So there were, at the very least, 80 people all hoping to get their grubby little hands on an Xbox 360.

What? Did you think I was talking about standing in line for Black Friday?  Psh.  I don’t shop on Black Friday, no way, no how.  Except the grocery store, but that’s not any different than any other day.

But, whatever.  Yes, we stood in line for an Xbox 360.  Well, we didn’t really stand the entire time of course.  But, we got one.  I guess they only had like 40 premium boxes (those are the ones that come with the hard drive and a couple other extra things), and we were like #36 or 37 for those.  The shitty part was that after the first 20, the rest were sold in “bundles”, packaged with miscellaneous other crap that we may or may not want to buy.  And by the time we got up to where the Xboxes were set out, all that was left were the bundles over $700.  The only thing we haven’t used in the bundle, though, is the wireless ethernet adapter, so we’re going to take that back in a couple of days and get $100 back for it.

We’re pretty impressed with the system so far.  The dashboard looks nifty (a big improvement from its predecessor), and the way Xbox Live works on it is cool, too.  Josh’s brother also has an Xbox 360 (although he was smart and pre-ordered it back in August), and they were able to do an audible chat over Live while they both played different games.

We didn’t pre-order ours, which I thank Sony for.  The reason we didn’t pre-order the Xbox is because, back when it was still possible to pre-order them and be guaranteed to get one at the release date, the PS3 was still slated to be released later this year.  Josh had pretty much been set on getting a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360, so he did not put in a pre-order for the Xbox, and was waiting for Sony to start doing pre-orders for their console system.  Then sometime in October I think it was, we found out that the PS3 isn’t going to be released in the U.S. until maybe 2007.  By then it was too late to pre-order an Xbox 360 and be guaranteed to get one, especially since we heard that MS was cutting back on the number of units being released on the street date.  So, line camping we’d be doing if we wanted even a remote possibility of getting one.

BB was chosen since it was supposed to be the store to get the most units.  Originally Josh was going to camp at one at the other end of town with his brother, but when they checked for a line there at 8pm, it was already MORE than 40-50 people deep, which, if sources were correct, was already more ppl than there was going to be stock at that particular store..  We called the BB by our house to ask how deep their line was, they estimated around 40 ppl as well.  We figured we’d have very little chance of getting one, so went to go see Harry Potter, with the intent of stopping by BB on the way home to check the line again.

After the movie we stopped and asked the ppl in line if they knew how many were there, and we were told around 30-40 ppl.  We opted to get in line and take a chance that we’d be able to get one, hoping that many of the ppl already in line were partnered up like Josh & I would be, one person actually there to buy an Xbox, and the other there to keep them company…  I’m glad we got one, we both would have been quite annoyed if we’d spent 8.5 hrs camping in line and end up being turned away because they ran out.  Especially since we maybe got 30-45 minutes of sleep that night.

As for the night before Black Friday… I happened to drive by BB on my way to Del Taco at around 9:30pm… The line was already as long as it was when Josh & I got in line at 12:30a for the xbox three nights earlier, only there were more ppl packed together in the same length of line (when we camped, many of the ppl had cots and were kind of spread out… this time they were on chairs and more compact).  So, if I had to guess, I’d say around 50-60 ppl in line by 9:30pm, whereas on Monday there were about 40 ppl in line by 12:30am.  I don’t even want to know how long that line was by the time the store opened Friday morning…  Eesh.