I went into a CEX store for the first time ever today, A new store opened up in lincoln so i thought id pop in and see if there was any bargains to be had. How wrong could i be!! Nearly all the games they had could be bought cheaper in gamestation which is nextdoor! So i thought id see what hardware they had ATI 2900 pro £150 you can get a 4850 for that nearly a 4870! Is it just me or are their prices far to high? I mean second hand DS lites @ £110, you could go next door and get a brand new one and a game for that!
I think they pull them out of their asses tbh - I once saw a 2nd hand Nokia 6230 for £350, with a brand new one for only £160 next to it!
Never even heard of CEX... but price structures like they apparently have is the reason so many buy online and due it shops like CEX are guilty of killing the pc parts retail business, so I wish them all the worst.
They had a 3310 for £30 which i thought was the biggest rip off in the whole store They did seem to have a rediculous amount of them htc/google phones which i thought was odd.
qft. there's been a number of wtf moments at the ones i've been to, although i can't be bothered to list any of them. some of their buying in prices aren't too great either (although that isn't surprising in the slightest) and their tactics when it comes to giving cash are disgusting. i remember selling a wii in there for a friend and asking for cash -- they said they "didn't have enough money in the store" to give cash for it and tried to force me into taking store credit. i ended up just walking into the gamestation nearby and getting better cash value anyway. turned out they had the money really, they were just trying to force me to take store credit instead. consider yourself lucky. it's just a glorified pawn shop.
Yeah its a crap store. People trade in their consoles/games for cash and the shop resells them. All dodgy looking stuff.
the hardwear etc is very expensive i always notice when i go into the one near mine. but the DVD's and CD's are cheap usually which is why i go in there
Their game trade in prices are substantially higher than anyone else which is why their resell value is that much higher. They bargain on people going there thinking that because it's second hand it much be cheap and that's how they get away with it. They also sell a lot of phones which can only be had on contract and people who want that model without the contract will also buy from them.
I used to work for there ecom department. I really can't understand how they keep going, that place was built for fail
places like these (we have them in Holland too) thrive on confused customers. That's why they pile on the BS layer upon layer, and they simply accept lost sales from people with their heads screwed on right. Profit margins are three or four times higher then in other stores, so they don't need to sell as much anyway. Such places also prove why capitalism fails: because of dumb consumers.
they don't have bad prices for buying off you sometimes. also, they have some pretty good deals on computers in the TCR branch, occasionally. but yeah, typical sale prices are terrible.
Right, Cex has a central pricing 'team' who are responsible for inital pricing and updating prices on everything instore, they key to the prices are essentially if they are selling enough units at that price, it is irrelevant if that item can be bought cheaper brand new at another store, as already said relying on 'dumb consumers'. Secondly new releases are consistently more expensive than the competition because Cex are trying to buy in as much stock as possible and therefore as the buy in price is high, and the sell price is normally twice that new releases although second hand copies will be around £40-45 My third and final point is that if any customer questions the prices the standard response is 'but you can trade stuff in here!' meh cex
Back when they would actually buy things for cash, the price they offered on hdds was considerably higher than you could buy them online. I recall selling them 6x160GB drives for either £46 or £48 each and buying 6x250GB drives from scan for £50 each. So there used to be a point to them. A friend of mine used to work at blockbuster and he regularly bought games with a staff discount, played through them and then made around 10-15% selling them on to CEX
I've not been able to sell anything at the Nottingham branch for quite some time, they always claim not to have enough cash and only offer store credit. There was even a sign in the window last time I passed it.
I bought a “new” game there once which already had a save file on it. Surely this is capitalism succeeding?
2nd that! It's just a place for people to offload stolen goods, well that's the impression I got from the store in Kingston when I was at uni there.
One in worcester still buys stuff, its cheaper than most stuff but its all abit dodgy and I certainly wouldnt spend all that much in there. I might go and get some top games though you can save around £10. A PS3 was £220 but with something like that its best to buy new I think.
