Damnit to hell. They just called my cell phone with an automated message about trading in saints row. You can hear the message here - 888-275-6501. Thats it. I can wait a day or two to get new games.
Bad enough the jackass at the store told me Saints row was in Friday before the release, only to go there and be told - yes it is in, but you can’t have it…
Yeah, I know, a new thread on EB. Bite me.
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This is why I never give any kind of retailer my ph#. You just know that eventually they’re gonna do something stupid with it.
Yep, whenever they ask, I say “No thanks” or “Choose not to participate”. I think it’s intrusive as hell and I hope this practice goes out of marketing scheme fashion soon.
I buy most of my games at Gamecrazy. They ask for my number and to join their membership program (which costs money) every single time. Same with Best Buy. It’s just a matter of course to say “no” now.
I don’t preorder, so I guess that’s one way they’d get you for sure.
When did pre-ordering start for games? That seems like a crazy idea to me.
edit: By the way, I’m not preaching holier than thou. It sucks they spammed your phone.
Ohhh… sounds like you got stabbed in the buttzorz. With a cell phone.
You should probably get that examined.
After finding out last week that I paid a $5 premium at EBGames over everyone else’s prices for Pokemon Mystery Dungeon and another game, I’ve decided that pre-ordering and the convenience of EB are no longer worth it.
Which is unfortunate, of course, because it’s a one-stop way to pick up all the stuff I want at once.
But I can’t think of an instance where a retail chain has done thing after thing after thing to drive me away, despite how badly I want to want to shop there.
So I’m another that’s put my money where my mouth is. I’m done with EB.
There was a time when I actually thought going to an EB was fun, even if I didn’t have anything in particular in mind to buy or a preorder I was picking up. It was almost like going down to an arcade.
I occasionally will step inside the local mall EB for old time’s sake. I typically quickly come to my senses, wonder what the hell I’m doing in there, then turn around and leave before the “sales” staff can breath on me.
They now sell directly to the lowest common denominator and that’s what I feel like whenever I go in there. I hate that feeling.
I actually feel much more comfortable in a Best Buy. That’s sad.
Seriously. Best Buy and Fred Meyer have become my preferred vendors for games these days.
That’s pretty sad that they’ve trumped the dedicated retailers who had my business and passion to begin with.
They just called me too, with the same Saints Row thing.
Next time I’m the area of my local EB, I think I might go inform the manager that I’ll be buying all my games from somewhere else, and this kind of thing is exactly why.
Here, where I live they are starting to get the games the same day as EB. A year or so ago I heard Best Buy was bitching to the distributors about EB/Gamestop having the monopoly on day 1 purchases. Now everyone holds up their street date for Best Buy.
It’s not phone spam, it’s an alternate reality game.
I got the message too. Ugh.
I don’t understand why you people are giving them your phone numbers.
edit: Except Bob. He probably had the sexy EB chick that works here seduce him into giving it to her. He probably thought she wanted it to set up a date. But the rest of you guys are idiots.
I started buying my games at Toys ‘R’ Us. They undercharged me by $10 for Lego Star Wars II!
This sounds very much like my experience. During the '90s, I used to love going to EB–it was my favorite store. I would typically buy 15-20 games a year from them. One reason that I liked EB was that they had a return policy that treated the customer with respect–I think I only returned about 3-4 games during that 10 year period of buying pc games from them. It was just nice knowing that if I wanted to return a game, I could with no hassle.
Then, abruptly, they said that the top management’s new policy was no more opened returns. What reason was there to go across town to EB when I had a Best Buy and Target that was closer with the same basic return policies?
Then all the boxes would be opened. Then the PC shelves shrunk to almost nothing. Then the good employees disappeared, only to be replaced with monkeys who knew nothing of the products they were selling. Then the used games–excuse me, “pre-owned” games disappeared (which wasn’t that bad, considering that most of them were ridiculously overpriced). Then the monkeys would pester me with their asinine “do you want a warranty on this game?” questions. It seems like EB has sunk lower and lower. Now, like the poster above, if I happen to be in that mall, I might walk in for a minute or two out of curiosity…but then I quickly walk out and don’t look back, wondering why I wasted my time.
Wha… EB opens all it’s new PC software? Is this even legal? Doesn’t that violate some provision of it’s EULA?
Simple solution:
Don’t go to EB.
Simple enough?
Cry me a river. “Oh EB is calling me!” OMG the humanity! What will you ever do?
When giving your phone number to EB, you consciously made that decision. And now you come here and whine about it? Pfft.
You know, I have a better solution. Why don’t you rape every employee when you go back to EB? That seems like the only solution.
(Fill in about 20 more snide remarks for every other goddamn EB apologist on this forum)
Please confine your pathetic whining to your own thread.
I can’t believe EB pwnd chet. How could this happen? :(
Besides that basically being what I said (only I’m adding in the whole “letting them know WHY” part)…
No, it’s not simple enough. I don’t own a car. I live in downtown San Francisco. The EB downtown is easy to get to, and the next easiest place to get games is the EB at the wharf. If I want to hit up Best Buy or something, I have to add a “using public transportation” tax to the cost of my purchases. It’s a pain. I could order stuff online, but I gotta make sure I do it from places that aren’t Gamestop/EB, and then I’m tacking on shipping.
So thanks for mouthing off, but it’s not as “simple” as you make it sound. For me personally, there are significant convienance/monetary costs to going out of my way to avoid EB. I’m probably going to do it anyway, but I’m going to let them know why.
As for why they have my phone number - because if you preorder something, you gotta give it to them. And because they somehow, after so many years of this business, don’t seem to be able to ship enough units of the popular games, you have to preorder something if you want to get it when it’s released. I don’t do it often, but a week before Saints Row came out I preordered so I wouldn’t get that crappy “oh we have it, but only if you preordered” line.
Maybe you think “apologist” means the opposite of what it means. There don’t seem to be any EB apologists in this forum.
I think you need to read my thread “The Big EB Butt Stab”. I was simply repeating how others reacted to me when I complained about EB.