Rue Plumet

I spent most of Saturday afternoon and evening camping out in line at WalMart to get a Nintendo Wii when they went on sale at midnight. I went with a friend of mine, and we called around to WalMarts all morning trying to see how late we could get in line and still get one. Shortly after lunch the lines started growing pretty quickly, so that was our cue to get going. Both of the closest WalMarts already had lines long enough to sell out, so we drove to one about 20 minutes away. When we got there, they had plastic chairs set up with numbers taped to them. There were 31 chairs (even though we had been told they would have 36 Wiis), and 30 of them were already taken. Yikes! We were a little discouraged because there were two of us and only one chair. But we talked to a few people in line and discovered a mom and dad who were holding two seats for their two sons. It turned out they only wanted one console for their sons to share, so one of the parents got out of line and that freed up a second chair. So then my friend and I had seats 30 and 31 out of a total of 31. While I held the two seats, my friend talked to an employee in the electronics department and got him to go back to the stockroom and open up the shipping boxes and hand count how many Wiis they had to make sure they really did have 31. It turns out they did, so everything appeared to be good to go.

So we settled in for the long wait until midnight (it was just before 2 PM at that point, so we had 10 hours to go). WalMart had us wait out in the lawn and garden section, right by all of the fertilizer, so it was somewhat covered from the elements, although the fertilizer smell was strong at times. After we had been waiting about an hour, a WalMart employee came and told us that we all had to move our chairs outside onto the sidewalk because the power had gone out. So we all ended up out on the sidewalk for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and then another WalMart employee came and told us to move all of our chairs out to the far side of the parking lot because there had been a bomb threat. Crazy! So all of us hauled out chairs and all of our stuff out to the far side of the parking lot. I’m sure all the people driving by on the road thought something pretty weird was going on. We waited out in the parking lot for about 45 minutes or so, and then they let everybody back in. Our wives and kids came by around 6 PM to bring us dinner, which was very nice, and then we just waited it out until midnight.

When midnight finally came, they lined us up and walked us back to the layaway counter where they had all of the Wiis and two registers to check people out. They had us make our purchases in numbered order, so we were the last two people to go. It wouldn’t have been too long of a wait, except for the fact that very early on one of the registers broke down so they could only check out one person at a time. We finally got our Wiis just before 1 AM, and then we headed home. Since it was so late, I just went to bed and didn’t even open mine that night. I’ll have to add another post later after I’ve had the chance to play it a little bit.