TOYS R US IS FAKING PLAYSTATION3 PRE-ORDERS
This is a great email. It’s from a Toys R Us employee who points out that branches are making its employees pre-order PS3s to boost the numbers.
That’s TOYS R US IN PS3 PRE-ORDER LIES SCANDAL, if you want to use this as the basis of a news piece for your site or blog (which you should definitely do as it’s better than uploading today’s Sony America ‘GREAT NEWS!’ press release):
TOYS R US IN PS3 PRE-ORDER LIES SCANDAL
“I work at a Toys R Us store on the multimedia section, and our PS3 pre-order campaign is not going very well.“We have big signs up advertising that you can reserve one, with NO deposit or obligation – that’s a FREE RESERVATION – and no-one wants to. At first our manager told us to approach customers looking at the display, but mostly they were just looking out of idle curiosity and what they really wanted was a Wii (sold out), Xbox 360 (sold quite a few of those!), a PC (actually sold a few of those too!), or Yu-Gi-Oh cards. For some reason people still buy those. But no-one wanted a FREE PS3 reservation.
“So, in mid-afternoon my manager got all the multimedia sales staff to put through a reservation (which I felt very dirty doing), so he wouldn’t get shouted at quite so much by the store manager, then told us to approach all the customers even if they were just looking at Hungry Hungry Hippos. Still no success, but we got more Wii enquiries and another 360 sale.
“By late afternoon my manager was getting desperate and started making announcements on the tannoy that customers could reserve a PS3 for FREE, but mostly they just kept wandering around looking at the Lego Gang Land sets, or the Bratz Prostitutez dolls, or whatever is popular with the kids these days. So the manager then canvassed all the staff members on all the other sections to put some pre-orders through the tills so it looked like people care about Sony.
“So, all in all on this busy Saturday, we did several PCs, a fair number of 360s, and we could have sold record amounts of Wiis if we had any – and a couple of PS3 orders from staff members who were forced into it.
“It was the 3rd best day of work ever (the 2nd being the time I worked for Game and read magazines in the stockroom all day, and the first being the time I played Unreal Tournament on my laptop at the railway station cafeteria when all the platforms were closed for maintenance but my manager told me to open it anyway)”
Great story, Mr Anonymous! We want more anecdotes from game shop employees like this, please! Mail them in. But bear in mind we won’t print any positive ones. We will keep your name a secret.
filed in LIES on Feb.28, 2007
February 28th, 2007 on 3:22 pm
The indie I work in has been promised 12 PS3 consoles for launch. Maybe 12 doesn’t sound much? But when you consider the fact that we couldn’t get any 360s at launch, 12 seems like a stupendous amount. we only managed to get 2 Wii consoles too. Nobody in my shop seems to want one. I also know that my local Gamestation takes more Wii pre-orders than PS3 pre-orders every day.
February 28th, 2007 on 7:14 pm
I was in town today and noticed that one of the branches of Game had hand-written signs proclaiming “ONLY 9 PS3 PRE-ORDERS LEFT!!!!!”. I couldn’t help but think that was quite a lot for one store to still have, considering how long people have now been able to pre-order them for. Also, extra exclamation marks = extra desperation!
February 28th, 2007 on 8:14 pm
Bugger. I think this article was actually so arousing I wet myself a little while reading it.
Thanks UKR, now I need to do washing early this week.
February 28th, 2007 on 11:36 pm
perhaps the toys r us manager should have shouted over the tannoy that the PS3’s are AIDS infested… for free! Might have at least caused somebody to bat an eyelid ¬¬
March 1st, 2007 on 12:33 am
How long before we see a “Pre-order a PS3 to get on the Wii waiting list” kind of deal? Soon, I hope.
March 1st, 2007 on 2:17 am
Yessss back to slagging PS3’s off again!
But Zorg aren’t you a gamer too? How will you resist not playing SEGA’s Virtua Fighter 5? Are you waiting for the 360 version? You want the gamer points right? You’re not a points whore are you? FFS.
Mind you, the price of the PS3 will cover a first class return trip to Japan just to go over and play it in the arcades. We’ll never see it in our arcades, the newest game in Skeggy is still Frogger.
March 1st, 2007 on 8:09 pm
the mention of Hungry Hungry Hippos brought a smile to my lips :)