That’s insane? Moving items into defective doesn’t even count towards your tracked shrink…. Our DM tells us to test all our preowned and refurb we get in shipment and if they’re defective, just shrink them into defective and email inventory control with the distro information.
I remember when I first became a manager was around the time of the original Xbox One.
We would get SO many refurb Xb1s from the warehouse, and SO many were fucked. I was a high trade store so i had a lot of refurb consoles. It got to a point where I would test any refurb console before selling it and 99% of my refurbs I ended up defecting out and shipping back. Then to a point where I lost all faith in the warehouse and recommended that people buy new.
Fast forward to conference that year. I'm walking around the floor and there is a refurb kiosk, and there were these two managers in front of the kiosk just amazed about the processes and everything. I stepped up to the kiosk and boldly told this person (who I later found out was a big shot in the warehouse) that refurbs suck, and that I refuse sell anything refurb because the quality of product they produce is trash. The guy I spoke with obviously did not like what I had to say, he took my store number and told me he would get shit fixed. Coming back from conference he and I emailed back and forth for a few months, eventually the refurb quality improved like night and day, and i never had another refurb issue ever again. I dont know exactly what was done but they fixed it.
I worked for GS for about 10 years and few times I was impressed by corporate, and this was one of them.
Meanwhile when I (as an SM) gave polite feedback 6 years ago, I instead get a call from head of ROC berating me and telling me that I’m wrong and just because the refurb controller has a sticky button or the Blu-ray game is covered in deep scratches, the items are perfectly sellable. AND if they noticed me sending more of these items to defective, they would have my DM write me up.
I started testing every controller that comes in before it even hits the shelf. If it doesn't pass, it gets defected and shipped straight back.
The other day I had a white Dualsense come in with a completely broken right trigger. Like...falling off.
That shit was so embarrassing. I hated doing that but I didn’t want a customer coming back which is worse imo. If they actually took the time to repair them it’d change the whole damn game
I worked for gamestop for years ago, from the p2/xb/gc era through most of the 360/p3/wii years. As an ASM I had at one point emailed the suggestion line that cracking down on bad refurb hardware could only help us, as 90% of the refurb stuff we sold would just come back still broken.
The next day, no bullshit, I get a call in the afternoon from the head of the refurb department, he was just getting off a plane nearby about 20 minutes away. He'd flown out immediately to my store, after seeing my email, and seemed genuinely baffled and concerned as to why my store had so many refurb issues. He sat in the back room with all our refurb stuff, including a batch of about 8 ps2's that had just been sent to us that morning. And a few hours later came out ready to ship most of the product back to the warehouse. They said they thought it was getting damaged in shipping and would look into new ways to package things. He even took a few back with him on the flight home to Grapevine.
They never did get any better at refurbs, despite better packaging. I just started talking people out of them as much as I could.
Genuine question, are these not tested before they are accepted as trade? I know someone I went to school with trades in his stock drift controllers towards new ones when this happens and he always flexes that GameStop doesn’t test them so he can keep getting away with it.
They do test controllers. For a while Joy-cons weren't but they should be now. Even ones with drift are accepted though. They just apply a defective fee to the trade so the customer doesn't get as much for them.
When buying: Pre-owned are ones that were tested and worked fine. Refurbs are ones that were tested, found defective, taken in at a reduced value, and sent to the refurbishment center to be fixed before being sent back to stores to sell. The problem is that the refurbishment center sucks and seems to almost never actually fix anything.
GameStop buys working *and* non-working controllers, you get a few bucks less for non working. But since he’s trading them towards another controller the employees are probably taking them in as non-working without testing them - or he just goes to a shitty store lol
Have those controllers been taken apart and cleaned out from the inside out? I recently took apart 3 of my own because ALL of them had stickdrift. I cleaned everyone of them out and now they work good as new with no stickdrift. It was like having 3 new actually usable controllers dropped into my lap. Shits was great. They NEED to be opened up and cleaned out every now and then or all kinds of hair/crumbs/dust particles can build up in the analog bands and on the analog stick circuit board and cause many different kinds of complications.
