CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Florida gulag: County mandates fingerprints to sell videogames  Tue Jun 02, 2009 9:10 pm | |
| For many young Americans, reselling video games to pick
up the newest, latest and greatest is simply the only choice to keep up
with the fast-paced, high-dollar industry (which is about to kick off a
massive annual trade show in Los Angeles as I write this).
GameStop, the largest games retailer on the planet, has made
billions from the trade, building an empire off the business model that
one Florida county appears to now view as a haven for criminals.
From the Broward-Palm Beach New Times:
I’m in line at Gamestop the other day, breaking down and finally buying the much-hated
NCAA Football ‘09, when I hear the clerk ask the guy in front of me for
his fingerprints. He’s returning a game, and the clerk breaks out some
kind of form. He swipes his thumb across an ink pad stuck to the
counter and then puts his mark in the appropriate box.
What the deuce? “The sheriff’s office has been making us do it,” the clerk told me. “People hate it.”
Reporter Eric Barton goes on to say:
Broward County Sheriff’s Office
spokeswoman Kayla Concepcion said the new requirement comes straight
from the Florida Legislature, which enacted a law on October 1 of last
year that treated video games like second-hand goods sold at pawn
shops. Now any store buying used video games has to collect the thumb
prints, along with a bunch of other personal info about the seller.
Now, I’ve got a little personal insight into this issue. As a teen
and young adult, well before I found myself tasked with the
journalisms, I was employed by Blockbuster, Movie Trading Company,
Borders Books and Books-A-Million. Library science — or, at least
inventory management and customer service — was my forte as a student.
(We’ve all got to get by somehow.)
At Movie Trading Company, we had tons and tons of DVDs and VHS
cassettes for sale, almost all of them brought in by customers looking
for cash or store credit. After about six months, it became quite easy
to spot the thieves among them.
I’m talking about people who’d walk in 10 minutes before closing
with a stack of Simpsons box set DVDs, or five copies of that week’s
big, new release. We had one regular customer, Eddy (a sex offender, I
later found out), who offered a couple of us, myself included,
methamphetamine in exchange for more cash back from his stolen DVDs.
The man was obviously desperate. I’d even go so far as to guess that
stealing DVDs was essentially his job.
It was policy that we accept what customers bring in unless the
condition was beyond repair, so every time he’d show up with a backpack
full of DVDs and games, we had to give him cash. But by the same measure, he had to submit some form of identification. We’d record it, pay out and go about our business.
One day a cop walked in with Eddy’s photo and asked if we’d see him
and if we had records of what he had sold us. I told the officer yes,
but the management stepped in after that and I never found out what
happened … And I never saw Eddy again.
Case in point: That happened in Texas, where there is no requirement
for fingerprints to sell used media like games or DVDs. Crimes were
committed openly and law enforcement (apparently) worked. It wasn’t
that difficult.
Surely Florida does not lack basic law enforcement capabilities. Why
should such draconian measures be necessary just to trade in a video
game?
RS |
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