Many users of Giant Bomb decry the existance of what we know as Gamestop, and often for good reason. The employees have been known to be either rude or unhelpful, games kept in their care have been reportedly kept in less than ideal conditions (both those put on display and those kept in the back room), and they have been oft maligned for their "pushy" pre-order strategy. However, none of these things really make me personally all that angry. The thing that they do to absolutely kill me, is put those little yellow stickers on their games.
They are fine when they are fresh. Get a game within a month of the "used" barcode sticker being added and you won't have a tough time getting it off. Hell, get the game within 6 months of being applied and chances are with a little bit of nail use that sucker is coming off with little to no sign that it was ever there.
But god help you if you are buying a real classic, like I did the other day on Ebay. I already had Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic for my 360 and am a big fan of Bioware ever since Mass Effect, so I figured there wasn't much harm in securing my own copy of KOTOR 2. The sale was easy, and the game came quickly, and i don't really blame the seller for the sticker, as it was something they didn't really care about so much.
Unfortunately, It looks like the game may have been bought used only days after the original release in 2004 for how crusty and icky the stickers were. Every single one of them (there were a total of five, some on top of eachother) was so old that even carefully peeling from the corner didn't manage to keep the thing intact. The worst part was that the spine sticker, instead of being attached to the plastic casing, was instead adhered to the box art itself. It took a good 30 minutes and the pointy end of a nail filer to remove it, and I was fortunate to get that particular piece off with almost no visible damage, but the back and front sticker areas were not so lucky. There is still residue in certain sensitive areas of the box, and a few areas are a bit damaged from my removal methods.
Of course, this isn't the first time i've had to deal with removing the damn stickers. In fact, the process for Ninja Gaiden Black was even worse, and dont get me started on the condition i got Skies of Arcadia Legends in. I was lucky when i worked at Gamestop that I didn't often work on the days we went through the weeks used games and removed the stickers from games that had price drops (to tell you the truth, most of the time we just put a new sticker over the old one, because often time it was just awful.
GAMESTOP: Figure out a better way to do this. I remember how big a pain in the ass it was to apply those stickers when I worked there for a few months, and they are even less fun to remove them. Instead of applying a new barcode, perhaps you could just store the games existing barcode in your database, with the exception of games given to you without a box. And for god sakes, explicitly tell your employees not to attach the stickers to the box art itself.
Bonus Points: As of today, the Star Wars (just obtained KOTOR 2 to go with KOTOR and Battlefront 1) series is the most prevalent in my XBOX (original) collection, and the Resident Evil (just obtained 0 and 1 to go with 2 and 4) franchise is the most prevelant in my Gamecube collection.
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