>>185250 (OP)
Thrift stores where I live have never, ever had any worthwhile games in the years I've tried going to them (which admittedly hasn’t been often on account of that). I suspect that either there have long been scalpers making the rounds out here, the stores opt to sell them full price online as opposed to cheaply as brick and mortar, or people with decent games just don't take them there to begin with.
Rather than thrift stores, I used to have have pretty good luck with multimedia stores fucking up on prices. Sometimes they'd ask far more than other stores here would, but at other times far less, and the games I was looking to play would usually be in the latter if I just had some patience and persistence about them. My guess is that they used to still go off an internal database of what they'd previously sold stuff at as opposed to then-current online auction prices. That happened less and less frequently as the past decade went on though, as they started catching on to how much money their stores had been missing out on. Last time I could still find the occasional game at comparatively bargain prices was right before the chink flu sent every used media store here scrambling to update their inventory to better profit from the sudden circumstances.
>>185270
>Where the fuck do these >people come from? Is this all they do?
There are indeed people that just go around looking for shit they can sell online, be it thrift stores, yard sales, craigslist (or whatever the local equivalent is), etc, and treat scalping them as a second job, if not their only job (as unstable as that ought to be). It's to the point that I've started seeing yard sale ads specifying stuff like "absolutely NO video games" just to cut down on people who show up solely to ask about them taking up curb space.
>>185309
I think a lot of people do know about it as a concept, but also conflate emulation with piracy and thus consider both to be crimes (unless it's a publisher using an emulator for their own official rereleases; then they're fine with it), and put up with highway robbery tier prices as a result since that’s at least “legal”.
>>185437
Seen some even trying to create new markets relating to video games, just so they can charge even more. Like making a selling point of old games that still have unused registration or survey cards in them, as if publishers are going to do anything other than toss those directly in the trash if people fill them out and mail them in at this point, assuming said publisher is one that's even still around to begin with.