Iphone 4G Rollout - The Fiasco in Phoenix

[soypancho]

Apple, just about every tech site and blog, and several major news networks announced on June 16th that Apple had taken over 600,000 preorders for this thing a day earlier. It's also public knowledge that as long as there have been iPhones, people have been waiting in line for as much as a week to get one. I'm not sure if you checked the weather forecast before leaving your house but I'm quite certain you knew it was going to be quite hot at the outdoor mall you planned on visiting.

I'm not flaming you or insulting your intelligence, I'm saying you practically went out of your way to not think this one through.

 

[JonnyBravo]

OP...I'm not going to "flame" you either, but the problem with your letter is that it never gets to the point. Its too long for anyone to read...and any arguments you write have no merit because no one forced you to stand in the line in the first place. Granted, you're upset, but if you plan to stand in line in the hot sun..you better be prepared to wait it out...and take a "chill" pill.

 

[Dsr1205]

i read about 1/3 to 1/2 of this crappy whine. I tried all day on the 15th from 7am to 4pm to order an iphone and i got through....2 times and bought 2. so anyone who couldn't pre order on the 15th didn't try hard enough in my opinion. Also, nobody put a gun to your head and said you have to buy the phone, you have free will to stand around like a jackass in the sun, if you didn't like it you could have left, the person behind you would have been more than glad to take your spot.

Maybe you will become famous before iPhone 5 and can wave down a apple employee to help you skip the line.

 

[ajax43]

Hell, at least you had the opportunity to make the choice to get in line. I live in Canada, and we have 3 carriers and exactly all none of them have told us when the iphone will be available here. It looks like now it could be August. Quit bitchin'..

 

[stackshady]

LOL at the OP. You are crying about long lines when YOU are the one that decided to wait. You could have simply left and waited a week or two. The websites went down because about 500,000 people tried to all pre-order their phone at the same time. The amount of servers and technical setup required to support that amount of people is pretty crazy.

 

[iHalo]

You weren't smart about it. I had a reservation at the Scottsdale Quarter store. My family wanted three phones, but due to the fiasco on June 15th we only had one reservation. Walked into the Scottsdale Quarter store at 6:20 PM, in and out with the new phone in 15 minutes. They told us to come back at 8 to see if any reservations would not sell. We were 20th in line, they had around 35-40 32 GBs and 15 16 GBs at 8:20. The 16 GBs were all sold to either people ahead of us or late reservations, but we got 2 32 GBs. All of this in Arizona without as hot weather and long lines.

 

[ucfgrad93]

I waited in line for 16 hours (from 10pm Wednesday night to 2pm Thursday when I left with my wife and iPhones) to get mine and one for my wife. The Apple store tried to make the wait as comfortable as possible. They provided the following for us free of charge: water bottles, canned sodas, Panera breakfast sandwiches, BBQ sandwiches, California Pizza Kitchen pizza, Starbucks coffee. They also had at least a dozen large umbrellas to hand out to use for shade.

My only real complaint came from how they treated the 2 different lines. There was one line for those who had managed to survive the online reservation process and another line for those of us who just showed up hoping that there would be some left over to buy. I was in the non-reserved line.

We were told by employees that Apple told them to show preference to those who had reserved one. In the first hour after the store opened, only 2 people from the stand-by line had been allowed to enter and purchase a phone. Now this was after we had been told repeatedly that there were plenty of phones in stock and that we would be able to purchase one. At another point in time, there was a stretch were no one from my line was admitted for 45 minutes, while a steady stream of people from the reserved line was admitted to buy their phones.

 

[jtara]

It's understandable why they gave preference to the people with reservations: the reservations are only good for one day. They had to insure that they could process all of the reservations. It wouldn't be good to have to tell people with reservations "sorry" at closing time just because they didn't have time to process everyone's orders!

I arrived at San Diego Fashion Valley around 11:00. Both lines were LONG. I reasoned that it would be better to come back at 7 or 8, an hour or two before the mall closing at 9, but didn't want to take the chance, and waited in line for 4 hours. Indeed, when I left, the reserved line was MUCH shorter - probably down to a 1-2 hour wait. Probably would have been 15 minutes near closing time.

The main reason seems to have been limited personnel processing orders. Honestly, there were more Apple employees outside tending the line and passing our ice cream, etc. than there were inside processing orders. I think there probably were only 2 to 5 employees handling iPhone orders. The rest of the store was filled with smiling, chatting employees answering the usual questions. You could have walked in and bought a Mac in 10 minutes, no problem.

An employee would come to the door, fetch the next person in line, walk across the store and invite the customer to sit down in a seating area. (My experience was a bit comical, as I was put in the child seating area. I sat down on a very low ball-shaped chair-thing, without realizing that it actually did have a flat bottom to keep it from rolling around. The last person had left it sitting on the round part. When the employee said "please take a seat" I said "OK, I'll try...") Then they'd ask which phone you wanted, went and got it, THEN got your particulars and credit card, then went in the back AGAIN to process the credit card. Then they marched you over to an activation station.

Now, all nice and friendly and personalized. And completely ridiculous. They could have easily cut out all the walking around (I guess it's part of the employee health program) and cut the time in half or more.

 

[freediverdude]

Pretty much the same thing happened at the store where I went in Tampa. The manager even lied to us and came out and said they were taking more people from the reservations line, when they weren't. When I got up to the front of the line, they were just taking 1-1, 1 from each line alternating. Now yes it's true that the op should have realized there would be a long line, BUT imo there's a lot of things Apple could do to make these lines a non-issue, and they aren't. Even things that would cost them hardly anything.

1. how about having a person just taking your cell phone number and then calling you when it gets close to your time? Leave a message saying you have 30 minutes to come pick up your phone. Would cost them next to nothing.

2. how about handing out those vibrating/light-up things like restaurants do? Those would cost something, but Apple has many of these type of product launches with lines, they could amortize the cost.

3. building an air conditioned tent out in the parking lot to house most of the line. this would cost the most, but then again they're raking in money hand over fist right now.

Sorry, but I can come to no conclusion except that Apple wants to have these long frustrating lines, just so the TV crews can show up and film it at our expense. There are things they could do about this, and they aren't doing them.

 

[bob5820]

This website failure resulted in an unnecessary 8 hour ordeal in extreme conditions.

I felt the same way about reading your post "an unnecessary 8 hour ordeal in extreme conditions."