So I work at a really good store here in US, Eastern State.

Our customer base mostly consists of Military (Retired and Active seeing as we are near military housing and base) and Moms who get dragged in the store with their children to take care of their purchases.

The store itself does very well on a regular basis. Pulling in millions every few months. Its technically pretty small size wise compared to other places.

We also happen to be placed right next to a Walmart, which is probably our nearest competitor.

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Store had plenty of preorders from both PS4 and XBO. Think 100s..... PS4 had about 30% more pre-orders(by default because we were alotted much more).

If I were to characterize our customers purchases, about 50% come looking for 360 stuff, 30% PS3, the rest everything else. 

Our PS4 launch went without many hitches, people started lining up for the midnight release at 1PM 11/14th.

Many people who were just coming in for other things were wondering what the line of people was for outside the store. We of course informed them that winter PS4 was coming.

Many started to ask, well how do they get one if they didn't preorder. We explained there was a very limited amount of consoles we had that were not reserved, so if they wanted one they needed to get to the back of that line. By 9PM normal closing time the line was stretching down past a few stores.

Some who originally were their for XBO pre-orders got caught up in the hype, and switched what they had put down on that towards a new shiny PS4.

About 95% of all our PS4's were sold that midnight.

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Next day, we had the last few that had not picked their's up yet. We have a 48hr hold policy on Reservations, and if someone doesn't pick it up in that time then their reserve becomes free game to whomever wants it (they don't lose deposit, and we won't do that for collectors stuff just the run of the mill that we know we will get replenished on).

Every......single......phone call was to ask if we had any PS4s left. We let those folks know to check back with us at closing time (9PM) and IF or last few reserves didn't come in, then they have a CHANCE of getting what we had left (Less than 10).

Many unkowing customers questioned about all the hubub as well. A good bunch decided that they wanted one of these elusive PS4s and would wait till close to see if they could get one.

Many started asking again, when is the soonest we could get more PS4s in, ready to sell their current gen consoles as well as switch over XBO pre-orders just to get in on the action.

We have no official dates on when we will be replenished, we just hope really soon. The Fever pitch for the console is at an all time high, reminding me of the original Wii craze back then.

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Update!!!!!!!!!!!

Xbox One launched last night. It went pretty well. Like I said, XBO had less preorders than PS4 but not by an unreasonable margin. Many of the reservers came to the midnight, maybe about half of total numbers.

What was interesting was the amount of excess allotted to us.....not much. To put into perspective, about half of what we had extra for PS4 which wasn't much to begin with. I was half expecting MS to match Sony's outputs with console's not meant for reserves.

Those few consoles were claimed fairly early in the day. Maybe a bit over 50 came to the midnight release. A few people of note within the line are aparently part of some XBL clan, sporting hoodies with a kid peeing on PS4 on it. Regardless of that one of them is fairly cool and easy to talk to. The other can't go 5 minutes without spewing some anti PS4 rhetoric, ironically enough most of it completely false(IE: PS3 had higher fail rate than 360, etc). In general, the worst kind of fanboy. Luckily that was the extent of the rowdiness.

Once again, COD leads the pack on most requested next gent title, followed by Battlefield, then Assassin's Creed. We had a few  reserves for the 3 exclusives;Ryse, Dead Rising 3, and Forza 5 but not a crazy amount. Interested to see how those numbers stack up. If I was to say which exclusive ppl were the most interested in?Ryse.

The Phones: rings about every 10mins or so, 70% of the time it was for "You have PS4's yet?", 20% about XBOs. A few more cancels of XBO came the next day, as recent hype in the media for PS4 swayed a few more ppl. Maybe 4 total. Most of the left over reserves came for their systems.

Apparenlty news is circling that PS4 has some "Kinect-like" capabilities, as well as the nifty Playroom App/Game. Many have started to snag PS4 Eye Cameras for it.

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The demand for both consoles still out stretches our supply. We have been turning ppl away constantly. I have to tell them we don't have any.....BUT thats actually a lie. Mid afternoon today we got a shippment specifically for Black Friday.  We can't sell any of it till the 29th. Aggrevating really. We get shipment every day so there is a strong chance we can recieve almost what our original amount was for release.

A store memo stated every store would AT LEAST get 5 for the big BF, we already have 12PS4's and 4XBOs. If we could get at least another 3 shipments of the same before Friday, maybe they will last longer than the first half hour when we open at midnight :P

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BLACK FRIDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok firstly, know that we opened at Midnight. A line of about 70 people or so waiting to get in by 9pm on28th. 

Thank god we did recieve 2 more shipments of PS4s and XBOs days prior to attempt to satiate the demand.

Shockingly, we had about 1/3rd more XBOs sent to us than PS4s. We were told we would be capped at many PS4s we were getting earlier. Over all, our restocking for Black Friday was less than half of what we got for Luanch's. We really could have done miraculous numbers had they only had the supply.

So.......by 12:30AM Black Friday every PS4 was claimed. We had a dry spell after that for the next hmm.....7hrs! A stragler here and there came to ask if we had anymore PS4s, etc.

The XBO allocation was barely dented. We had a lot more XBOs but we didn't sell enough to match the PS4s we sold even at 1PM. Still a whole bunch of them sitting in the back. The amount of ppl who came looking for them, or lack their of, was suprising because people have been on the beat all week calling about them.

I left at 1:30PM so not sure about if we got rid of all our stock. We have been letting people know if they or a friend was looking, we had them.

Thanks for the information man. Speaks volumes about your average costumer. They make up their minds based on the lines they see! The psychology of the human mind!

Great things coming this consoles way.

100 sold?
how many of them were broken?

All of them. 

man how can people be so fickle, decide to buy a 400 dollar thing they don't know about because a bunch of people are? must have deep pockets.

Why would this surprise you? Do you know how many iPhones Apple manages to sell just because of this effect? And those are much more expensive!

A couple hundred dollars cheaper price point can't hurt, that's for sure.

Hype is a real thing. As I said with the Wii U, I'm actually more interested in next year's numbers.

Did anyone get robbed for a PS4?

Yeah, those make much less sense. they seem to release a new version in less than a year's time from the last and people don't complain about those inflated prices. Prsonally I still use a 3gs and nothing that has come after it has been worth throwing hundreds of dollars at. the phone in reality hasn't changed much...