In NH here both Apple Stores are in the malls and the cops will NOT allow anyone to even enter the mall parking lots until a designated time by apple. I think last year it was 6:30am.
From 3:00am last year to 6:30am it was quite comical. Ever 20-30 minutes you would see people in closer and closer through the mall parking lot, then the others in the parking lot would notice this every time and then everyone starts running towards the main entrance where you line up...About a 1/4 of the way there the cops would start SCREAMING at everyone telling them to get the hell off the property until 6:30am. After about 3 or 4 dashes through the parking lots people started getting arrested, around 5:00am for doing. Did that stop it from happening again a few times? Not at all lol.
Eventually at 6:30am the cops said it is alright now to enter and you see this massive crowd of what i would guess is about 400-500 people sprinting about 1/2 mile to the entrance(huge mall and campus) Then you can imagine once the line starts forming it is all chaos. The 1st 50 or so people battle for about 45 minutes because the you need form a single line, no one forms a line of course because they want to get what they came for. So the cops start screaming at the first 50 people which are all just bunched up making like a donut shape at the entrance, everyone just stands there like they don't understand English(which half of them probably didnt...) Again the cops started arresting people because they would not form a line.
Then i saw others in that first 50 get sent to the back of the 500 person line because they would not get in filing order.. It was quite the experience last year since supplies were limited, the year before that it was gravy..I showed up at 10:00am and they still had tons of tickets and about another 300 were in line after me until they ran out. For that launch they had to have had at least 2000-3000 Iphone 5's in store that morning.
After last year though i will never go again to stand in line...I waited for seemingly 5hrs from start to finish and i ended up being about 200th in line. All they had left was 16gb models in black, i was looking for a 64gb white or gold...So i took the 16gb tickets they gave me and sold them for $50 a piece and took off 🙂