GameStop employees hording incentive items?

I've a sneaking suspicion that my local GameStop employees here in Seattle are hording their pre-order incentive items for themselves. I buy nearly all my games from them, many of them pre-ordered and the only pre-order items I ever get are download redeem codes if anything. My friend in San Diego who buys games not nearly as frequently as I do keeps telling me about all the pre-order incentive items he gets, even for games I get too but none of those items are offered to me. For instance, we both did the midnight launch of Left 4 Dead 2, he got a model crashed airplane from the swamp level in the game, and he didn't even pick up Assassin's Creed 2 and they gave him a model of the Enzio glider. Anybody else have similar experiences, noticed such disparities with other GameStops or know whether not all GameStop retailers get the same incentive items as others?

People still shop at GameStop? I thought it was thoroughly established that it was a terrible store.

Just the whole situation of allowing their employees to open & play new games, and then sell those games as "new" afterwards would have stopped me shopping there if I had one nearby. Seriously that infuriates me. To me, if it's out of the packaging it's instantly lost it's 'new' status. There's a lot of shady things that store does from what I've heard.

Just shop somewhere else. It's a bad place, and it's policies aren't likely to change as long as their profit margins are still good.

Go to a different Game Stop?wstfld

well, I go to the one I go to because it's the only store that sells games in walking distance to whereI live, and I take the bus everywhere and don't drive so my options are pretty limited, and yeah, like the other guy said they're pretty bad about gutting everything and selling it as new, though I'm careful to eye it and never let them sell me anything that's not factor sealed

I have a friend who was a manager at gamestop and they would totally do that. I would get all sorts of preorder items from him even though I didn't preorder the game.

Maybe Ubisoft sent some extra toys to San Diego because it was convenient for them to ship them there, but Seattle would have been a problem. Not all stores have the ecaxt same thing every single time. Just like games vary from country to country (with special editions), they vary a lot in the same country. To ask the bigger question here: do these toys really matter that much?