Earlier this week, meme stock retailer turned Pokémon card pawn shop, GameStop, announced a new trade-in stunt engineered to go viral. “Trade Anything Day” will let customers come in and hand over almost anything in exchange for store credit. Employees who weren’t 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.
GameStop’s 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’t 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.
But that’s not the whole story. A flyer store employees received goes into more detail and explains exactly how “Trade Anything Day”is 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.
“We’re getting so many calls already and people are being extra people-y already because they aren’t reading the rules,” one current employee told Kotaku. “The problem has been lately that they drop this stuff on socials and we find out hours or days later.”
Other GameStop workers are already crashing out. “God help us,” reads one thread on the r/gamestop subreddit. “I’m not prepared for the ‘bring anything to trade’ day. I just know I’m going to have to handle some nasty shit. And not only that, we’re probably going to have to reject some of the things because they’re a biological hazard. I’m gonna have so many customers asking me ‘HoW cOmE yOu CaN’t TaKe iT iN?’ Cause we can’t bro.”
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’t advertising that part of the promotion. Instead it’s making jokes about trading in taxidermy animals.
“A store next door to mine has a Toys for Tots bin, so we’re going to push for toys,” an employee told Kotaku. “A co-worker’s church is doing a coat and sweater drive so we’ll push for that. And we’ve talked to a couple of our regular Pokémon 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’t get packs [because of scalpers].”
They’re 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’s 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.
