I'm in mild disbelief at my luck on this.
I was so tired last night that I just said, "Screw it. I'm not setting my alarm. If I'm up in time, I'll make the effort, but if I'm not, I certainly won't lose sleep over it." (terrible pun alert!)
I woke up at 930, with Best Buy opening at ten, and figured I was screwed. Still, it's only an eight minute walk from my apartment, so I hiked over and saw a line of what looked like about 15-20 people waiting. I walked up to the back of the line just as two employees walked out and started with, "I've got some bad news for you guys..."
No one immediately strangled her, so I'm assuming there weren't too many in line who'd been there long.
Turns out the "bad news" was a weather-induced delay on the UPS truck carrying their precious Wii shipment, and as such they would take down the names and numbers of the first twenty people in line to notify when the shipment arrived. The lucky few would have 24 hours to come back and buy the Wii before it would then be made available for general sale.
I started quickly making a headcount of the folks in line, trying to determine how many were clustered together to count as one spot. I then heard them reduce the ranks of the lucky from twenty to seventeen names, since they'd received a tiny shipment of three Wiis the other day, and the ladies weren't sure whether it was an independent shipment or part of their "mininum of twenty" allotment for today's sale.
I was the last guy in line, having waited for all of forty-five seconds, and ended up thirteenth out of thirteen on the list. Lucky me.
And, if you live near the San Marcos, TX Best Buy, that means they had at least four guaranteed Wiis for rain check availability, as of forty minutes ago.
Cheers, and happy gaming.