163+ days on, the XBOX Series X/S and PS5 are still unavailable, scams abound
If you happened to sell your XBOX One S a month or so before the new consoles came out expecting you’d pick one up after Christmas and be able to continue your replay of Injustice 2, well, hah hah… yeah… they’re still not available.
The ordering systems of major retailers get a restock about every week and they’re gone before the average person can even land on the ordering page. The new owners of the consoles then go to eBay, plunk ’em up for roughly a 100% markup on average, and get it.
The Twitter scams abound, prices that aren’t 100% markups are generally people scamming or planning to rob you, and yeah. Fun times. Good job everyone involved in letting this happen. A shortage leading to a lot of people getting scammed, robbed, and otherwise crimed.
The cause has to do with semiconductor shortages, which are affecting less interesting things like cars, NVIDIA’s 30-series GPUs, and presumably any reproduction of Iron Man’s 1960’s “Transistor Powered” armor.
The scams aren’t just from your standard directions either as some operatives are looking to ease you into a financing deal by signing you up for credit, an $800+ xbox with a game pass, and a $20-60 bounty paid to the blog or referrer who convinces you to sign up for it.
The big name distributors have taken no effort at combatting this, not even a simple “sign up and we’ll email you when your product is available and you can click ‘buy'” setup, instead allowing their stores to be overrun with device scalpers, and whoever has the best botnet can grab the product the millisecond it releases.
The shortage is so bad multiple companies are talking about nationalizing backups to the IT supply chain as whole industries are effectively twiddling thumbs, waiting for parts.
So, yeah… big name retailers need to start making waiting lists, and production of critical IT infrastructure needs to not be centralized.
Shakes fist at shortsightedness of an easily broken supply chain.
