Welcome to nerd world.Population: 55
This past Thursday night after going to the Oilers game (thanks for the hookup, Robin), I got in my car and jetted home, grabbed my camera, threw on some long johns and ventured over to the west end Best Buy for 11:30pm. I got there to find a slew of tents, Tim Horton's, laptops, PSP's and more than 50 people who were willing to drop $700 on the PS3.
I spent the next 9 hours in the parking lot, where I wrote a story for Ed on the anatomy of the lineup. Here's the highlights:
The campers. The guys in the front tent had set up on Wednesday night at 10:30pm. They sat through a hail and windstorm in order to hold spots 1-4 in the line. Inside, they had a generator that powered their 17" TV and gamecube.
At 5am, Best Buy staff started showing up. They gave the 50 people in line, all of who had been there a minimum of 17 hours by now, tickets that entitled them to come back at the store's opening. Everyone packed up their tents and probably went to Denny's for breakfast. While he was waiting for his ticket, Jordan, the first guy in line, told me that he had a dream on Wednesday night where he had a Duck Hunt gun in his coat and he was using it to protect his spot in line.
The store managers let me in at 7:15, before everyone else so that I could take picutres of the customers coming in at 8. I wanted to get a pic of the people in line waiting for the cage to come up, but it didn't really work out.
A reseller's wet dream
I got tons of pics with the people inside, but this is one of my favourites. I call it nerd jubilation.
One of my favourite parts of the night were how tall tales made their way through the lineup. I heard rumours of PS3's selling on eBay for anywhere from $4100 to $30,000 US; I heard about a girl in the line who was supposedly selling her PS3 online to pay her tuition. I looked for her, but never found her. There were stories of Wal-Mart raffling off tickets for the 12 systems they had to over 300 people at random--I called two different Wal-Marts when I got home Friday morning, who said they didn't do this.
I didn't get asleep until 5pm on Friday, but the campout story was totally worth it. I can't wait to do one for a sneaker release; maybe this spring/summer for Slam.
posted by Chris O @ 4:52 PM
4 Comments:
And then on Saturday night people were lined up for the Nintendo Wii. Although they didn't need to be. Here's my story of getting one:
My friend and I went to Best Buy/Wal-mart/Superstore/Future Shop Sunday morning at around 1am to guestimate how early we would need to line up. The fact that there were almost 100 people at the Best Buy and almost as many at the Wal-Mart, but that other lines weren't full made us ballsy enough to decide that we didn't need to get anywhere until 8am. So, anyway, I went home and watched Battlestar Galactica and then went to bed at like 4am.
We got to the Superstore on Calgary Trail at 7:50 or so and there were only about 20 people waiting. Cha-Ching. Or so we thought. It turned out that there were only 12 units at the Superstore. So we went to the London Drugs on 51rst. No one was there. The lady at they door asked why we were lining up (at least 5 people from the Super Store came with us). We said we were waiting for the Nintendo Wii. She said "what's that?" and then went to see if they had gotten any. Now this place had gotten five PS3s so we were pretty certain that they would have Wiis. As it turns out that certainty was ill placed. They aren't carrying the Wii.
One of the guys in who was waiting there with us said that EB in Southgate might be getting extra units beyond the 15 they had set aside for pre-orders. We thought it was a long shot, but what the hell, it was only about 5 blocks away and the hard part wasn't waiting it was the getting up early and we had already done that. So we went to Southgate and went in the door (now this is key, since it was only about 8:20 at this point and every door to the mall was locked except for the one we tried, although we didn't know that at the time) and we made our way inside to the EB.
There were two guys waiting there already. They worked in the mall and had used an employee entrance. We sat down and started waiting. The EB manager showed up and told us that he didn't know how many units extra he had, but there were certainly enough for the four of us.
In the end they had 26 extra units and you could have gotten one if you had shown up at around 9:30 or so (although the line was full after that). Beyond that most of the waiting was waiting for the EB guys to get done ringing in the presales.
There's something poetic about people setting up generators so they can ply video games ... as they're waiting in line to buy a new console.
Did you see the youtube videos of people being trampled in front of stores. Hilarious! But sad ... for the person/people who was trampled anyway.
Didn't somebody also get shot or something? Given that it's Edmonton, I'm a bit surprised there weren't some stabbings (possibly, for poetic justice sake, with Wii controllers).
I was actually really surprised that the Best Buy staff didn't have cops or security escorting customers out of the store. They were essentially sitting ducks in the parking lot. I heard one guy with a PS3 in hand ask management if security was available to walk him out and the two Best Buy guys actually laughed at him. I wish I had 1500 words or more to write on this thing, because I had really wanted to talk about that. I actually left out a lot of stuff that I had wanted to include. Oh well.
BAM
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