A Report From The Frontlines Of The SNES Classic Preorder Battle
If this is the first you’ve heard of this, I’m sorry, but preorders went live for Nintendo’s highly coveted SNES Classic machine last night. Like….late last night, when most humans in America were asleep. Best Buy, Amazon and Walmart sold out within minutes.
Gamestop put out their preorders later in the morning, but their entire website crashed in seconds, leaving consumers with two options: use the Gamestop phone app (which still wasn’t 100% successful) or buy an expensive bundle from Gamestop’s sister site ThinkGeek. The downtime was rather suspicious, since Gamestop’s 404 page contained a big link to ThinkGeek’s website, where hunters found available copies unavoidably bundled with ugly objects the site obviously was having trouble pawning off.
The remaining site, Target’s, opened their preorders shortly after that, but it was its own exercise in frustration: a small number of units would be available, followed by a “sold out” message, followed by the reopening of preorders for a few more seconds, followed by people getting blocked again, over and over until about 2 PM. The typical shopping experience involved clicking the big red button over and over until you got a different message, VERY quickly heading to the Checkout Page, VERY quickly entering in your credit card information (because the site provides no way to store that info)…and then being told you were too late. If that wasn’t enough, many people who purchased the machine from Target were later sent cancellation notices and refunds.
I experienced many of these problems firsthand and it was without a doubt the most frustrating shopping experience I’ve ever had. Unfortunately I fear the only way Nintendo will possibly comprehend, let alone care, about the suffering of their consumers is if they had to suffer the same themselves. So this is my plan:
- Buy up all the ramen in Japan
- Wait for the Nintendo business executives to get hungry
- Tell them the only way to get ramen now is to preorder it through our website
- Force them to purchase ramen through a scalper for eight times markup
Once they experience the error of their ways firsthand, they’ll feel immense remorse and immediately order Foxconn to produce 10 million SNES Classics by the end of the month, possibly more.
Now all I have to do is raise enough money to buy all the ramen in Japan. My crowdfunding campaign will begin shortly.