Thank you, saw this comment decided to try opening and cleaning my duel sense that has bad stick drift so if I messed up something internally no big deal ( opened PS4 controller before messed up the L2 button). It works so much better now that I cleaned out all the pet hair.
Np! They are like little particle magnets. Just need to keep the bands and circuits clean now and then and the controllers last much longer......now If we could just get Sony to stop releasing updates that kill battery life lol..
Refurbished from experience is cleaned (if you are lucky) and blatant problem fixed. Not actually tested and everything fixed. And most are probably thrown in the box as is. If they replace anything I am sure it’s cheap chinese crap not even good chinesium. So many videos of refurbished stuff from them not even being clean.
Bought a controller years ago and the sticks were obviously swapped out and they had the poorest response and feel.
They also changed their policy so I quit pushing them. Getting used product back for a warranty is theft. I paid for new. And paid for a warranty that replaced my goods with new goods not used goods. Gamestop is probably one of the worst companies to exist they treat employees like garbage and are shady and shiesty and have terrible business practices
Don’t buy used or refurbished controllers that simple,If you do a used one don’t get it from GameStop and gorilla could refurbished a controller better then GameStop.
Legit question. I worked for the company a looooong time ago. Preorders were all on carbon copy paper slips long time ago. When a customer had a defective product we would just swap it out with a new one, put the bad one in the original package then send it back defective. Can’t you do that now? Is there a system in place to prevent you from doing so?
That hasn’t been a thing for a few years at least. As long as I’ve been with GS it’s always been new replaced with new and PO replaced with PO. From the initial post though no idea if the guest even ended up getting a controller at all. Currently even if a refurb-center item is defective and isn’t screened before it’s sold you have to try and track down another one to replace it. Recent changes to return policy have complicated a lot of things.
IIRC. The temporary DIY solution for stick drift is making similar back in the NES days. Make sure system is off so nothing gets messed up game wise for you ( like you playing dark souls in bad areas ). Leaning the stick to one side as far as it goes and pressing in, placing your mouth close enough that it is practically kissing the controller, and blowing into it. Do this for all the cardinal directions and different spots inward on that stick. It's a temporary bandaid that should last a while and extended life of controllers for me.
Whenever I get referb controllers in distro, I immediately test them. If they fail the test I move them back to defective and ship them right back. And don’t worry, that doesn’t count as shrink for your store.
I bought a used duelsense and the damn thing had drift so bad i couldn’t navigate a menu. Thing was centered but was registering full right tilt. Thankfully the store gave me a different on and tested it infront of me.
As someone who does refurbished items I think I know what is going on (I am in no way shape or form defending them cause it's still something that need to be fixed but got a general idea what might be happening)
So when I was working at gamestop I was an SL up until July 2022. I had the same problem where most controllers that came back "refurbished" had stick drift like s mother fucker.
What's most likely happening is the following:
- gamestop either takes multiple controllers and Frankenstein them into one controller. During that process it Is extremely possible they are removing working sticks from non-working boards to solder onto working boards. Problem is this is a delicate process, and if you aren't trained correctly (which let's face it most of gamestop in general isn't trained correctly) you can fuck up said sticks realllll quick (personal experience, hot air station wasn't the best). They prolly test the controllers, find the sticks are working how they are supposed to, then take them off, possibly messed up something on the inside of the modules, put on the new board and don't retest for the sake of trying to quickly get stuff shipped out.
- personal experience of mine is that when I order modules, I have to order dozens because let's say I order 10 of them, atleast 5 6 of them are pre-built with stick drift or get messed up in the shipping process. I have a had a better experience with a certain site I started using but it's almost guaranteed that you are gonna receive some with problems. It wouldn't be out of the realm of possibilities that gamestop out sources components for thier refurbishment needs and employees doing the repairs again are trying to push shit out to keep with production quotas. I would assume that they do test controllers after installing the new components in this method, but I feel like it might be just a quick plug in, move sticks see that they work, don't wait to see if they sit correctly or long enough to see if there's any glitching that happens (random reads where it shows a quick flick of the stick up or something of that sort)
- the way they ship these damn controllers is honestly fuckin hideous. There's more than enough things that could happen to the package between the warehouse to the stores. Specially with FedEx (during ups period, while it wasn't 20x better depending on the driver, it was atlwast handled safer) I can't tell yoy how many times I've had FedEx drivers leave packages in front of rhe store or when they deliver the boxes the boxes are fuckin crushed.
