Burbank Best Buy Bullshit or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Inner Rage.
Yesterday I ducked out of work early to go line up at Best Buy for, you guessed it, Sony's bouncing baby Blu-Ray: the PS3. Yes, this is the same Burbank Best Buy that previously shooed away campers last week, and has since kept steady guard of its outside walls. I arrived in time luckily enough to join an emerging congregation of future PS3 purchasers who had a plan to circumvent BB's restriction on lineups until midnight of last night.
It was simple: create a list of names for those who wished to line up, pass out numbers corresponding to those names, and hang around the Empire Center (which, to briefly explain is a shopping center that houses both retail stores and restaurants both quick serve and sitdown). At midnight (11/16), we would then line up in our designated order outside of Best Buy, camping there until the PS3 was available on Friday morning.
This went surprisingly well. New inductees accepted their line placement in a docile manner, those further up in order holding out hope that enough people before they would fail to meet an hourly check-in and lose their spot. Again: since Best Buy was not allowing people to form lines outside their stores, this seemed like a well-played makeshift ordering method.
It also helped that due to being in the right place at the right time, I was near the front.
That pleasant organization was short-lived, as a Best Buy employee intent on purchasing a console for himself decided to ruin the List's order by claiming himself as first, using his title as one who receives a meager salary from the store itself to denounce the validity of the List -- even though it had garnered the approval of the store manager as the definitive PS3 line order.
The employee refused to budge, indifferent to the unanimously agreed-upon list. He cited any technicality to invalidate it that he could, all the while poorly masking the fact that he just wanted to get his greasy ham-hocks on a console of his own, even though he missed the official role-call. (I will not mention this person's name, but will say he had the figure of a beach ball and the face of a badly-scabbed pizza . I could suppose that perhaps his profound failure to attract any creature remotely female served as his motive to gun for a Playstation 3. This Friday he wouldn't care that he had no date.)
So, new people lined up behind him, brushing off the list, as he assured them it would not hold up. Within minutes a security guard was summoned to usher the false line off the premises, but could do nothing to enforce the request, due to blah-blah-blah.
The original PS3 line creators and I lobbied with the store manager to kick the new line off the sidewalk, but due to its growing numbers, he decided to backpedal on his initial support of the Official List, wishing not to piss off the growing line whose presence was both breaking the pre-midnight rule and heavily disputed amongst the equal numbers of Real Line members.
Best Buy basically left us to fight amongst ourselves all night long, rather than take a stance, make an executive decision, and enforce it accordingly. The responsibility for us, the total 100+ PS3 hopefuls, was never made clear during back-and-forth discussions with the manager. At times it was Best Buy who could tell people to go away, other times it was the property management for Empire. Essentially, a group of corporate pussies had us tensing in our own powder keg for the entire night. No fights broke out, but heavy arguments did ensue.
We got some media attention. ABC news was on the scene, as was Telemundo. A local radio station showed up in case fights broke out. But the granddaddy of them all was a visit from the one, the only, Evan Stone. For a porn collector like me, it was an honor.
Morning came, and Best Buy staff discussed the way to handle this problem between two factions vying for the rightful spot. The people who were there first versus the people who refused to move from their wrongfully-claimed spot due to delusions of precedence and/or ignorant greed.
The solution was simple: each of the 100-plus people waiting outside, regardless of time spent there (be it 16 hours or five minutes) received one raffle ticket. An employee would then draw 24 numbers for 24 winners, each of whom automatically received a voucher for the guaranteed shipment of 60gb models. A second series of drawings would then be held for the 16 highly likely, yet not guaranteed receipt, 20gb units. I won neither. Once drawn and noted, the winners could then go home with happy plans of returning the next day at eight o'clock to make their purchases.
Upwards of 17 hours spent with nothing to show. The people I chatted with were nice, sure, but it really sucks that one bratty butterball had to ruin the prospects of the people who were already queued before he waddled over and pissed on everyone's chances. He didn't win a console either. At least I can be glad of that.
And at least there were some good people who won purchases. A bony grandma. A green-shirted old man who would be damned if he was following anyone's idea of a line. A very polite and deserving kid with his handicapped mother. Also a boyfriend and girlfriend each won PS3s in separate drawings, when they originally intended to buy one console for the two of them.
Dammit. Not to toot my own horn, but one of those consoles was supposed to be my epileptic little brother's Christmas present. May those who were in it for the Ebay money enjoy their petty cash.
This is a minor case of commercialism's negative impact on American society, but hopefully one that will not go unnoticed.
