by Psypher » Mon Aug 19, 2013 2:21 am
I just wanted to share my launch day story. I will preface it by saying that it was one of the most fun days I've had in recent memory.
If you've been following my posts, I managed to snag everything I wanted last night during the midnight order. My wife and I woke up at 6:30am. The first thing I did was check my email expecting to find a "Your order is ready to be picked up" email. There was nothing. Now I am starting to get concerned as was the purpose of this thread. I was afraid that for some reason, the employees would not hold my items for me before opening at 8:00am. I had planned to go to Target first and then to Toys R Us, but I decided to call an audible.
We were on the road at 7:00am and got to Target at 7:35. I was somewhat surprised and disappointed to find that nobody was waiting outside. We decided to initiate our backup plan. I dropped my wife off at target with the responsibility of snagging both the Cars and Lone Ranger playsets at the 17.49 price. She was first in line. I then headed over to Toys R Us which is about 3 minutes down the road from Target. Now it's around 7:45 and again NOBODY is in line. So I was first over at TRU.
At 8:00 the doors open and the manager asked if I pre-ordered and I said "no" because I actually had my preorder at GameStop. I told him that I ordered everything at midnight for in-store pickup and the manager said something like "oh, well did you get the email saying it was ready?" I was like "no, but they said that it was all supposed to be ready for pickup at 8am." He said "We don't have any pickup orders in our system yet. If you want you can just grab what you want here and just not pick up your items. We only put a hold on your credit card until the items are officially picked up, so you won't be charged double." No problem. It was really fun to be the only customer in the store and have my pick of everything I wanted. The manager grabbed me a cart because I forgot to grab one on my way in. It was so cool. I would say they probably had at least 10 of everything. The first thing that struck me was the detail on the figures. They looked great. The first thing I grabbed was the Crystal McQueen. Then I saw that they had the exclusive power disk album and grabbed one. This was a nice surprise because it looked like they weren't available online for a while. I also picked up Sidekicks, Villains, Dash, Violet, and Francesco. I took 3 regular PDPs and then noticed they didn't have any exclusive PDPs. I asked one of the employees and he found a box in the back and brought it out and I was able to pick one. I got BOGOs for everything except the PDP Album which I used my %20 coupon on.
I headed back over to Target to see how my wife was doing. She was stuck at the register because the Cars playset had had a street date set for 10/15 and it wasn't allowing the cashier to sell it. They finally got a manager involved and he just rang up two Lone Ranger playsets and then they gave us $5 off the order for the inconvenience. We ended up getting both playsets for 29.98. Not bad.
Now it was around 8:35 and we flew over to GameStop to get in line for our preorder. We got there around 8:45 and once again were the first ones in line. Two more families ended up showing up right before opening, but I was disappointed with the turnout. While we were waiting, my wife called 1800ToysRUs and got them to cancel the midnight in-store pickup order. Doors opened at 9am and I got in first. I picked up the game for the Wii U, Mater, Power Disk Pack, the Mini Mag and the strategy guide. The guide ended up being 7.99 with the $10 discount.
We then came back home and had a blast opening all the packages and setting them up on my shelf. We played the game most of the day and really enjoy it. It's neat how it's like there are so many games in one. We ended up going to a different Toys R Us later in the day and picked up 6 more standard PDPs. Half of all the new PDPs I got were doubles and I was a little disappointed.
All in all it was a very fun adventure. Planning the day out, buying everything, and unboxing it all may have even been more fun than the game itself. I hope everyone else out there had a happy launch day. Enjoy!