Sold Out

The worst thing about great electronics is that their popularity will lead to them selling out. It is infinitely worse around the holidays which all the electronics companies seem to conspire to release around. Anyone trying to buy the new generation of gaming consoles knows this all too well.

In the old days, people would camp out a day or two before a console was set to release. They tried to hold their place in line to be one of the first to get one before they sell out. Now, especially with Covid-19, the waiting in line has been replaced with hitting the F5 key to refreshing shopping websites, hoping to see the coveted  add to cart button.

The true scourge of the old waiting in line or refreshing websites is the scalper. It’s hard enough getting the new popular item with all the competition, but scalpers make it even harder. Now they even use bot programs that go thru the checkout process automatically. Normal people hardly have a chance before they see sold out.

It especially hurts to know they won’t even use it and only intend on selling it for twice or many times the original price. In the old days, they would hang around parking lots of the stores to sell it out of their trunk, but now they put it on Ebay to get bids for even more money.

PC gamers are not immune to the sold out problem. New CPUs and GPUs will often be hard to get. The Nvidia RTX 3000 series and Radeon cards forced people to research times that supply drops happen at online stores before they place the F5 game. PC gamers have seen the sold out placeholder more often than add to cart.