Boston's Mayor Pissed At Sony, Joins Rest Of World
Well, it seems that Sony won’t be posting a profit at all this year after Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino is through with them. Reports are starting to surface that Menino plans to bill the corporate giant for all the police time that was spent quelling a riot that nearly occurred due to poor planning and crowd management at the Sony Style store in Copley Plaza.
Apparently, the campers were actually doing a fine job of managing themselves until the store’s employees announced they were going to do things their own way (and make things a lot worse, it seems):
The store was mobbed by a crowd of over 500 people for the 5am opening Friday. “It was ridiculous,” said Fernando Villanueva, 22, of the South End, who had been camping out in the rain starting Wednesday and paid $630 for his PS3. “We tried to keep it orderly by creating a list and having a roll call every half hour,” he said, in an interview with the Boston Herald. “But the store said our list was meaningless; it’s going to be a mad rush, and whoever gets through the doors first gets one.”
Eventually, over ten police cars showed up and forced the store to actually use the crowd-created list; from the way it sounds, the fuzz ended up preventing what could have been a truly nasty riot. So what did Sony have to say about this?
A spokesperson for Sony said that 400,000 PS3s were all the company could produce for the launch, and that the ensuing buyer chaos was “not something we planned or foresaw.”
Hmm… funny, I seem to recall hearing that the number of PS3s at launch was just a little less than 400,000, as opposed to the 600,000 originally promised at E3 this year. I’m a little curious if other cities/counties will bill Sony for the police time spent responding to the PS3 launch’s incidents of violence… this could prove to be a very interesting story over the next couple of days.
Boston’s mayor says Sony’s launch wicked wrong
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to on 20 November 2006
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: clam chowdah, police time, ps3 launch, sony, thomas menino
Well seeing as how the only reason Sony is being billed in this instance is because this was a SonyStyle store.
Either way, I disagree with the move by the mayor. This is what your (and Sony’s) tax dollars are for after all.
Seriously, with all the shipping options available today, why can’t Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo just do an online only release of new consoles and have additional units hit retail a week later. Retailers wouldn’t be so happy, but look at the crap people go through to get a new console on release day.
i totally disagree with the mayor’s decision. the consumer knew ahead of time that there was a shortage so they should had been prepared to accept the fact that not everyone would get a ps3.
with that shouldnt it be the peoples fault and not sony’s?
Except that in this case (according to what we know) the people were being sensible and the store was the one that wanted to create the chaos.
Uh…go Mayor Menino! And boo to the sadistic bitches at Sony Style who wanted to see a mad rush.
Billing Sony isn’t quite the right thing to do, but what Sony did was shitty. The store should have been doing everything it could to avoid a riot, and instead they practically incited one by basically telling everyone the first person to the door gets a PS3. Had they just enforced the line and given them to the people who were waiting there first and sending the rest on their merry way, they could have avoided the whole thing. People waiting in line should not have to plan for a mad rush.
People tried to avoid a riot and make things fair. However, fair doesn’t get on the morning news, Riots do. And everybody knows riots over Sony products gets Sony off. So their people decided ‘To hell with doing things calm and civilized, FIRST COME FIRST SERVE’
People don’t remember how that kind of mentality KILLED people before by being trampled.