The market for pre-owned consumer goods has turned into a $17 billion industry, with sales of second-hand video games, CDs and DVDs expected to see double-digit growth despite periodic slumps in the market for new versions of the same products.

Money spent by consumers for video games now rivals that of box office feature films The used video game market grew from $630 million to $790 million in 2004. While the video game industry runs in predictable cycles and is currently on the downside, the used video game market has been growing over the past several years. About 8% of all games sold in the U.S. are used games. The used product sector is expected to increase over the next few years when users start trading up and buying the next generation of games from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft.

Used CD sales have been skyrocketing over the last few years because new CD prices have been increasing Since you can burn CDs perfectly and many people now keep their music collection on MP3 players, buying used CDs is quickly becoming a preferred choice among many music consumers (Celia Hirschman, 5/5/04, On the Beat).

There are about 20,000 available DVD titles and close to 2 billion DVDs in home libraries across the country (Plunkett
Research, Ltd.)