My local AT&T sold out of their 15 phones by 8:05. I was immediately offered the "direct fulfillment' option, and took it. The 3-5 days mentioned here sounds much better.
The point is that AT&T has been offering this option all day, not just late this evening.

My big question is why the h*** were all the country's AT&T stores so under stocked yesterday. The one near my house only had 40 units available on opening day despite having plenty of warning that they could sell far more than that the first day. Plenty.

I was one of many people in the store complaining that I had warned the store sales staff that I would be coming in on the first day to buy an iPhone and while they wouldn't take pre-orders, couldn't they count? Couldn't they even get a vague idea of the demand facing them?

They were certainly able to open two hours early and sell out all their iPhones before 9 AM. if they could sell out at the rate of 60 phones an hour and planned to be open for 14 hours that day, you'd think that they would plan on having a few more than 40 of the most highly rated and popular cell phones ever in stock for their customers.

I checked back later to find out that the "Next day's allotment" was in the back room but 'could not be released until the next day.' How many in the new order, 40.

Perhaps this was set in stone, perhaps they'd been there that morning and only now was it being admitted. Was it a crime that they were willing to admit that they had it but were unwilling to sell the phone to a disabled person who could not wake up early to be first in line to get one of the 40? Should I file an ADA lawsuit because of this?

More disturbing was that the fully staffed store was full of employees only too eager to push customers HARD to other phones that had many iPhone like features but were in fact inferior to the iPhone. Were they trying to make unhappy customers happy, clear unwanted, now obsolete inventory, or was this a deliberate bait and switch and therefore illegal tactic on part of AT&T nation wide to deliberately profit off of initial day iPhone frenzy by deliberately keeping iPhone inventory down.

If so, I hope every stinking off-brand phone bought today is returned on the 29th day. I was tempted to do so and do just that I was so angry at their incompetence.

I can see underestimating iPhone demand at a given store on opening day by dozens of units, but even at 4pm dozens of people were walking into this 95th and Western avenue city of Chicago south side store at the rate of 1 or 2 per 5 minutes. When would they be back? Would they be back?

Why go back to an AT&T store when they can now watch individual Apple store inventories on-line.

SO which is it - AT&T bait and switch consumer fraud conspiracy or just massive incompetence? Hard to say. But if I was the U.S. attorney general I'd be getting warrants and subpoena's right now and if I were AT&T I'd be hoping like h*** that there weren't too many federal judges and prosecutors turned away at AT&T stores yesterday.

Everybody makes mistakes. Maybe the ordering decision is the decision of each individual store manager. Maybe the price/risk fallout for them from being overstocked with iPhones was too great for them to be stuck with even 1 extra unit in each store. I don't know how those stores work, whether they are McDonald's like Franchises or O & O'd by AT&T. But somewhere, someone really insulted all new iPhone purchasers yesterday.

Software, network goofs can be expected to happen. But getting darn phones in the store, that's an elemental business practice. Shame on you AT&T. Maybe your managers just didn't want to work too hard. I did note that some store employees thought that they were working "Crazy Hard" at one store that had only 40 people in it. And they were slow. (Not the one I mentioned. Of COURSE I tried another.)

Peter, Editor and Spell Wrecker
The Peter Files Blog of Comedy Satire & Commentary
Http://ThePeterFiles.blogspot.com

By the way, I don't blame the sales reps.

The one in store I mentioned, James, did his very best to turn Lemons into Lemonade and did NOT try to move me to other options. He saw that I knew exactly what I wanted and spent a lot of time making sure that ALL my questions were answered so that when phones were in that I could get in and out as fast as possible.

For that, he deserves a shiny gold star and a raise. He'd also spent the time to really understand the product better than most of the others in the store though we were both mystified when the demo product didn't go landscape at two different points when we tried to.

He was however absolutely frustrated, but very polite, about the absolute lack of information coming down the pipe about plans for additional stock, whether you could order phones to go to a certain store, etc.

It seems that a natural solution for apple would be to set up a deal where you could engrave and ship your iPhone to a specific store where being pre-bought, they could do the final activation for you. That way if you wanted to buy say an iPhone and a non-iPhone and give them consecutive phone numbers like I want to, you could do that.

Now what the h*** is wrong with that idea, I ask you. How hard would it have been to set up a deal where apple sold the phones and sent them to the store of your choice, or took a major deposit for them and had them waiting for you on 7/11. I just cannot fathom it.

Thanks for reading. I'm still steamed. Those of you who are NOT in constant pain have no idea what it feels like to wait for long periods of time in line with pain levels of 7-9 in small box-like stores where they are not even announcing that they are out of iPhones and with no chairs to wait despite sign in sheets.

Peter, Chief Spelling Wrecker and Curmudgeon
The Peter Files Blog of Comedy, Satire, Jokes, Commentary, Stupidity Twitting, Videos and Original Ranting - All SFW & H

How about the creation of a tab (like lefthand news and electronista) for just the iPhone. I am SO DANG TIRED of reading about iPhone news. This is MACNN not iPhoneNN!!!

It seems that this site (and others) as well as Apple have given up on anything non-iPhone. Am I the only person who just doesn't care???

The closest Apple store is about an hour away, so I went to the local AT&T store at 7:30 for an 8:00 opening and walked out with two iPhones at about 9:30. (I didn't find out the phones were one-per-customer until I was already in line, but the store manager was fine with letting my wife join me in line, rather than making us both go to the back.)

I was surprised to hear they only had about 40 phones to sell the first day, though - glad I didn't show up any later.

One thing in AT&T's favor, though - since they didn't activate the phone while I was in the store, I wasn't stuck waiting around the store forever when Apple's servers barfed. AT&T just gave us the phones still in the shrink-wrap and we took them home to activate them. Activation took about a dozen dock/eject cycles for each phone, but at least I was home on my couch and not waiting around the store.

I think it worked out well, compared to going to the Apple store. I went by the Apple store at about 6 pm on Saturday, and there were still about 100 people in line. The slightly-frazzled Apple employee I asked about it said that it had been like that since Friday morning.