Yesterday was Cyber Monday, and if you believe the numbers Adobe's already tossing around, it was the biggest online shopping day in US history: something like $3.45 billion spent, up double digits from last year. I believe it, because I personally contributed exactly zero dollars to that total despite trying pretty hard for about six hours.
Here's what I actually wanted: an NES Classic Edition. The little plug-and-play Nintendo box that came out a couple weeks back for $59.99, loaded with 30 games, shaped like a tiny replica of the console I had as a kid. I did not want this because I lack an actual NES sitting in a box in my parents' garage (I have one, it works, I checked over Thanksgiving). I wanted it because the little HDMI one is convenient and I am, apparently, exactly the demographic Nintendo built this thing for.
Except nobody can get one. It sold out basically the day it launched and hasn't been reliably in stock anywhere since. Best Buy, Target, Walmart, GameStop: all the same story, "check back later," items appearing in carts and vanishing before checkout finishes. Meanwhile eBay is absolutely lousy with resellers asking $250 to $300 for a $60 box, which is the kind of markup that makes me irrationally angry in a way that's probably out of proportion to a video game console.
So naturally, being a person who writes a tech blog, I decided the sane response to "the website won't let me buy this thing" was to write some code instead of, you know, just giving up like a normal person.
The script, such as it is
Nothing fancy. A little Python script that hits Best Buy's product page for the NES Classic every few minutes, checks the page for the "Sold Out" text versus "Add to Cart," and if the wording changes, fires off a text message to my phone. I've had a small script like this before for concert tickets, so most of it was just copy-paste with new selectors. I stuck it on a cheap little VPS I already had running (I use Tricknowtech for that kind of thing, cheap enough that I don't think twice about spinning up a box for something dumb like this) and let it poll away in a cron job overnight.
It actually worked, in the sense that it did text me, twice, at 2:47am and again around 6am. Both times I got to the site fast enough to see it in stock and both times it sold out again before I finished typing my card number. I don't know if that's Best Buy's system buckling under load, bots beating me to it, or just genuinely that few units landing per restock. Probably some combination. I've heard from people on Twitter having the exact same experience, refresh button mashing as a competitive sport, so at least I'm not alone in this particular flavor of dumb.
I did not get an NES Classic. I did get a mildly interesting reminder that scarcity marketing, whether Nintendo intended it or not, works incredibly well — I want this thing more now than I did two weeks ago, and I already own the exact games it comes with, legally, on the original hardware, in a box, twenty feet from where I grew up. That's not rational. Retail during the holidays generally isn't rational, which I guess is the whole point of Black Friday and Cyber Monday existing as concepts.
The bigger picture, if you care about the bigger picture, is that mobile accounted for a huge chunk of yesterday's sales too — more people are just checking out on their phones now instead of bothering with a desktop, which tracks with basically everything else in commerce for the last couple years. Doesn't fix my NES problem though.
If anyone reading this actually managed to snag one yesterday without paying scalper prices, I'd love to know which retailer and what time, purely for research purposes, definitely not because I'm going to try the exact same thing again tonight. My script's still running. I'm not proud of it, but it's running.