Animal Crossing: Target completely dropped the ball with the Sanrio amiibo cards

As I mentioned earlier today, scalpers suck. A lot of them swooped in snagged a bunch of the Sanrio Animal Crossing amiibo cards that went on sale today and Target and turned around and started selling them on eBay for ridiculous prices.

So how did this happen? As we’ve seen with new consoles and such, getting new stuff is almost as difficult as getting vaccinated. Yet something like this, that shouldn’t have had any problems, was fraught with them. Why?

Turns out Target had a lot to do with it. As time goes on and more and more reports come in, people start to question why people on Twitter keep posting pictures showing that they’re holding multiple. How were they able to buy these?

They weren’t supposed to.

Target’s ads for the event stated that the event was going to be online only and that you had to place your order through the site first. The good people out there did just that. Turns out that Target corporate are two separate heads of the same hydra and neither of them communicates well.

As time went on today, more and more people started posting that they were confident that they were going to get it today because they had it preordered through the site. However, they were surprised to find out that their order has been canceled.

The reason is that most stores, when found out that the item launched today, absolutely did not want to deal with the people and just sold them. “Oh, you wanted to pick up the pack you put money on? Sorry, we sold our entire inventory to some clown on Twitch who wanted to give them away to subscribers.”

This is far from an isolated thing too. Apparently many scalpers just chilled outside Target and, despite something like this clearly needing to be one-per-customer, walked out with the majority of the stock. One person even told me that the person behind her in line requested “all that’s left” and was handed them.

So while scalpers and people who clear out inventories are still absolutely terrible people, it’s something that could have been avoided if Target would have done the remarkably simple thing of just following their own stated rules.

On the plus side, as the event has caused almost nothing but bad PR for Nintendo, hopefully, it means they’ll think twice before working again with the company.