Do I have the right to complain to upper management of Gamestop?

Ok, this is going to require a little background first.

I start off a few months back, playing Dynasty Warriors 7 on the PS 3. I decide that I wanted to get a second controller, so I drive to my local Gamestop to buy a pre-owned controller. My reasons- my paycheck wasn't coming in for another week, I am a bit impatient, and I wanted to think ahead for other stuff by getting a pre-owned controller. I buy it, bring it home and start playing, and then I am stuck at the title screen.

It takes me a few moments to realize they sold me a controller with a broken start button. So I return it, and after explaining what happened- I chose not to take any ps3 risks- so I traded in some old games I was meaning to do so, returned the controller, and pay with the store credit and returned cash for a new one.

About a month later, I go to buy an xbox 360 controller. Pre-owned to save money. Turns out one of the major buttons (right bumper) was broken. So I return it, get a different pre-owned to see if it was just bad luck. Same deal, broken buttons. So I return that and get a new one due to my frustration with pre-owned.

Just recently, I go there again and buy a fighting-pad for the 360 (like a fight stick controller hybrid, if that makes sense). Again, broken trigger button.

The fourth time in the span of a season. Something is wrong here.

I can only assume they don't check their controllers before buying them. Maybe you should complain?

But ah geez. I know your feels, they sold be a GameCube (turbo) controller with a C-stick that tilts to the left by itself every minute or two. If only they still accepted those, I would sell it in a heartbeat.

They did tell me they can't test the controllers, and they just do the 'feel check', which often fails to find broken ones based on this experience.

But yeah, a company that prides itself on value to players who buy pre-owned, it has done a poor job. The extremist side of me wants to file for a law suit, mainly because this is a chronic issue (4 broken controllers sold to me alone, how many are sold to others?)

That sucks Dephlogisticate. I'd say complain if you want to. I mean at the end of the day, what have you got to lose by doing so? Time perhaps?

That "can't" is only because they're lazy. They're definitely able to. They just don't.

And most of these places will gladly refund you your controller. It pretty much costs them nothing with the massive amounts of controllers that they process giving a dollar or so of store credit. Although, if it keeps happening over and over, again, they may start suspecting you. Look at it from their perspective. Despite multiple issues with them, you keep coming back and every time you get a controller it comes back broken. Someone out there will get paranoid.

As a Game Stop employee, I can say from experience that most of my peers don't really do that "feel" test on the buttons, which is not hard to do in the first place. If any of the buttons feel like they stick or don't press quite right, it's an easy way to tell if something is wrong. Plus, we aren't suppose to take them if chunks of the thumbstick padding is torn off or completely missing.

It sounds like they've got some quality control problems at the store you go to, so yes, you do have the right to complain. Ask to talk to their store manager and let him/her know. They need to train their peeps a little bit better. If that isn't good enough they can't actually give you the number of their district manager, only pass yours along to them.

At any rate, there are safeguards in place for this kind of thing. Because it's used you have seven days to come back to the store with the receipt for a refund for any reason and 30 days to come back if it's broken so they can do a direct swap. If they've never bothered telling you any of this, then they do, in fact, suck at their jobs.

No, we can't. Let me put it this way, the only way for us to test if a controller is 100% working when we take it in as a trade is if we have a system to test it with. Since we have nothing just laying around up front to do that kind of test with (the demo units don't count, given that their cases are under lock-and-key and the average associate can't mess with them) the only way to do that would be to drag a sellable console from the stock room onto the floor and set it up. This is impractical because we can't do that every time someone trades a controller because it would waste massive amounts of time, especially when he have lots of customers in the store or don't have double coverage. Plus, we can't leave a "controller test" console just laying around connected because we need that area to test consoles being traded.

So yeah, we can't within the bounds of how corporate tells us to run the store, and anyone trying anything similar to what I just said will probably be fired.

edited 1st Sep '13 7:32:52 AM by Vanguard

What about checking it at a later time, to see if it needs to be refurbished or can be resold as is?

The process goes about as such:

• Customer comes in with a controller to trade
• The associate makes sure that Game Stop can accept it (or at least they're suppose to). What I do, at least, is the standard "feel" test on all the buttons to see if they feel like they work properly, they have the battery packs (depending on the controller) and they aren't modded. If the associate doesn't think it can be taken, it's not accepted as a trade.
• After the transaction is done it sits on our back counter until it can be processed, which involves bagging it and displaying it for sale. How long that takes depends on how busy the store is and how much other stuff there is to process.
• If we sell it and it doesn't work the customer brings it back, we take it back as defective and put it into the Defective Drawer (or as I call it, the "Sad Drawer").
• From there the broken controller is sent off to the Corporate Factory in Texas to be refurbished and mailed off to another Game Stop somewhere to try selling it again.