Sometimes, you can find things at beats and bytes that you can't find at other stores in town because they can't be bothered to keep stock on little odds and ends. Generally, the things they sell are quite varied and interesting, and like any second hand shop the individual items appear to be in varying conditions.
This being said, they WILL rip you off if they can. I was once told they they will give you about half of what they think it's worth, but they offered me just under $10 once for a PS2 Slim in excellent condition with everything with it while they were selling PS2 slims (in similar or scratchy conditions) for $40-$50 a pop on the floor- I tried politely to haggle the amount up a little, but the guy said that nobody would pay more for it, and had a terrible attitude.
I have also bought numerous products that were in terrible condition or were of terrible quality when new- some examples of general incompetency and instances of getting ripped off:
- Bought a PS3 Slim that seemed to work fine, found out only after 3 months of owning it when I acquired Metal Gear Solid 4 (one of the only dual-layer blue ray discs for PS3) that they hadn't tested to see if the drive's blue ray drive was working okay. I was screwed.
- Bought a set of bookshelf speakers for $80, couldn't figure out why they didn't quite sound right (they refused to test them in-store). I figured it was just an equalization problem until I later realized that the previous owner had blown both of the tweeters. Too late to return them. Screwed again.
- Little brother bought a monitor from them, upper right corner went black after a month. Too late to return, screwed again.
- I've seen a lady go ahead of me and be given a lot more money for the same item than I was offered, and I take care of my crap- a number of my friends (females and males alike) noticed that some of the staff seem to give better deals to the ladies. Management should probably watch out for this if possible, that is extremely unfair.
- I once bought a Sega Genesis controller (brand new) from them, it stopped working after 20 minutes. I thought I would try cracking it open instead of returning it on first-glance because I'm well seasoned with fixing electronics, and it was only $10 or so. The plastic was so cheap and brittle that when I put a bit of pressure on the screw on the back because the bit wasn't sticking, the screwdriver actually PUNCHED THROUGH the damn thing and through the front of it, straight into my palm. It was Tomee, their mainly-carried off-brand variety of controllers.
- I've bought a camera from them, but they had to give me a shady battery charger that made squealing noises because the employees said they must have lost it / failed to get that from the original owner at the time of purchase. I later realized that the camera body was warped as if the camera had taken a sharp drop. Lens could not retract properly into the housing. I had to spend 45 minutes opening the stupid thing on my own and fixing it.
- Website is freaking HORRENDOUS. On the desktop, it performs like crap and the listings are wildly inaccurate- what you see is NOT AT ALL what you get. Too many times, we have called and asked if they had a certain laptop in stock. Website said yes, and employee "checked the system" and agreed that they had it in stock. Arrive 2 hours later, a different employee sees no record of such a computer. This happened at least 3 times, and we ended up just buying a laptop from Staples instead after a couple hours of fighting with them and trying to find a single laptop that was listed on the website that actually existed in-store. This is all on-top of the fact that the site looks and feels like it went live in 2002, despite going live in its current form in 2012 according to the internet wayback machine archive.
- Website doesn't even try to cover the stock at their second location, so even if they fixed the site, the second store doesn't have any way of looking at what they carry.
- Mobile version of the site is ENTIRELY useless. I keep trying to use it in the vain hope that maybe it will work better or will have received an update- nah man, no use. It's somehow less functional than the desktop site.
- Some items are reasonably priced, but they make it very apparent with most items that they want to squeeze every last penny they can out of you- a lot of things are NOT competitively priced, like selling DSLR cameras from 5-6 years ago for $400+.
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It is worth noting here that I do visit fairly often for those oddities that other shops in my city don't carry and have done so for years, and sometimes they have interesting stuff, but to be fair that's more or less just the nature of a pawn shop, and not really because of any effort on their part. As far as stores go, they are BEYOND mediocre. read more
