APRIL 18, 2009 • Retailer Radio Shack is rolling out a console buy-back program to 4,400 of its stores. Depending on condition, Radio Shack will pay credits worth up to $77 for an Xbox 360 Pro, $115 for a Wii, and $175 for an 80GB PS3. The program has been run on RadioShack.com as a trial.

Impact: Most of the recent action in the issue of selling used video games has been the games themselves, not hardware. True, the idea here may be to encourage gamers to trade up to newer versions of their systems. We wonder, however, whether this national retailer understands many families are in such financial distress and that there is a business in giving them a way to off-load their investment in hard times. If the latter is true and if consumers are off-loading their recently acquired game systems for cash, then the jury is still out on how well the video game industry will ride out this recession.