General Gaming Story 8
Shrinkage
by Rich
Working at video stores in my youth, I always had access to a shrink wrapper. Those are the machines that can heat plastic around an object until it “seals” completely around it and makes the item look unopened and brand new. Using that, we re-wrapped video games and exchanged them at stores whenever we got tired of them. The stores would give us credit and if there was nothing there we wanted to buy, the fake cash built up. When the Sega Saturn was unexpectedly released in 1994, I had enough Toys ‘R Us Geoffrey money (it looked like Monopoly money) in my pocket to buy it ($399) and some accessories and games.
Some of my friends got greedy and shrink wrapped game boxes without games in them. They would put blocks of wood in there so the package would feel normal. They would then return these to stores for store credit. Its terrible to imagine the store re-selling that game-less game and a kid opening it up and seeing a block of wood and the father going back to the store to try to return it. Would the store believe him? I bet that would depend entirely on the person returning it.
Returning a game box without the game in it was a tremendous risk. Randomly, the store would open the game right in front of you. I don’t know anyone that was unlucky enough to get caught like that. After a while, after my friends and I returned things many, many (many, many, many, many) times, store personnel would recognize us and suspect something wasn’t right. We in turn, would get to know their schedules and plan our exchanging visits for the “easiest,” ie, the least strict, employee’s shift. Even after resorting to a bunch of tricks like that, we’d eventually exhaust an entire store’s amount of goodwill and have to find different stores to exchange things at while our favorite stores “cooled down.” We’d drive great distances so no one would recognize us. We’d go on holidays and sometime multiple times a day. We took advantage of lax return policies for years and enjoyed different systems’ entire library of games for very little cost. How many games you actually owned translated into how many games you’d get to play before one would have to go back because something new was out that I wanted. We did this starting with the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo and continued through the Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar and all the way through to the Sony PlayStation. Those were the best years of my life.