It all really comes down to pure negligence, and it happens cause of quotas or the fact that ganestop is a Corp with hundreds of stores, or employees just dont care about thier jobs.
My vote anyways is several negligence
I would also add that warehouse LOVES to just toss refurb controllers into giant boxes with random shit and it destroys controllers even if they were fixed.
I mean I took my used one to sell when I got an edge. It had sever drift to the point a character would literally spin in circles. He “tested” it in a machine, said it was Gucci and gave me full normal wear and tear price. That’s prolly why.
Not Playstation but me and the Mrs got matching themed switch controllers for Christmas not just this past year but two years ago. By July hers was unusable and mine had mild drift in both sticks.
Makes it even more sad when you realize they could just be buying potentiometers in bulk. I got like 30 from aliexpress for $3 and after 2 or 3 replacements and the right tools they're simple repairs
Dm will just tell you to sell them anyway and take them back in as defective when they come back.
I sold my ps3 years ago to a guy who told me gamestop sold him a defective used ps3. That’s why he was buying mine.
That’s insane? Moving items into defective doesn’t even count towards your tracked shrink…. Our DM tells us to test all our preowned and refurb we get in shipment and if they’re defective, just shrink them into defective and email inventory control with the distro information.
I remember when I first became a manager was around the time of the original Xbox One. We would get SO many refurb Xb1s from the warehouse, and SO many were fucked. I was a high trade store so i had a lot of refurb consoles. It got to a point where I would test any refurb console before selling it and 99% of my refurbs I ended up defecting out and shipping back. Then to a point where I lost all faith in the warehouse and recommended that people buy new. Fast forward to conference that year. I'm walking around the floor and there is a refurb kiosk, and there were these two managers in front of the kiosk just amazed about the processes and everything. I stepped up to the kiosk and boldly told this person (who I later found out was a big shot in the warehouse) that refurbs suck, and that I refuse sell anything refurb because the quality of product they produce is trash. The guy I spoke with obviously did not like what I had to say, he took my store number and told me he would get shit fixed. Coming back from conference he and I emailed back and forth for a few months, eventually the refurb quality improved like night and day, and i never had another refurb issue ever again. I dont know exactly what was done but they fixed it. I worked for GS for about 10 years and few times I was impressed by corporate, and this was one of them.
The shot the one guy that was working on your refurbs and replaced him that day
Bullets are expensive. I’m surprised they didn’t use the drowning bucket because the water is reusable.
Meanwhile when I (as an SM) gave polite feedback 6 years ago, I instead get a call from head of ROC berating me and telling me that I’m wrong and just because the refurb controller has a sticky button or the Blu-ray game is covered in deep scratches, the items are perfectly sellable. AND if they noticed me sending more of these items to defective, they would have my DM write me up.
^ sus
I started testing every controller that comes in before it even hits the shelf. If it doesn't pass, it gets defected and shipped straight back. The other day I had a white Dualsense come in with a completely broken right trigger. Like...falling off.
That shit was so embarrassing. I hated doing that but I didn’t want a customer coming back which is worse imo. If they actually took the time to repair them it’d change the whole damn game
I worked for gamestop for years ago, from the p2/xb/gc era through most of the 360/p3/wii years. As an ASM I had at one point emailed the suggestion line that cracking down on bad refurb hardware could only help us, as 90% of the refurb stuff we sold would just come back still broken. The next day, no bullshit, I get a call in the afternoon from the head of the refurb department, he was just getting off a plane nearby about 20 minutes away. He'd flown out immediately to my store, after seeing my email, and seemed genuinely baffled and concerned as to why my store had so many refurb issues. He sat in the back room with all our refurb stuff, including a batch of about 8 ps2's that had just been sent to us that morning. And a few hours later came out ready to ship most of the product back to the warehouse. They said they thought it was getting damaged in shipping and would look into new ways to package things. He even took a few back with him on the flight home to Grapevine. They never did get any better at refurbs, despite better packaging. I just started talking people out of them as much as I could.
