No more pushing extended warranties and trial magazine subscriptions on annoyed customers!
And so I began at Gamerush; working about 25 hours a week until I started school again in the fall. It was a great job, dealing with video games and also getting first choice on traded-in games to buy during the returns of the $9.99 trade-in deal. As I rang through more trade transactions, I started to find more “loopholes” similar to Drake. A frequent EBGames update shopper, I began buying these games cheaply, and then trading them in at Gamerush stores in the area. As you can imagine, I quickly accumulated credit this way. I never filled up a giftcard though. Never had more than $500 at a time. I bought way too much to ever accumulate that much. I mean, sure, I’d pick up a rare game if I knew I could sell or trade it, but most of the stuff I bought was for my own collection.
In the winter of 2004, a new employee policy threatened my trading practices. Employees were now allowed only to trade in games at their “home store”, and were no longer allowed to place their credit on value cards to take to other stores. This message was clearly communicated to me, and I signed a form willing to comply. And so I stopped trading at other stores…for about a month. At this point I realized that most stores did not recognize me as a Blockbuster employee. I decided to no longer trade in games at the Novi and Wixom stores, as I knew most of the employees there from my previous trading. I resumed trading in games at the Farmington Hills and Plymouth locations. Though both were quite a drive from my house, it was worth it to be able to take advantage of some crazy trade-in values! I also traded at the Brighton store once in a while, when I could handle dealing with the jackasses that worked there at the time.
So with a steady stream of credit accumulating, I was able to preorder pretty much any game that I wanted to play and also pay off any hard to find games that I’d come across on my travels. I enjoyed sharing upcoming deals on this site with a good collection of some of the best Gamerush customers. And I genuinely enjoyed working a job for the first time. My co-workers were all good-hearted, interesting people and we always had fun.
It was all going great, until about 3 weeks ago. Our store received a memo stating that the trade accounts of 12 members had been closed due to excessive trading. I wasn’t on the list, though I recognized a couple of the names as customers from our store. Ten days I showed up to work and it began just like any shift. Helped a kid trade in a few games, discussed with a frequent customer some of the new programs he’d installed on his PSP. About ten minutes after my shift began my manager came up to me and told me he needed me in the back room. He said that people were here to talk to me about my trading and that he was sorry. I immediately knew what was up. My manager is a great guy, and he really felt bad even though I had brought everything upon myself. I had always known that this meeting was going to happen.
So in the back room I’m greeted by the district manager (a grumpy man with the looks and personality of a serial killer) and a man from loss prevention. Over the next two hours I was grilled over my trading practices. Among the false accusations made over that time period were as follows: I was a retailer, I sold my value cards, I was a big reason why our store wasn’t profitable, I was the reason that employees didn’t get enough hours, and I flipped games. I told them the definition that I was given for flipping was buying games from Blockbuster and then trading them back in for a profit. They decided to expand the definition to include games bought at other locations. They had printouts of all my transactions I’d ever done at all Blockbusters. All in all I bought from the Novi and Wixom stores. I was a regular trader and customer (once every other week or so) at the Brighton, Plymouth, and Farmington Hills stores. I’d also visited stores in Waterford, Bloomfield Hills, and Rochester once or twice. They had printouts of every game that I’d ever traded and how many copies of each. I must say, even I was surprised by the 26 copies of Zoocube (GBA) that I’d traded in. I admit that at the end of the day, I had abused the deals. However, is it my fault that Blockbuster did not introduce restrictions or monitor trade-ins for odd cases such as Galleon? Under the current restrictions of 2 per title, 20 games total per day, I had never broken the rules. The only thing they had me for was not following employee policy by trading at other stores and possessing gift cards. At one point in the inquisition they asked how many gift cards I had. I told them the truth: I had one single gift card in my wallet, with less than $100 on it. I informed them that all the credit I got from my trades I put directly back into the stores. The district manager didn’t speak much the whole time, except to ask me on three occasions, “What do you think should happen to you?” Each time he asked I told him I should be fired. At this point I knew I no longer wanted to work for the company. When I was asked if I had any final comments, I explained for a few minutes how I had great relations with employees, strong bonds with many of the customers, excellent preorder numbers, impeccable knowledge of video games, and put an extraordinary time into my job despite only working two days per week during school. In fact, about a month before I left I designed a preorder book with over 100 Powerpoint slides, each one detailing a game that was coming out later this year.
At the end of the meeting the district manager told me that he wanted to fire me on the spot, but that he’d have to run it through human resources first. So I was suspended without pay. Before I left, the loss prevention guy asked me if I felt that I owed Blockbuster any money. I found this to be ridiculous, and responded no. As I got up to leave, he told me I could do whatever I wanted with the giftcard and looked at me expecting for me to hand it over. I simply said “OK” and walked out the door. I returned three days later to talk with my manager and quit the job. Being the great guy he is, he said that it was probably be best for me to do that, and said I was always welcome in the store and I was free to use him as a reference once I’ve graduated from Michigan State. A couple days ago in the mail I received the infamous “letter” that informed me that all of my trade accounts had been closed. Way to completely blackball some of your most loyal customers, Blockbuster. Oh yeah, and yesterday I spent the $75 remaining on my giftcard.
So if you’ve read this entire story, I feel for you. So I’m providing this: a list of all the games that you should be trading in at Blockbuster stores along with their trade-in values. This list was accurate as of 2 weeks ago. Enjoy!
XBOX
Galleon $20
Curse $13.50
Power Drome $10
Steel Battalion Line of Contact $25
Gungriffon $18
V-Rally 3 $12.50
Dead to Rights II $30
GCN
Dinotopia $13.50
Auto Modellista $20
Road Trip $25
Tube Slider $13.50
PS2
Inuyasha Secret of the Cursed Mask $20
G1 Jockey 3 $25
Kuon $25
Echo Night Beyond $18
Whiteout $12.50
Death By Degrees $20
GBA
Road Rash Jailbreak $10
Matchbox $9
Turbo Turtle $12
Zoocube $12
Robotech $8
Robopon (Ring and Cross versions) $9
Super Duper Sumos $9
X-Bladez $9
Aero the Acrobat $9
Car Battler Joe $12
Defender $9
NHL 2002 $9
So many GBA games are at the $9 mark!
(
ed up stuff.
