GameStop workers say Trade Anything Day was pure torture

Some jokes were funny and harmless, others saw customers needing to be thrown out of the video game store

The way GameStop social media tells it, the retail store's first-ever "Trade Anything Day" was a resounding success. People did, in fact, try to trade anything, from taxidermy to social security cards, all of which make for some prime-o viral posting. To be sure, some workers had fun trying to process the wild things that customers tried to cash in. But based on what workers are saying on social media, Trade Anything Day was a poorly thought-out nuisance that encouraged employee harassment from customers wanting to see how far they could push the gag.

GameStop's official social channels have shared some of the more noteworthy acceptable trade-ins, which included a surprising amount of taxidermy. To be clear, GameStop isn't about to explore an unusual source of new revenue; stuff like this will supposedly get donated to local charities. What a charity will do with the dead husk of a bird is anyone's guess.

Arguably, GameStop set the stage here by partnering with an influencer called brendenlmao whose entire shitick is pranking stores — like the time he tried trading in a fake a 'Gamesphere 360.' These videos see brendenlmao arguing with employees to try and get them to accept trades even as the workers continually ask him to leave the store.

No surprise, then, that GameStop customers felt emboldened on Trade Anything Day. Some stuff was harmless. Someone brought in a broken plastic spoon; another got five cents for a piece of lint. There was the obligatory 6-7 joke, where someone brought in two pieces of paper with the numbers scribbled on them. Another person brought a parking ticket. With a giggle, one dude pulled up with a literal ticket to Pound Town. This guy brought in some grass. No, like actual grass, not grass.

Then there were the jerks. One guy brought in a handmade Valentines card depicting President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, which the cashier reluctantly took in. This man seriously walked into a GameStop with a plushie of Sonic the Hedgehog stuffed with a Fleshlight. "It's hard to give up, I use him every night," he told the cashier. Once the employee realized it was a sex toy, he informed the customer that he couldn't actually take the trade-in — only to have the man argue back. "Is it because I'm gay?" the prankster asked. Intimate items like these were a common theme based on what GameStop employees are posting online. One worker claims that they got in trouble for throwing out a man who was loudly trying to trade in a dildo in a store full of children. "I don't care if I'm let go at this point," the employee wrote on Reddit. And yes, there were definitely people who brought in porn, seemingly with the intent of seeing how GameStop employees would respond. "How absolutely disrespectful and disgusting," one worker, who says a customer laughed at them for responding poorly to their graphic trade-in, wrote.

Apparently, it was pretty common to have to throw out "belligerent" customers. Elsewhere, now that "messing with people IRL" has become a genre of content on video platforms, people walked into GameStops wearing the Meta glasses that make it easy to record people without their knowledge. One employee alleges that a man walked into their store with a politically charged outfit and proceeded to try and embarrass the worker on call at the time. The GameStop called the cops on the man, they say, but he just came right back. Now they're trying to figure out how to get the viral ragebait video, which depicts the workers without their consent, pulled from social media.

" I am so exhausted...." the worker wrote on Reddit. "We already deal with so many scummy people in the store."

Though many stores were cursed with problematic customers, some GameStop employees say that Trade Anything Day brought unexpected kindness. One store was gifted a box of donuts. A different store got a very apologetic note from a customer who knew that people were going to try and trade in garbage.

But if there's one thing that's emblematic of how little GameStop appears to care for its workers, it's the environment that corporate created for what was already slated to be a hectic day. Multiple stores are reporting that, for Trade Anything Day, the TVs around the store that tell customers about new games and promotions were instead programmed to be as annoying as possible. Voices were sped up, alarms were rung, awful sounds permeated throughout the store. If that sounds like an exaggeration, employees say that even customers were asking them if the devices were faulty. Imagine having to tell a man you can't give him money for used adult toy while also low-key being psychologically tortured?

"I had to work 11 hours today and it was horrible hearing this crap in the background while trying to process four dozen trade-in games," one GameStop employee says.

"I clocked in for 20 minutes and [am] already losing it," another said. "That ad is rage inducing and I was 🤏 this close to bashing my head in," another chiimed in. "The sped-up part is like fingernails on a chalboard."

The kicker? It sounds like corporate at GameStop liked the results of Trade Anything Day enough that it's going to happen again at some point.