[elizilla]

Only tangentially related to Sony readers, but I'm posting here since this is where I heard about the program on sonystyle.com where you can trade in your old gadgets to get coupons good for new gadgets.

I am curious about what they do with the stuff people trade in. Do they sell it on eBay or Amazon? Do they dissect it to recapture some small amount of precious metals or chips? Do the gadgets end up piled up somewhere with all the nail clippers and toothpaste that the TSA steals from people at the airport? I notice the address we're sending them to is in the Detroit suburbs - if I go to the Gibraltar Trade Center (a huge flea market) will I find my old MP3 player for sale in a stall there?

I can't really see them shipping these gadgets to some charity for use as they are, since the use of these devices presumes some sort of power source, computers to load the players with music, etc. How many third world disaster victims or other charity recipients have the infrastructure? And the tech support demands would be impossible if homeless people or famine victims are expected to use this huge variety of old devices.

Pretty much the only way I can imagine, for them to even recoup the cost of their prepaid mailing labels and the people to handle it all (and forget the Sony coupons), would be to sell the stuff on eBay.

If the goal is just to get us to buy new stuff, it seems like it would cost them less to just offer coupons without collecting the old stuff, and it would be every bit as useful. Is their goal simply to pull all these old devices out of the marketplace, like the Cash For Clunkers program did for cars?

Curious...