Woman paid guy $800 for place in queue to buy $100,000 worth of original iPhones before realising expensive mistake
Woman paid guy $800 for place in queue to buy $100,000 worth of original iPhones before realising expensive mistake
A woman who paid a man $800 (£624) to jump the queue and buy $100,000 (£78,000) worth of iPhones made a huge - and expensive - mistake.
Back in 2007, when the first iPhone came out, people were pretty eager to get their hands on one.
Of course, back then, people had no idea just how huge the iPhone could become.
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But one woman who wanted to capitalise on the launch made a plan to purchase every iPhone she could - although it horribly backfired.
When the iPhone was first released, people even camped outside stores to be at the front of queues to get their hands on it.
One day late in June 2007, the original iPhone was released and outside a store in Dallas, Texas, one woman showed up with $100,000 and a determination to walk away with as many phones as possible.
She even paid the guy at the front of the queue $800 to take his place so she didn't have to camp outside the store for hours and could be the first one to make it inside.
The woman declared that her intentions with attempting to buy $100,000 worth of the new iPhones was to resell them on eBay, essentially becoming a scalper, someone who gets in first and buys up all of something people want to resell it on at a much higher price.
When they first went on sale, original iPhones went for about $499 (£389) each, but she was sure she could make double that on each one she bought by reselling it on eBay.
However, her plan hit a snag when the store's doors opened and she was the first customer in as she was promptly told that they were limiting sales to one per customer.
It was a measure introduced precisely to block someone from doing what she did and to ensure that as many people queuing up could get their hands on one.
She'd started her day declaring she'd be 'buying $100,000 worth of iPhones' and ended up very much not doing that, having instead paid a guy $800 so she could be disappointed as soon as possible.
Still, it worked out pretty well for the guy she bribed to queue jump, he'd have been able to buy his iPhone with that cash and still have some left over.
Years later, Steve-O interviewed the man on Wild Ride! Podcast.
Marc Rebillet explained that he had initially thought it was a marketing ploy, due to the news crews that showed up.
Meanwhile, Steve added: "What made her think she was going to keep everyone's place in line?
"Maybe if she showed up with a team of people, she needed a physical person for every person's spot in the line."
Perhaps she ought to have bought the phone anyway and just kept it in the box as a collector's item, as an original iPhone from 2007 in mint condition sold at auction last year for $39,339.
That's more than 75 times the original retail price, proving that all good things come to those who wait.
Topics: US News, iPhone, Technology, Money
Joe Harker