(Image courtesy of AppleInsider and iClarified)
If you sat out last Tuesday’s iPhone 4 pre-order meltdown and hoped to saunter into your local Best Buy to grab the handset come this Thursday, June 24, you may want to rethink that plan. A wealth of data has been leaked from Best Buy, including a launch day manual that outlines the big box retailer’s plans for Thursday as well as some early inventory reports.
AppleInsider is reporting that Best Buy is not looking like a prime candidate for grabbing an iPhone 4 this Thursday. According to website iClarified, Best Buy has a corporate-wide launch day manual to help walk stores through the June 24 madness, but the document appears to have some problems. On page two, the manual states that Best Buy will be launching the iPhone 4 on June 24, but only one page later it contradicts itself with the note, “iPhone 4 devices will not be available on launch day.”
Meanwhile, iClarified has also procured inventory data from a number of Southern California Best Buy locations, which strangely shows that most of those stores 32GB white models of the iPhone 4 “on order” -- around 10 for most stores, with several locations showing 20, including those in Thousand Oaks, Porter Ranch, Burbank, Glendale, West Hollywood and Sherman Oaks. Of course, at this writing no one has the white model of iPhone 4 in stock, so it’s unclear if this is actual data or just a “wish list” inventory from the retailer.
Regardless of color, it appears that the iPhone 4 will likely be extremely limited at Best Buy, assuming there are any left at all after the retailer fulfills their initial pre-order demand from last Tuesday. An inventory report from the state of New Jersey shows only 384 handsets spread out amongst 14 districts, with the Secaucus store having the most on order at 60.
AppleInsider is also reporting that while competitor RadioShack will also be offering the iPhone 4 on launch day, The Shack was told by Apple last week that “it could no longer use the word ‘pre-order’ as part of its own reservation process, nor could it guarantee customers that they’d receive their iPhone on June 24, according to people familiar with the matter.” The same source claims that Apple has only allotted RadioShack just shy of 100,000 units for their entire 4,500 stores across the country.
It looks like Thursday, June 24 is going to be a repeat of last Tuesday’s pre-order madness, but this time staged at the retail level. It’s likely to be a long, hot day, so let’s be careful out there, folks.
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