While I can't speak directly to any of GameStop's current policies, pricing, or reservation/upsale strategies, as a long-time manager of a Funcoland, I'd say that a great deal of "frustrations" felt by users venting in this thread is simply a matter of perspective.

For every "omg GameStop suxxorz!" rant, I can guarantee you that there's a "you'll never believe what this idiot customer said/did." story to be told.

Without discounting the legitimacy of any of the frustrations over things like low trade-in rates, opened copies being sold at new prices, borked reservations/promos, etc. (because, those things absolutely do happen)

... some people need to keep in mind that most GameStop (and similar game retail store) employees deal with a huge HUGE HUGE amount of ignorance/grating personalities/behaviors from customers on a daily basis and while that's no outright excuse for bad service or bad company policy, that kind of thing rapidly wears away on the tolerance level of most sane, reasonable people and has a tendency to make them short-tempered, bitter, and apathetic despite their best efforts to avoid that kind of behavior.

Just remember there are always two sides to every story.