The Cat Helmet edition of Halo is the B&M’s DO NOT WANT of the year. This is funny/annoying for several different reasons.

First, the lady at my local Gamestop hounded the hell out of me to order the cat helmet. I repeatedly told her that there would be plenty of copies of Halo 3 to go around and that I wasn’t giving them a zero interest short term loan of $20 to hold a copy of a high volume commodity.

Finally, in February, she told me that Gamestop corporate was cutting off pre-orders and that if I wanted one, I had to pre-order it NOW. I finally caved, remembering that you can always cancel pre-orders and get your money back.

Then, Circuit City had a price mistake and was selling it for $99 with free shipping. I ordered it.

Then what to do? Wait 10 business days to get my Halo on or buy it at Gamestop? Turns out that I turned the table on those GS bastards. I picked up my cat helmet at midnight and then returned the later arriving copy 2 weeks later. Honestly, I figured Gamestop would be glad to get another copy of this sought after item to sell. I was going to use the $130 towards other pre-orders anyway, so everybody wins. Then I noticed that they had a helmet sitting behind the counter. Turns out that there is a huge glut of these $130 monstrosities taking up valuable shelf space at B&Ms nationwide. Gamestop is opening copies in every store to entice people to buy them.

Yesterday Amazon.com was selling the Legendary edition for $110 with free shipping.

What a disaster! They didn’t have enough Bioshock CEs to fulfill customer pre-orders, but the Legendary editions are all over the place. Maybe it’s time to actually follow through with promises and actually make some items pre-order only. Greed is bad for business. Anyone who has watched NBC’s Deal or No Deal could tell you that.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 5:58 am and is filed under Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.