EB Games Encourages Employees To eBay Gouge

Our cottage-cheese-golem brethren over at Kotaku took a break from mouthbreathing and fantasizing about imaginary elves who live in their computer to throw us a couple of links yesterday. Never say we don’t return the favor.

According to Kotaku, employees at Electronics Boutique, a popular game store, are only going to be receiving 5 or 6 PlayStation 3 video game consoles per store when it comes out in November. Who cares, right? Except…

    When I asked them about Playstation 3s, the manager on duty told me that every store in the chain is getting about four or five each, which means they aren’t getting any. I asked him to explain and he said, while literally rubbing his hands together, “They’re letting employees buy PS3s, so there won’t be any left.” I asked if they have to stand in line and he said no, the second we open we’ll just buy them up. He did say that they can only buy one each, but I’m guessing most stories have at least five employees smart enough to know how to use Ebay.

In other words, Electronics Boutique’s policy is to allow their employees to buy up the entire stock of consoles, then sell them on eBay. Given that a PS3 will cost $600 when it is released and no one is going to be able to buy them (massive shortages are expected, even without employees ganking all the consoles) this means that Electronics Boutique is giving its employees open license to gouge their own customers on eBay, where a PS3 will likely go for a couple thousand. Nice one, EB.

EB Employee: We’re Buying All Our PS3s [Kotaku]

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