Sounds like you were in the right place at the right time for sure. I suppose we could go in and ask if anyone brought anything in. You know how chains work though. Sometimes once something is checked into "the system" it is such a pain to get it out to where they might not be allowed to give it out once it's checked in. It might be worth a shot though I have at least 6 best buys within a 45 minute drive of me.

I'm pretty sure you cannot generally get away with this; this guy at the counter you interacted with could probably get in trouble if he let people do that regularly. Never mind the fact that Best Buy is in the business of selling stuff and would prefer that you buy something new – What would happen if someone dropped off a piece of old electronics, and Best Buy let someone else have it, and then that person received a severe electrical shock?

You could conceivably hang around outside the door all day hoping that someone might drop off something interesting, and then stop them before they get in, but I doubt the people running the store would want you harassing potential customers, and the people dropping stuff off would probably start getting suspicious about whether you might be trying to harvest their personal information.

Now, my local Best Buy did formerly have bins at the front for the disposal of old cables, remotes, DVDs, etc., and I will confess that I've quietly nabbed a few odds and ends that happened to be conspicuously sticking out – but those bins have since been removed, probably because that's exactly the kind of behavior Best Buy wants to discourage.

I wouldn't count on this but nice that you got lucky, after all this is the land of the dollar where profit by any means comes first. Did this a couple of times at Goodwill and bagged a socket 4 IBM system.

I'd be worried about the concerns people said above; mostly the privacy concerns.

Instead, I made friends with a local computer shop which takes PCs in for recycling as well as a junkyard that takes them for scrap and get free PCs there: 😁