When GameStop outlined the policies for its “Trade Anything” Day event in mid-November, most of it made logical sense. For example, do not deal in hazardous waste, chemicals or weapons.
Yep, that makes sense.
But in the same list, there were some exceptions to the rule that made everyone lose their minds. Chief among them is that “Taxidermy” items were identified as “valid for trade.” In other words, if you're sitting on a long-deceased stuffed animal and also want $5 in store credit, you can totally cash it in.
Flash forward to Saturday when reports of what actually went down on “Trade Anything” day, taxidermy was somehow nowhere to be found among the list of items GameStop employees began listing and sharing online.
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Come on, it actually happened, not once but twice! Also, the official GameStop Twitter account is the one with the proof!
There were also other questionable items that were attempted to trade in but we will not list them
On Twitter, GameStop identified not one but two instances of actual taxidermy deals. The first involved a bird in all its dead and stuffed glory.
The other of a mountain cat of some kind that was also seemingly perfectly posed.
Again, and we cannot stress this enough, these were once living creatures and were paid to be stopped and preserved for the purpose of displaying them.
Now, it's worth noting, as several people did in response, that GameStop's own terms and conditions had dictated that these items, whatever they are, must fit in a 20x20x20 box. I won't pretend to be a mathematician (I was terrible at math as a kid), but there's almost no chance any of this actually made it into that box that the employees were supposed to follow.
Of course, if they had stuck with it, then we wouldn't have gotten proof that someone was actually taxidermy, but also given that employees seemed to have a problem with someone donating soup cans, an item that would have been perfect since donating to charity, AKA part of the whole point of this, then it's a little backwards, just accepting the taxidermy somewhere else.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, GamStop got their viral moment and that person got their $5, which was enough for both parties. Whether GameStop tries to push this back with different parameters remains to be seen, but if they do, I'd venture to guess that things will be much stricter, even if it means turning people away.
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