I did once.
It was Black Friday of 2006, a week after the release of the Wii. My friend had to work at a store in the mall in the wee hours of the morning, and he dropped me off to wait at GameStop so I could test my luck. Nintendo has always been infamous for engineered scarcity, and the Wii was no exception, so I was fully prepared to leave with nothing but an interesting story to tell. I had never seen the horrors of Black Friday, and was morbidly curious to experience it for myself at least once.
The experience was pretty tame. At first I waited outside the mall. I had my guide dog with me, and I allowed other people in line to give her pets and scritches as we waited. Not gonna lie, me bringing her was a bit of social engineering. Who’s gonna hit a blind guy? We got to chatting about what the line was for, and I discovered it was for an unrelated promotion. I asked if I could be let in to wait in front of the GameStop in the food court out of the cold, and they let me enter.
I can’t remember if others in the same line came in with me, or if they had already been there, but I ended up behind a dad and his two kids, and they were both getting a Wii. There were only three in stock, so I ended up getting lucky. I even got a copy of Twilight Princess, as well as FF XII on the PS2 as a Christmas gift for my sister.
tl;dr: veni vidi wiici
I’ll keep this brief, but me and my buddies are down in Philly just smoking a lot of weed and having some beers, as we tended to do. Our friend who’s going to school at John Jay in the city (which is New York where we’re from) tells us they’re going to be giving out PS3s on TRL. So this is sometime around November 2006. So me and my friends drive to Trenton and hop on a train to Manhattan, get in around 5am, stumble out into Times Square with all the degenerates on a Friday morning, get to the MTV building, meet our friends, and do this thing. There’s a decent enough line but nothing crazy.
Hours go by, and we just wait. We hang out til showtime, which is like 2 or 3pm, I can’t remember. Needless to say, they eventually come out and say it was all a rumor and there are no PS3s. Depressed, we hop back on a train back to Trenton, because we are seeing Brand New open for Dashboard Confessional in Camden that night. We are exhausted. We meet a friend in Ewing, smoke some blunts, get uncomfortably high, but head to the show anyway. On the way in we watch this girl trip on a sidewalk and land on her face. Her friends help her up. I want to help, but I am too high and so we ask if she’s okay, get nods, and we continue in.
Brand New is already on. We hear one song. Dashboard comes on. Lead singer starts crying almost immediately. A woman who’s at least 10-15 years older than us (we are 19-20) keeps hitting on my one friend, and eventually says “This guy’s a bigger pussy than me, and I’ve got one!” We go home.
It was one failure after another for us. That was my one and only.