Rumor: EB Games Canada to push used sales with confusing labels, hiding new items
Employees of GameStop owned EB Games in Canada have stated that the company is to stop differentiating between the price tags on new and used games, making it harder for customers to tell the two apart.
According to an internal document handed to Kotaku, all games, regardless of new or used, will be put in the same section and contain white stickers, where are before, used games carried a yellow price sticker.
EB Games stores in Australia already mix the two together on the shelves, as does our local GameStop here in the US, but so far it's still easy to tell the difference between a new or used title. However, an EB employee told Kotaku that the new games are to be hidden on the shelf behind the used products.
After the original report was posted by the site, a separate EB Games Canada employee stated the following to Kotaku: "I can confirm, 100%, [that] we were given instructions last week to start this. We were told that we were to merge all used games with the new games and have them sectioned off by one of four specific genres they gave us. They told us that the new copy must be on the very bottom of the pile and the used ones stacked on top and that we were to change all price stickers to the white ones. They also instructed us to discard all materials advertising used games.
"Now the stickers do have the words NEW or USED on them but no one looks at that. HUGE problems with this will of course be with the online code games. Generic Customer 01 will grab the top copy of NHL 12, go home, and not be able to play online. There are also MANY games where the new copy is as cheap as $19.99 but the used copies stacked on top of it are $34.99. It is also a nightmare to find anything anymore and the opinion of what games fall in what categories was different even across staff members in the same store."
After this statement was received, another reader claiming to work for EB said none of this was true, so there are confirmed and conflicting reports all around.
Kotaku has contacted the EB Games for an official statement on the matter, so in the meantime, be sure to dig through the piles and pay very close attention to whether the sticker says New or Used.