Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

Waiting in line for the Hot New Thing has become our preferred method for measuring the popularity of a product, like a yard stick that wraps around a Best Buy.  I suppose you could trace it as far back as the arrival of the Beatles in America, when throngs of literally ecstatic fans massed at the airport just to see the band deplane.  Skipping forward to the 80s, this phenomenon was often seen on the day after Thanksgiving, when parents would line up in the freezing predawn hours to savagely beat each other for a Cabbage Patch Kid, Ninja Turtle, Furby, or Tickle-Me Elmo.  It was also seen at movie theaters, when the diehard would wait for days to score tickets to a highly anticipated premiere.  Fandango changed all that, and the Star Wars prequels were probably the last movies to generate this kind of behavior.  No one camped out for tickets to Order of the Phoenix or Transformers.

Luckily, electronics have become the new line phenomenon.  The XBox 360, PS3, and the Wii were highly desired and scarcely stocked at launch (still the case for the Wii!), thus guaranteeing lines of consumers at the mall.  This has become the token of a product’s popularity.  Is your product good?  Not sure?  Well, does it have a line?  No?  How pedestrian.

That’s what I find most interesting about the iPhone launch, as I remarked here.  Would-be iPhone owners began queuing up hours or days in advance, so hotly did their desire for product burn.  The funny thing is, such behavior proved entirely unnecessary.  Almost everyone who went to an Apple store on launch weekend was able to walk out with an iPhone, regardless of whether they had pitched a tent on the sidewalk.  Apple anticipated the demand and took steps to meet it.  The customers, interestingly, simply assumed that line behavior would be necessary.

You can blame Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo for propagating the asinine idea that wasting an entire day just for the chance to purchase a single item is acceptable behavior.  The fact that these companies cannot, for whatever reason, seem to produce enough hardware to meet demand speaks more to incompetence on their parts than anything else.  The line experience is consumer unfriendly and a huge waste of time and money.  As I have made clear time and again, I greatly desire a Wii.  I would love to give Nintendo several hundred of my dollars, if only they would do what companies are supposed to do and build more of their damnable machines.