We have a house full of teenage boys who like to spend their savings on games for their games consoles. EB Games is one of the few places local that sells them. We’ve found a few shonky practices by them over the years at various stores in both NSW and Tassie.
Firstly, if you layby anything from them and the price changes between the time you make your deposit and the time you make your final payment, they will charge you the new price, even if you began the layby during a sale and it now costs more than what you originally initiated the layby for.
Secondly, when you do initiate a layby, or make a payment, they never give you receipts that let you know how much is left owing or show a balance of any kind. You only get a receipt to show how much you paid on that particular transaction which is their way of making sure the full price of the item is not set in stone when you place it on layby.
Thirdly, they have a policy of letting people bring their games back within a week if they decide they don’t like them. The games are then placed back on the shelf and sold as new games and charged at full price, usually sitting next to second hand versions of the same game being sold at a discounted price. We’ve paid the new price for cartridge based games that have had someone else’s saved games still in the memory banks, and for games that came with downloadable content codes that had already been used, rendering them null and void… Things that you would expect from the cheaper second hand versions, not from the full priced new versions.
These all seem to be a common theme across all of their stores, yet their head office once told us that it was entirely up to each individual store manager on how they conducted their business concerning laybys and returned items.
So buyer beware if you ever choose to purchase something new or initiate a layby at EB Games stores. They’re pretty shonky in the honesty department.
