I was looking at some electronic stores today that seemed to be offering recycling program incentives where you can trade in your old products for a gift card to be used at its stores. I have yet to get rid of my old digital camera and so out of curiosity I looked up at how much credit I could get for it. Apparently, they were offering about $50 for it. That made me think as I know I could probably sell it for at least $100 minimum.

I guess it’s best to trade things in if you know the item that you have is so outdated that no one would really buy it at this age such as CRT monitors. Funny enough, sometimes you can actually buy outdated items like video games for clearance prices and then trade them in to places that will actually offer you more credit than what you paid for the item. Like in that example trading in would definitely make sense if you were looking for an instant profit with old items that may be hard to sell otherwise.

I was looking at the Bestbuy site and how the company offered cell phone owners the option to trade in their old handset for store credit. Essentially, the more recent your model the more money you could get. The interesting thing was seeing what they offered you for models that are non existent. Say cell phones that are 7+ years old.

For these, the site displays that in exchange for your phone they won’t give you credit but will instead plant a tree for you. I was thinking, while it does seem like a good way to dispose your old phone that you have no use of I can’t help to think just the way it is presented will make people unsupportive of the idea. How would you even know that they actually went through with planting a tree too?

I’m inclined to say that most people would rather try to sell it for say $10 themselves and knowing that someone else has a use for it.

A person I knew recently had to go to exchange a gift that they received as the item was something that she had already. So, she decided to exchange it for something else by first getting store credit. Then the tricky part came as always with store credit as rarely can you ever simply spend the exact amount of credit that you have. You usually end up having to spend more.

This particular scenario was a little more excessive than normal as the person ended up using the credit to buy another item that was two times the value of the original item. I guess the mentality was that the credit made it feel like you are getting the item at a half price sale and so it seems like a great deal.

I know this is usually why companies love to have things such as gift cards as it does usually translate to people spending more than the value of it. I once heard of one person who always tried to simply sell his gift cards as this way he doesn’t end up having to spend more and can actually gain some interest out of it as oppose to leaving the card idle. I guess even using store credit requires some discipline as well.