I decided to check out what Future Shop had in the offering for their Boxing Day sales. There were no real big ticket items that I was particularily dying to get this year, so I opted for a couple of the smaller deals. I wanted to get a Belkin Wireless-N router and a 2GB Flash USB drive, which seemed reasonable enough. I was on right after the sale started at 8pm and I put through my order. This year they opted to put in a 2 stage queue system to attempt to handle the load, since in previous years their servers have folded like cheap lawn chairs. This seemed like a move in the right direction. It turns out it’s just another stage of online shopping hell. Instead of just going to your cart and checking out, you now have to wait in line. It seems to emulate real life in this regard, as if you were attempting to buy one item at the grocery store only to be stuck behind an old lady with a cart full of cat food, coupons and a change purse containing exact change…in pennies.

I waited in this queue initially after 8pm and waited, and waited until eventually walking out of the room and forgetting about it without having the progress bar move at all. I came back at 10pm and tried again. This time the progress bar was moving, but it took quite awhile. It eventually froze, so I gave up again given it is Christmas Eve and I wanted to spend some time with family instead of online shopping. I tried again and had the progress bar get to the end, only to have it deliver me a Microsoft runtime error. So I go back to my shopping cart only to find the Flash drive is now apparently sold out. Ain’t that just special. I give it one more go after removing the Flash drive and finally get to step 1 of the checkout process. I try and plug in my new address with which to ship to, only to be thwarted again. This time the site is running so slowly that none of the graphics will load, including the ones that will navigate me to the next page. So I’m left stuck, since when I hit enter it just takes me back to the order verification page. That’s just special.

To me this crap is unacceptable. Future Shop and Best Buy have this happen every year. It’s not like it’s a surprise that they have a spike in demand. I can tell they tried to build an infrastructure that would hold up to the demand, but obviously they are pretty grossly deficient in this regard. As I finished this blog post I just finished placing my order for the router, nearly 5 hours after I originally wanted to do so and with only 1 of the items I originally intended to get, even though I am sure I would have got the Flash drive if they were properly able to handle my order when I actually put it in.