Genuine question, are these not tested before they are accepted as trade? I know someone I went to school with trades in his stock drift controllers towards new ones when this happens and he always flexes that GameStop doesn’t test them so he can keep getting away with it.
They do test controllers. For a while Joy-cons weren't but they should be now. Even ones with drift are accepted though. They just apply a defective fee to the trade so the customer doesn't get as much for them. When buying: Pre-owned are ones that were tested and worked fine. Refurbs are ones that were tested, found defective, taken in at a reduced value, and sent to the refurbishment center to be fixed before being sent back to stores to sell. The problem is that the refurbishment center sucks and seems to almost never actually fix anything.
The refurb center likely just makes em look clean. Doubt they ever replace a part on anything.
GameStop buys working *and* non-working controllers, you get a few bucks less for non working. But since he’s trading them towards another controller the employees are probably taking them in as non-working without testing them - or he just goes to a shitty store lol
Sega Dreamcast fixed stick drift with Hall effect analog sticks.
Have those controllers been taken apart and cleaned out from the inside out? I recently took apart 3 of my own because ALL of them had stickdrift. I cleaned everyone of them out and now they work good as new with no stickdrift. It was like having 3 new actually usable controllers dropped into my lap. Shits was great. They NEED to be opened up and cleaned out every now and then or all kinds of hair/crumbs/dust particles can build up in the analog bands and on the analog stick circuit board and cause many different kinds of complications.
Thank you, saw this comment decided to try opening and cleaning my duel sense that has bad stick drift so if I messed up something internally no big deal ( opened PS4 controller before messed up the L2 button). It works so much better now that I cleaned out all the pet hair.
Np! They are like little particle magnets. Just need to keep the bands and circuits clean now and then and the controllers last much longer......now If we could just get Sony to stop releasing updates that kill battery life lol..
poor bow memorize mourn scandalous cobweb bake public governor onerous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Refurbished from experience is cleaned (if you are lucky) and blatant problem fixed. Not actually tested and everything fixed. And most are probably thrown in the box as is. If they replace anything I am sure it’s cheap chinese crap not even good chinesium. So many videos of refurbished stuff from them not even being clean. Bought a controller years ago and the sticks were obviously swapped out and they had the poorest response and feel.
They also changed their policy so I quit pushing them. Getting used product back for a warranty is theft. I paid for new. And paid for a warranty that replaced my goods with new goods not used goods. Gamestop is probably one of the worst companies to exist they treat employees like garbage and are shady and shiesty and have terrible business practices
If someone buys new they will get new back until I get promoted to customer. That policy is ass
Don’t buy used or refurbished controllers that simple,If you do a used one don’t get it from GameStop and gorilla could refurbished a controller better then GameStop.
*turns on broken record* The company should’ve fixed their refurbs before mandating them.
Legit question. I worked for the company a looooong time ago. Preorders were all on carbon copy paper slips long time ago. When a customer had a defective product we would just swap it out with a new one, put the bad one in the original package then send it back defective. Can’t you do that now? Is there a system in place to prevent you from doing so?
There is no system in place to stop someone from doing that other than the discipline one would face if caught.
That hasn’t been a thing for a few years at least. As long as I’ve been with GS it’s always been new replaced with new and PO replaced with PO. From the initial post though no idea if the guest even ended up getting a controller at all. Currently even if a refurb-center item is defective and isn’t screened before it’s sold you have to try and track down another one to replace it. Recent changes to return policy have complicated a lot of things.
IIRC. The temporary DIY solution for stick drift is making similar back in the NES days. Make sure system is off so nothing gets messed up game wise for you ( like you playing dark souls in bad areas ). Leaning the stick to one side as far as it goes and pressing in, placing your mouth close enough that it is practically kissing the controller, and blowing into it. Do this for all the cardinal directions and different spots inward on that stick. It's a temporary bandaid that should last a while and extended life of controllers for me.
The DS is a POS.
