Last week, people were all hyped up over the fact that, apparently, Walmart had the SNES Classic Edition available for preorder – yeah, hop on the site, pay for it, and ya got it, right? Right?
Nope! Yesterday, and continuing today, they have canceled seemingly every single pre-order for the console. People are acting surprised by this, but quite honestly, I saw it coming a mile away, and no, this isn’t because Walmart is “shady” or any crap like that (don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending Walmart here) but, much like any situation, someone fucked up.
What more than likely happened is the same thing we’ve seen time and time again – the information was put into the sales database and someone, somewhere, due to poorly designed software or otherwise some kind of human error, it was set as active, so people could order, and order they did.
Now, I can’t quite explain why it let orders happen – maybe a dummy quantity was put in to test something, or maybe it was just taking orders until it was cut off by someone? Who knows. Either way it still took a week for the cancellations to come, leading many to believe that they had successfully ordered the unit!
Right, let’s address the elephant in the room with this, either way: so many people are pissed it’s pathetic. For people to think the per-orders were live on this one retailer and not the others, and not figure it was a glitch that would be rectified, was just absurd.
These errors happen, and the company is under no obligation to fill these orders. Hell, this early before release, I doubt these companies even know how many they will be getting – many of the units that will be sold at launch probably still haven’t been made. Seriously, the lead in for manufacture such devices is often only a month or two at most, and they aren’t shipped out to company warehouses until usually about a week beforehand. While companies place their orders and know ahead of time how many they should get in total, it’s usually pretty close to release day when they finally learn just how many of a given device like this each store will get, and how many they will have available to pre-order / pre-purchase.
Like I said, usually – it’s different for various products in the electronics industry – games can arrive a month in advance sometimes, or arrive in stores on the very day of launch. A product like this will be a little more organized, but still, the fact remains, to think Walmart owes you a SNES Classic just ain’t right.
Yeah, it sucks, but it was pretty obvious if you thought about it there was a good chance this wouldn’t hold water. If you’re mad at Walmart or, somehow, Nintendo on this one, you should be equally mad at yourself for not thinking this through further.
Skepticism is quite the useful thing, especially in situations like this that just don’t add up. Again, I don’t want to defend Walmart here – I’m just explaining human error that’s all too common in things like this – and the fact that people are inevitably going to get upset at this; mostly at the company that made the mistake, but rarely at themselves for believing something that was probably too good to be true, and doesn’t quite add up when you think about it.
Basically, use it as a learning experience.