Half Price Books — Local services in Bloomingdale

The Store: This store has a wide variety of books, music, and movies. I firmly support any second-hand store that offers this kind of variety. During certain points it tends to offer a lot, while offering nothing at all. You can find quite the wonderful surprise gems here, however! Quite clean and very bright. Keep in mind, that this store does not compete with Gamestop or Play-N-Trade, so game prices of $9 for a PS3/360 game at Gamestop, will be $29.99 here. The Staff: This will be my main complaint. As with any store, the staff can make or break the experience. The hipsters that work here have an air of "snobbish" around them. They won't come up to you and ask if you need help. They won't even take notice of you unless you track them down. Unless you catch them on a good day, even when speaking to you they still retain that air of "superiority" to you. I have had great experiences with them, but most irritate me to my core. If you ask them where a certain book is, they say "It will be in their section." If you want them to find it, they won't even bother. They say "If it's not on the shelf, it's not here!" Which isn't true, as some people take things and either hide them, or misplace them. I would certainly hate to be on this crew during inventory and actually track down these items! When you insist on them finding it, they go to their computers miffed, type in the item and say "We can order it for you." This means they want you to pay and guarantee them money before they even bother searching for it. Again, sometimes they can have good days, but for the most part they are too busy playing with themselves and having hipster-power-huddles at the Buy-Counter to even notice you. Let me say that like any badly staffed store there are two or three associates that stand out as really good. The Buy-Counter: This is where you will be horrified to find out that your prized collection of items are only worth .50¢. They go to their computers and want you to think they are looking up some Beckett of prices, but actually they check -AMAZON- of all places! They look at the lowest cost on Amazon, then make you an offer even lower than that! Do NOT have high hopes of a return! Your items will have to be in high demand to get a high return (name of the game). This HPB is definitely worth taking a look at, but not because of the staff. If there was another closer, I would suggest going there instead. Finally, avoid...

My friend and I got kicked out of the store for asking about the prices they were giving us. I normally love going to half price, but after my last interaction, I will never be going back. My friend and I went in trying to get rid of games and a console. We were going around to 3 different locations to try and compare prices. We went to gamestop and disk replay and wanted to try half price. I asked one of the worker about a ball park price for a decent quality ps4 slim, its not the best system nor the worst and I just wanted to get a ballpark, but they wouldn't give one and instead directed me to the manager, who instead of treating us like human being proceeded to bash us for asking and told us we were in the wrong for asking. So we went to get the system and have them check all the games in. Once they had processed everything through, we went up and checked to see the price. They never took the system because it was too dusty and said it wouldn't work, which is inaccurate because the system work a day prior when we factory reset it. I then asked them to give me an idea of a few games to see what they would sell them to me for and compare prices to the other stores I had visited. I had taken one game off the sell list because I could have sold it for 10 extra bucks at the other locations. In the process of doing that, he told me and my friend to get out and go somewhere else. I would have easily sold them some of the items, but because of the way they treated us, I will never go back. After this last interaction, I went and sold most of what I could to disk replay, I told the guy what had happened, and he told us that this had happened before to other customers who had visited this specific half price books. Don't go to this location. The other locations treat their customers...

I started coming here ages ago as a game collector. I found some really cool stuff to add to my collection here at reasonable prices. Sadly, those days have long passed, for the most part. Game collecting has gotten super popular now and prices on everything have gone WAY up. Every once in a while, though, I still catch them sleeping or at least find something decently priced. I found a complete copy of a game in almost pristine condition for about 1/5th of what it goes for on Ebay a couple months ago.

That said, my complaints about game collecting aside, I still really like this place for other reasons. Browse the other sections and you never know what you'll find. I've found books, movies, and music of every genre imaginable here. If you have any interest whatsoever in some sort of geeky/nerdy hobby or subject, you'll probably find something cool here. They also have a good selection of new and classic board games and they do RPG nights here, too, if you go for that kinda thing. I like the employees here, too. They seem to enjoy working here and try to help customers as much as they can. They also handle long lines as the registers pretty efficiently. Massive store, too! I've been to a few other Half Price Books stores in the area and I'd definitely call the Bloomingdale store...