Major Japanese electronics store begs customers for their old PCs as hardware drought continues — ‘we pretty much buy any PC’ pleads the Akihabara outlet
A major Japanese PC and electronics store is pleading with customers to sell it their old PC gear.
A major Japanese PC and electronics store is pleading with customers to sell their old PC gear. “As a favor, if you buy a new one, please sell your gaming PC to our company,” begged the X-account of Sofmap Gaming in Akihabara, the Electric Town district of Tokyo (machine translation, h/t PC-Watch). The store shared a photo of some almost barren shelves, presumably taken at its triple-floor retail establishment.
ゲーミングPC、中古も本当に在庫なくて今これあの、お願いなので買い替えたらぜひ弊社にゲーミングPCを売ってください...結構高く買い取っていますので...ゲーミングのデスクでもノートでも、もちろんゲーミングじゃない普通のでもPCなら大体買い取っているので... pic.twitter.com/IinBuGgRV7January 7, 2026
Moreover, the company underlined that it wasn’t going to be fussy. “Whether it's a gaming desktop or a laptop, or even a regular non-gaming one, we pretty much buy any PC...”
These are clearly the words of a PC retailer facing consumer demand that it just can’t meet. We reported on Akihabara store trying to limit new RAM, SSD, and HDD sales back in November.
Old becomes gold
The memory supply crunch impacted the PC industry faster and more deeply than many would have predicted. The insatiable demand for memory from AI data center makers, with their deep circular-funded pockets, caused the first pricing jolts in the PC memory market. That’s reasonable, as consumers and industry both need to be fed product from the same big-three memory makers.
Consumers saw the first impacts on modern DDR5 pricing. Some DDR5 kits, if you can find them in stock, like this Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-5200 16GB (2x8GB) on Amazon is now $235. That price is more than 3.5X what it cost last October ($66).
