“In an effort to avoid the fate of Blockbuster, Circuit City and others in the remainder bin of failed retailers, GameStop has embarked on a daring, if inglorious, strategy: refashioning itself from a console-game purveyor into a repairer and reseller of Apple gadgets, betting that its retail visibility will prove an advantage,” Cliff Edwards reports for SFGate.

“Standing in the Refurbishment Operations Center, or ‘the ROC,’ a $7 million, 182,000-square-foot facility down the road from CEO J. Paul Raines’ office in Grapevine, Texas, workers unload truckloads of ammunition for the turnaround battle,” Edwards reports. “GameStop last fall began buying up consumers’ old iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches, shipping them to the ROC for cleanup and repair, then returning them to stores for resale at a nice markup.”

Edwards reports, “If GameStop eventually resells 5 percent of the 230 million Apple devices in U.S. consumer hands, it stands to bring in $1 billion in new revenue in the next few years, says analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities. ‘Where GameStop can absolutely kill is selling prepaid phone plans with the used iPhones, since a lot of their customers are teenagers with money to spend but no credit to get a regular phone plan,’ he says. The company has been experimenting with selling AT&T prepaid phone plans in about 60 stores, Raines says.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Why would Apple hand over the U.S. prepaid iPhone market to GameStop?

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers "Fred Mertz," "Dan K.," and "Jax44" for the heads up.]