I figured what the hell, I'll go to Best Buy when it opens this morning to see what the demand is like for the Xbox 360. There were known quantities on the Internet, so I figured if I showed up and there were fewer than 50 people, maybe I'll get lucky. At worst, I would brave rush hour traffic for no reason.
I got as far as the parking lot and saw a tent city. You've got to be kidding me. Do these people have lives? What makes you camp out in 36 degree freezing rain? I've done less for concert tickets. I did less in college trying to hook up with chicks even.
Oh well, like I said, the only thing I really lost was a buck in gas and a little time. I can't imagine having waited for hours to buy a game console, not when I might be able to walk up and buy one next week.
Extreme? maybe if you look at it purely as a game console, but try this: Would you stand in line for 12 hours if someone paid you $600? Xbox 360's have sold for as much as $2000 on ebay. With that number, you got paid $1550 or so after taxes to stand in line. Adding to that, if you were in line for 12 hours, you made almost $130 per hour! If you sold your console for _only_ $1000, your per hour rate would be around $45 per hour.
A group of my friends went to Walmart yesterday to start waitng for it at noon. They ended up being #15 & #16 in line so they were able to get one of the premium consoles. I guess a few people started waiting at midnight earlier that day. I was surprised that more people hadn't lined up sooner, actually.
The Best Buy around here had a similar situation though. Apparently not everyone did their homework because many didn't know about the limited number of consoles.
After playing on the 360, I have to say that it reaffirms everything good I have had to say about it before its release. Perfect Dark Zero and Call of Duty 2 are incredible. The full media package that comes with the console is stellar. I especially like the ability to play your iPod over any game. First person shooters are so much better with some good tunes interlaced with the action.
The only downside was that (as I suspected) Xbox Live looks like it was unable to accommodate the huge influx of people logging onto their servers. Hopefully they can get that resolved in a timely fashion, if they haven't already.