Gamestop has received an unexpected shipment of the next-consoles and instead of being a source of excitement has turned into a nightmare for the employees. Speaking to Bloomberg, the staff claimed that they received a very small notice prior to getting the new stock, and the resulting crowd has been both a health risk as well as hard to control.
On the East Coast, an email regarding the new stock was sent out just minutes before it came in. The store got just 15 consoles and that too for pre-order. Within less than half an hour, there were more than 40 people crowding outside the store, hoping to get a unit, and violating social distancing rules.
Most employees were given less than an hour to prepare for the surprise sale on Saturday which was far from enough to let them prepare for the horde of gamers who stormed in minutes after the email went out.
We realize that in some situations our approach of notifying customers of this opportunity may have caused unintended reactions from both our associates and customers. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Statement from GameStop
All latest game consoles, CPUs, and GPUs have been facing severe shortages as nearly all of them are manufactured by the same foundry (TSMC) and that too on the same process node (7nm). You’ve got AMD’s Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs, Ryzen 4000 mobile APUs, the newly launched Ryzen 5000 CPUs, the Radeon RX 5700 GPUs, the Radeon RX 6000 “Big Navi” GPUs as well as some other secondary lineups being produced by the same foundry. This leaves little space for the Xbox Series X|S and PS5 consoles which despite being given a higher priority can only be given so much room.
Supply is expected to improve starting from Feb 2021, with shipments supposedly returning to normal for both PC components and consoles by the second quarter of 2021.