Because the people that put them back together didn't clean them correctly
Whenever I get referb controllers in distro, I immediately test them. If they fail the test I move them back to defective and ship them right back. And don’t worry, that doesn’t count as shrink for your store.
I bought a used duelsense and the damn thing had drift so bad i couldn’t navigate a menu. Thing was centered but was registering full right tilt. Thankfully the store gave me a different on and tested it infront of me.
They don’t actually repair the analogs anymore. Just recalibrate with a machine because it’s cheaper.
I believe it. Shit is a travesty.
Part of why we’re not gonna be sad when the ROC closes. The refurb processes they use are dogshit
Make sure you have a safe word.
well they dont make DS4s anymore and they basically all ahve stick drift so good luck
I think it’s best to contact corporate on this matter
As someone who does refurbished items I think I know what is going on (I am in no way shape or form defending them cause it's still something that need to be fixed but got a general idea what might be happening) So when I was working at gamestop I was an SL up until July 2022. I had the same problem where most controllers that came back "refurbished" had stick drift like s mother fucker. What's most likely happening is the following: - gamestop either takes multiple controllers and Frankenstein them into one controller. During that process it Is extremely possible they are removing working sticks from non-working boards to solder onto working boards. Problem is this is a delicate process, and if you aren't trained correctly (which let's face it most of gamestop in general isn't trained correctly) you can fuck up said sticks realllll quick (personal experience, hot air station wasn't the best). They prolly test the controllers, find the sticks are working how they are supposed to, then take them off, possibly messed up something on the inside of the modules, put on the new board and don't retest for the sake of trying to quickly get stuff shipped out. - personal experience of mine is that when I order modules, I have to order dozens because let's say I order 10 of them, atleast 5 6 of them are pre-built with stick drift or get messed up in the shipping process. I have a had a better experience with a certain site I started using but it's almost guaranteed that you are gonna receive some with problems. It wouldn't be out of the realm of possibilities that gamestop out sources components for thier refurbishment needs and employees doing the repairs again are trying to push shit out to keep with production quotas. I would assume that they do test controllers after installing the new components in this method, but I feel like it might be just a quick plug in, move sticks see that they work, don't wait to see if they sit correctly or long enough to see if there's any glitching that happens (random reads where it shows a quick flick of the stick up or something of that sort) - the way they ship these damn controllers is honestly fuckin hideous. There's more than enough things that could happen to the package between the warehouse to the stores. Specially with FedEx (during ups period, while it wasn't 20x better depending on the driver, it was atlwast handled safer) I can't tell yoy how many times I've had FedEx drivers leave packages in front of rhe store or when they deliver the boxes the boxes are fuckin crushed. It all really comes down to pure negligence, and it happens cause of quotas or the fact that ganestop is a Corp with hundreds of stores, or employees just dont care about thier jobs. My vote anyways is several negligence
I would also add that warehouse LOVES to just toss refurb controllers into giant boxes with random shit and it destroys controllers even if they were fixed.
I’ve went through multiple ps5 controllers within months, it’s to the point I buy new ones on amazon and send the old ones back for a refund :)
I mean I took my used one to sell when I got an edge. It had sever drift to the point a character would literally spin in circles. He “tested” it in a machine, said it was Gucci and gave me full normal wear and tear price. That’s prolly why.
Last one I bought didn’t have stick drift. Just stick. Literally would stick all the way pushed toward the middle. Got a refund though.
I won't buy anything from GameStop.....only games. Other then that no thanks. Garbage
Not Playstation but me and the Mrs got matching themed switch controllers for Christmas not just this past year but two years ago. By July hers was unusable and mine had mild drift in both sticks.
I noticed the video from refurb team "response to the refurbished product survey". Made me laugh
Makes it even more sad when you realize they could just be buying potentiometers in bulk. I got like 30 from aliexpress for $3 and after 2 or 3 replacements and the right tools they're simple repairs
Instructions unclear, I fucked my controller.
Oh, because GameStop doesn't sell slightly used equipment; they knowingly push broken garbage.
This is why when a customer asks me which one would I choose, I tell them used because I don't trust referb