Want to know why?
Nearly 2 days of waiting in line at Best Buy, 3 hours of total sleep at best, and I come home with no PS3, not even a 20gig, which after thinking about it, I would've duly accepted.
I'm tired, need a shower, it was freezing cold, it rained very hard the first night, and the elements were against us the whole time. So why bash scalpers (if I hadn't made it clear in past threads)?
Well, roughly 75% of the people who got one (the cut off was 34 people, I was 39) openly boasted of selling it on eBay. They had no interest in really playing with it, just the greed and dollar signs in their eyes. Some people sold their spots in line. A pair went for 700 each, another for 750, and one fairly close to the front went for a whopping $1000.
Once vouchers were passed out this morning, one person sold theirs to a guy who just walked up and offered $1600. This guy apparently already had 3-4 systems from other places and all were going up on eBay, including the one the voucher would allow him to get. This guy did NOT stand in line for 2 days like most of us.
Not to mention that when the remaining hopeful of us realized that there was a slim chance someone's payment would be declined or that they would have more than they said, some of us could get bumped up to receiving a system. Of course, this didn't happen at all.
I feel even worse for two of the people beyond me. One was this really cool Korean girl who was apparently out there to get the PS3 as a surprise Xmas gift for her boyfriend. In fact, she was probably the only person in line who was even giving it as a gift to someone else (the rest of us who were keeping it were buying it for our personal use). She braved the elements and got NO sleep for the entire time she was there and she doesn't even have a present to her boyfriend to show for it. If it weren't for the scalpers in line, we'd both have gotten one for sure. Victimless crime? I think not.
Then there was another guy who got dicked over by Gamestop/EB pre-orders. He (and several other people past the cut-off point) had apparently tried to come earlier or ask about the line-up policy and were told they couldn't line up more than 24 hours before the units would go on sale. Lo and behold, people lined up 48+ hours beforehand and were not told to leave. Thanks a lot Best Buy for having a consistent policy that dicks people over! Oh, and did I mention that he already had Resistance? Now he won't have anything to play it on for quite some time.
Morever, various BB employees fed us SOOO much bullshit over the 2 days that there was no way to believe that any one thing that came out of their mouths was true. One employee, especially, would walk by and say that they only had 28 and then snicker with a smug grin on his face. Shit, Best Buy, is this any way to let your employees treat your customers? They would NEVER give us a straight answer as to how many they would be getting until near the end, but it would've been nice so that those of us who, for sure, were not going to get one, could leave and go home. Instead, they jerked us around until the actual launch.
~2 days is an exorbitant amount of time for anybody to wait in a line and scalpers made it hard for the people who sacrificed work, class, tests, and doctor's appointments to get a PS3, but who instead walked away empty handed. We aren't talking about Johnny-Come-Latelys here, but people who were there a majority of the time.
The whole idea of the scalper makes me cringe now, if it hadn't before. Greed over gaming is the shittiest new trend to hit the community in recent years and it really is unfair to a lot of people who simply wanted to enjoy what the PS3 has to offer. I saved up the money from paychecks to buy one, so I can't simply go out and blow $2000+ on some lame eBay auction. Sure, I want one quite bad, but I wouldn't pay that on principle.
It's even worse when they like to flaunt it in your face as if they were the most clever person in the entire world. And they don't make the wait any more entertaining by telling you repeatedly how "mad cash" they're going to earn on eBay. Hey scalpers, quit trying to be the middlemen that nobody wants and stop dicking people over for your own personal gain.
Nearly 2 days of waiting in line at Best Buy, 3 hours of total sleep at best, and I come home with no PS3, not even a 20gig, which after thinking about it, I would've duly accepted.
I'm tired, need a shower, it was freezing cold, it rained very hard the first night, and the elements were against us the whole time. So why bash scalpers (if I hadn't made it clear in past threads)?
Well, roughly 75% of the people who got one (the cut off was 34 people, I was 39) openly boasted of selling it on eBay. They had no interest in really playing with it, just the greed and dollar signs in their eyes. Some people sold their spots in line. A pair went for 700 each, another for 750, and one fairly close to the front went for a whopping $1000.
Once vouchers were passed out this morning, one person sold theirs to a guy who just walked up and offered $1600. This guy apparently already had 3-4 systems from other places and all were going up on eBay, including the one the voucher would allow him to get. This guy did NOT stand in line for 2 days like most of us.
Not to mention that when the remaining hopeful of us realized that there was a slim chance someone's payment would be declined or that they would have more than they said, some of us could get bumped up to receiving a system. Of course, this didn't happen at all.
I feel even worse for two of the people beyond me. One was this really cool Korean girl who was apparently out there to get the PS3 as a surprise Xmas gift for her boyfriend. In fact, she was probably the only person in line who was even giving it as a gift to someone else (the rest of us who were keeping it were buying it for our personal use). She braved the elements and got NO sleep for the entire time she was there and she doesn't even have a present to her boyfriend to show for it. If it weren't for the scalpers in line, we'd both have gotten one for sure. Victimless crime? I think not.
Then there was another guy who got dicked over by Gamestop/EB pre-orders. He (and several other people past the cut-off point) had apparently tried to come earlier or ask about the line-up policy and were told they couldn't line up more than 24 hours before the units would go on sale. Lo and behold, people lined up 48+ hours beforehand and were not told to leave. Thanks a lot Best Buy for having a consistent policy that dicks people over! Oh, and did I mention that he already had Resistance? Now he won't have anything to play it on for quite some time.
Morever, various BB employees fed us SOOO much bullshit over the 2 days that there was no way to believe that any one thing that came out of their mouths was true. One employee, especially, would walk by and say that they only had 28 and then snicker with a smug grin on his face. Shit, Best Buy, is this any way to let your employees treat your customers? They would NEVER give us a straight answer as to how many they would be getting until near the end, but it would've been nice so that those of us who, for sure, were not going to get one, could leave and go home. Instead, they jerked us around until the actual launch.
~2 days is an exorbitant amount of time for anybody to wait in a line and scalpers made it hard for the people who sacrificed work, class, tests, and doctor's appointments to get a PS3, but who instead walked away empty handed. We aren't talking about Johnny-Come-Latelys here, but people who were there a majority of the time.
The whole idea of the scalper makes me cringe now, if it hadn't before. Greed over gaming is the shittiest new trend to hit the community in recent years and it really is unfair to a lot of people who simply wanted to enjoy what the PS3 has to offer. I saved up the money from paychecks to buy one, so I can't simply go out and blow $2000+ on some lame eBay auction. Sure, I want one quite bad, but I wouldn't pay that on principle.
It's even worse when they like to flaunt it in your face as if they were the most clever person in the entire world. And they don't make the wait any more entertaining by telling you repeatedly how "mad cash" they're going to earn on eBay. Hey scalpers, quit trying to be the middlemen that nobody wants and stop dicking people over for your own personal gain.
