Sticking it to the man.
We all know that large chain game stores are pretty much the bane of gamers. It's a fairly universal experience among our kind to receive crappy treatment at our local GameEBcrazystop. Once in a while, you'll run into a few decent employees peppered around these franchises, but for the most part, people who work at these stores annoy you with constant pushing of pre-orders and membership cards. Many times, they'll hassle you for returning or exchanging a game even if you do it within the limited guidelines of their own store policies. I've even heard stories of game store employees telling their customers that their choice of purchase is stupid and that they should get something else. On top of all this, their used games programs are pretty much just thinly veiled extortion, buying used games from you for 10-15 bucks at most and selling them back to someone else for only 5 dollars less than new.
However, depending on participation in your area, there is a small, petty yet satisfying and legal way to get back at them.
Many GameStops (at least in my area) are currently running a "Trade in two used Wii games, get one new (up to 49.99 value) one" deal. I believe they're also doing this for PS3 games, but really, who owns a PS3? Anyhoo, the way this works is that any used Wii game you turn in is automatically bumped up to a 25.00 value when you trade in two with the intent of buying a new Wii game. At least, this is what the register biscuit told me. So here's the deal. There are a couple of Wii games out there right now that are retailing new at 20 bucks because they're crapfests or whatever. One is Open Season and the other is Far Cry: Vengeance. You see where I'm going with this? So you buy the two games for 40 bucks, turn them right back in and get yourself a nice new copy of Super Paper Mario. Viola! A brand new game for 20% off. If your local GameStop happens to be populated by total jerks, you can add insult to injury by opening up the new games right there in front of them and then demand your new Wii game in exchange for these two used ones.
These places make most of their money on these used games. Now that you've bought two games that probably wouldn't sell in the first place, and traded them in for more than you paid to get a brand new game, they've lost money on the deal because now they have two USED games that probably won't sell, and now they can't even sell them for the full 20 bucks any more.
NOTE: This next section, while probably still mostly legal (not guaranteed), is nowhere even close to ethical. Read it for fun, but act on it at your own risk. (There, that should cover my ass.)
If you happen to be a particularly sadistic human being, you could, in theory, run this in a circle over and over again, building up more and more net store credit as you go. You'd probably want to move between different stores so they don't catch wise, though. Buy 2 new games for $40 total, trade in for a $50 game, don't open the game and turn it in for the full $50 in store credit(this is where you'd want to move to a different store), use the store credit to buy two new games for $40, and you've made a net of $10. Rinse, repeat. Do this among enough different stores and different employee shifts and you'll have a good stockpile of store credit after a while. This requires an initial investment of $40 actual cash, and you'll only ever end up with store credit. But if you are patient enough and you have a few stores around your area, you could theoretically get enough credit to buy pretty much whatever you want.
What say you?!