At some point, my preparation to wait months for a PS5 turned into an obsession to have it right away. I spent almost a week in Reddit, graduated to Twitter and Discord and joined more purposeful alerts and groups of like-minded vampire PS5 seekers.
Walmart's announced console drops resulted in crashed carts from hundreds of millions of refreshes. Playstation Direct had to start queuing people up and then randomly letting them into the store. Since they didn't announce their launch times, this is how I spent 60 hours locked in place waiting for others to notice the line started. Target and Costco had covert drops but even so their servers were no match for the traffic. Crashed those sites too.
Somewhere in dat chaos, I found a retailer Ant Online and managed to score an Xbox Series S bundle! I figured that if I was going to wait months for a PS5, I'd at least see what the all-digital system is and get caught up with the whole generation I missed out on via Game Pass. So if you're not keen on what Microsoft is doing, they released an upper-tier and lower-tier version of the next gen systems. The only caveat is that their branding is atrocious. Sony went from the Playstation -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5. With Microsoft, the Xbox started competing with the PS2, so Xbox -> 360 and S -> One and One S -> Series S and X. The Series S has no disc drive, a graphics card half as strong, is $200 cheaper and all-digital. Mine was bundled with the Game Pass, which lets you download ~200 rotating full games for $10 per month. Not half bad, but not a PS5!
Then there was the Kohl's Fumble of 2020. They had a midnight drop of PS5 bundles and I scored one!
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However, whoever built that product page underestimated the number of people looking for this, and they also forgot to add a product order kill switch. Tons of people ordered these $800-1000 bundles, earning $180 in Kohl's cash that you can spend on almost anything else on their website. The following morning, they had to cancel the majority of these orders, but let cancelled people keep their Kohl's cash. This is an expensive mistake. A lot of users in the PS5 group I was in had a feeling this was the case and bought multiple bundles, knowing they'd be cancelled. At that point, it wasn't sure whether they'd be able to keep the free money, but some of these people ended up with almost $1000 in free money.
The thing is, a few hours after that, I was getting ready to turn in to bed with my own doubts about Kohl's. That's when Best Buy dropped PS5s and I secured a store pickup that'll be mine this coming weekend. That confirmation email put an end to this 10-day rollercoaster of frustration and stress. Sure enough, I woke up to Kohl's cancelling my order, but letting me keep the $180. Hello bakeware!
All this is to say that if you are looking for one of the new systems:
-Subscribe to notifications on Twitter (I followed @Wario64, @antonline and @PS5deals), and be prepared to be anything but casual about this.
-The app will beat the website on your PC. Every single time, the app loads faster and gets the item to your cart. If you have a robust data plan, there are also suggestions of approaching it via 4g on your phone and via traditional wifi on your PC/tablet.
-Items in your cart is only 10% of the struggle. You have to checkout at fast as humanly possible. Beforehand, make sure to create an account (WITH A SECURE PASSWORD) and save your address and payment info. The fastest typer in the world would still take 15 seconds to do that and lose place over it.
-When checking out, you will occasionally get booted out of the checkout process or 'place order' final step. If this happens, the site/app will likely as you to re-enter your CVV number. Knowing this 3-digit code by heart will save you time.
-If you're planning to buy it from the Sony store at Playstation Direct, loitering on the site before the supposed drop time doesn't help--the site boots you out to the queue. This evolved over a few days, as I'm sure their customer service was inundated by some of us watching others get their PS5s with simple tricks. Once you're in the queue, that doesn't guarantee the PS5 is yours, as the queue is simply to enter the store. Free 2-day shipping if you have a PS+ membership!
I doubt you'll need to invest 60 hours in a week like I did, but if your time is more valuable than that, please don't fall for any OfferUp or Craigslist scams. These are easy to spot because:
-The seller has no feedback, and the account was created Nov 2020.
UPDATE: It looks like as of 11/24, OfferUp is going through and removing these obviously-fraudulent sales. Overpriced PS5s are still there, but the sellers all have feedback. Go nuts!
-The asking price is 500. No one is going to sell a 500+tx system that's one of the hardest things to get this year for less than what they paid.
-The majority of these people will ask for payment via Apple Pay, Cash App or Paypal gift. That would avoid any commission, but also void YOUR protection from a scam. Pay through OfferUp app or ask them to re-list the item on Offerup for the 13% extra that they'll eat for their service charge (and your protection!).
The perfect listing will likely be ~$200 above retail price, from someone whose account is older than Nov 2020, has feedback/stars, and will meet you in person or ship it to you through whatever app you're using with the secure payment.
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