{"id":291324,"date":"2025-11-18T16:26:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/291324\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T16:26:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:26:07","slug":"gamestop-employees-are-bracing-for-trade-anything-day-chaos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/291324\/","title":{"rendered":"GameStop Employees Are Bracing For ‘Trade Anything Day’ Chaos"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier this week, meme stock retailer turned Pok\u00e9mon card pawn shop, GameStop, announced a new trade-in stunt engineered to go viral. \u201cTrade Anything Day<\/a>\u201d will let customers come in and hand over almost anything in exchange for store credit. Employees who weren\u2019t told about the promotional stunt in advance are already preparing for the worst. Some are even trying to harness the chaos for a good cause.\u00a0<\/p>\n

GameStop\u2019s official announcement says people can bring in their junk and trade it in on December 6 for credit toward games and other purchases as long as it doesn\u2019t violate a long list of exceptions. Those include hazardous materials, things that pose health risks, and Meta Quest VR headsets, for some reason. Trade-ins for stuff the stores normally accept will continue as usual.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the whole story. A flyer store employees received<\/a> goes into more detail and explains exactly how \u201cTrade Anything Day\u201dis supposed to work. Customers can only trade in one nonsense item that day. They only get $5 store credit, no matter what it is. At the very end, employees will be tasked with taking all of the qualifying items to local, approved donation drop-off points. Presumably everything else will be thrown out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re getting so many calls already and people are being extra people-y already because they aren\u2019t reading the rules,\u201d one current employee told Kotaku. \u201cThe problem has been lately that they drop this stuff on socials and we find out hours or days later.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other GameStop workers are already crashing out. \u201cGod help us,\u201d reads one thread<\/a> on the r\/gamestop subreddit. \u201cI\u2019m not prepared for the \u2018bring anything to trade\u2019 day. I just know I\u2019m going to have to handle some nasty shit. And not only that, we\u2019re probably going to have to reject some of the things because they\u2019re a biological hazard. I\u2019m gonna have so many customers asking me \u2018HoW cOmE yOu CaN\u2019t TaKe iT iN?\u2019 Cause we can\u2019t bro.\u201d<\/p>\n

The fact that all of the trade-ins have to be donated or thrown out has already inspired some stores to try and coax their customers into trading in canned goods and other non-perishables or toys that can be used for holiday gift drive charities. For some reason, GameStop isn\u2019t advertising that part of the promotion. Instead it\u2019s making jokes about trading in taxidermy animals.<\/p>\n

\u201cA store next door to mine has a Toys for Tots bin, so we\u2019re going to push for toys,\u201d an employee told Kotaku. \u201cA co-worker\u2019s church is doing a coat and sweater drive so we\u2019ll push for that. And we\u2019ve talked to a couple of our regular Pok\u00e9mon collectors about bringing in a five-ish dollar card to join the collection of cards we give to kids who come in at my store and can\u2019t get packs [because of scalpers].\u201d<\/p>\n

They\u2019re hoping this can add a silver lining to what otherwise promises to be a messy day. While GameStop is infamous for its poor trade-in values, store employees are also used to dealing with unreasonable customers expecting top dollar for last year\u2019s Madden. I can only guess how it will go when they try to bring in a cardboard box of moldy junk and only get $5 off of Kriby Air Riders for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earlier this week, meme stock retailer turned Pok\u00e9mon card pawn shop, GameStop, announced a new trade-in stunt engineered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291325,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[45,49,48,24256],"class_list":["post-291324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-gamestop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}