The next riot at Walmart…
…is apparently going to be over these:
Those are Zhu Zhu Pets, some kind of mechanical hamster I think and according to an e-mail from a Walmart employee to the Examiner they’re at the center of what sounds like a new Black Friday:
“Please do not use my email address as I am an employee at Wal-mart and not allowed to tell this info. However the big stores (like Colorado) are getting 90 to sell on each day. I was told they are expecting people to line up starting at night and spend the night just to get them. Hope this helps you.”
Why keep this number a secret? Assume for a moment that people do line up for these things. What happens when the line gets more than 90 people long? Those poor suckers are going to get to the front of the line after waiting for hours in the cold to satisfy the whims of their oh-so-trendy children and be disappointed, but Walmart doesn’t care. If they did, the number in each store would be common knowledge, which again according to the Examiner, it appears to be at Toys ‘R Us.
I wonder if things will still be done this way when Walmart takes over our health care system.
When Walmart lined people up and handed out tickets so they could make sure there was no one waiting in line who couldn’t get one, you were unhappy with that…
Bob,
They didn’t tell people how few sale items they had on hand. That’s why there were minor riots.
Really?
We were telling people up to a week beforehand how many of each item we were getting (on the “hot” items… some of the other items, we didn’t know exactly, but once we knew and if we were asked, we were told).
The whole point of letting people line up in advance and get tickets was so individuals wouldn’t wait in line for an hour (or more) to get an item that would be “sold out” by the people in front of them.
There were “minor riots” because – frankly, that’s how people are. Do you think if I told people I was going to drop 5 $100 bills from a high building, only five people would show up and everyone else would just go home?
So why exactly didn’t you know the totals of EVERY item? And why didn’t Walmart put it in its press release?
Because we received trucks with some of the special items Thanksgiving day.
While, ideally, we know what’s on the trucks – sometimes what’s supposed to be on the truck and what’s on the truck isn’t always the same. And you don’t want to tell the customer you’ll have something you don’t.
The store I work at is a 24 hour SuperCenter, so it will be open all night. No waiting out in the cold. We have a sign up saying the line can begin forming at 4 am. I still wouldn’t wait in line 3 hours to get one of the furry little rodents.
No riot in our store. I was off the first 2 days of this “event”, but the report I got was we had 8 people in line the first day, and 1 person the second day, and I didn’t see anyone today at 7 am. Not sure how many Zhu Zhu’s we had, but I was told it was “over 50″ each day. Someone said there was a newer version of the little rodents than what we have, and people were wanting them instead of the version we had. (I don’t keep updated on this, so I’m taking this as fact, when it might not be true. Maybe someone else can confirm it.)
I would venture that the people who absolutely had to have one found one elsewhere instead of waiting until a couple of days before Christmas on a gamble they “might” get one. Timing is everything.
Yeah, I was given the fun task of diving them up evenly for each of the three days. We had 64 for each day. Basically no one in line for them. Sold them all each day before noon though. Hope some kids are happy – I don’t get them. I’ll stick with my video games.