I took an intro to ECE class last fall that was basically just a parade of people coming in and talking about the kinds of things that they do as an engineer. One of the speakers talked about how one could have all of these cores, but that coding to take advantage of all of them was such a difficult task that it's hard to find any software that takes advantage of the few cores we're shipping today, let alone a hundred cores or a thousand cores. Apparently he was working on a project - a sort of wrapper? I think he mentioned AI but I don't know if he was just blowing smoke up our ass at that point - to help streamline writing for thousands of cores. I don't know how much truth is in that but I found it interesting, and would love to hear from someone who actually codes these kinds of things.

I'm sure your comment will warrant you a +4 insightful, but I might as well try and get my licks in: nowhere in my post did I say anything about things happening outside of the store's property, and your comments on "entitlement" are, frankly, insulting. Of course I'm not entitled to a profit. Neither is someone entitled to coming into my store and undercutting me after a I've spent the resources of securing a store front, doing the research, examining the item and negotiating a price. This isn't a god damn auction, it's a sale between two parties. You wouldn't go into a new retail store and tell someone that's about to buy a laptop that you've got one right here in your bag that you'll sell for half-price.

As I said in a post farther down, this has nothing to do with what happens outside of the business I'm conducting - I constantly refer people to craigslist or ebay when they don't like the price or I don't have a particular item. I'm not trying to bend the market to my will - I encourage people to do their research. I never hide my intentions: if someone asks, I'm happy to tell them that, yes, that camera I'm buying from you for $20 I'm going to sell for $50, and that here are the ebay listings that I'm finding and, no, I won't pay you the $200 you bought it for. At the end of the day, I'm just a sales peon working in a slightly different environment. I didn't post that intending to start some kind of crusade-against-people-selling-their-crap, just that, "hey, that's sort of frowned upon. Why not put it up on craigslist and not abuse their facilities if you're feeling ripped off?"

Here is my other post: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1864094&cid=34198896

God no, it's not a career - I'm currently going to school for Mathematics. I understand the situation when it comes to games and, eventually, most media. Video games are a small portion of our business, but a notable one. We have seen traffic in it go down, and we keep having to turn away people wanting to sell games because they require Steam or a monthly subscription. We've completely stopped selling music CDs.

We will change and adapt to other areas of the market. The Gamestop's have nowhere to go.

No offense taken, and the battle of used-store vs. streetcorner/ebay/craigslist vs. new is a difficult and complicated situation. In the end, all anyone wants to do is "get on by" without upsetting people, but all these things seem to be in contention with one another for one thing: your dollar.

I could say how we don't normally set our prices at "just below retail": most of our prices are determined by what we research online (for media this is usually a quick check on Amazon) and we price them as such, unless we're POSITIVE it will sell for more. We've also ran into some competition with Walmart, actually, where they price their brand new blu-rays and some consumer electronics items at or below USED value (which tends to be ~60% retail on average).

As for what we pay, it reflects the risk we're taking on what we buy. A vendor has the ability to get replacements or refunds if there is a significant amount of a defective product; for us, it just goes in the trash. We have to do our research, hold it for a number of weeks to be processed by the police, clean it, maintain it, and then guarantee it - all after buying this thing from someone that decided to use their DVD cases as coasters. Fantastic. $10-$15 for something we're going to turn around and sell for $30 sounds more than fair to me, but I suppose I'm biased.

The issue isn't that people are buying and selling between each other instead of us. It's using our facilities, our store, as a way to find that connection. Go use craigslist or ebay - we refer people there all the time when they don't like what we're willing to pay - but it's akin to us coming and selling our crap in the middle of your store and saying that it's OBVIOUS and INEVITABLE because you're selling everything SO FAR ABOVE market value.

As someone who works at a second-hand store, this is a very rude thing to do, and I would politely tell you to leave if you continued to do so. Poaching buys is pretty low: while you just want a game, we're fronting all the costs to bring that game to you. Plus, you don't get our 7-day money back guarantee! Likewise, selling things to other people inside the store or just outside will get you asked to leave.