Dick Smith game sale barely lasts an hour, angry customers take to Facebook

Last week, someone at Dick Smith leaked an interesting memo citing a sale to start today, offering cheap games and uber-cheap consoles. But things didn’t quite pan out how people expected. Here’s what happened.

After writing about the leaked memo on Thursday afternoon, Dick Smith confirmed to us that yes, there would be a clearance sale for games beginning on April 2.

The official statement we received on Friday said:

“Just wanted to let you know that Dick Smith has announced its massive $7 million Gaming clearance, which will commence April 2nd. I will update you with more details as they come to light.”

No other official details surfaced until April 2 – today – and while customers eagerly awaited the massive gaming sale, something had apparently gone wrong.

The sale officially began at 8am this morning, with an image on the Dick Smith page linking to a paltry 19 items, nowhere near the amount our leaked memo contained. There were more on-site, but you had to find them a different way, as Dick Smith’s “Games On Sale” ad only linked to the small offering mentioned above. You could find things by looking in the “$0-$25” gaming section, with 438 items listed, most out of stock by the time this story was written.

Meanwhile, Dick Smith’s website couldn’t handle the load gamers were inflicting upon it, falling down almost every time we tried to connect since 7.30am. By the time the site returned to normal, stock on the items listed in the sale – from $1 accessories to $5 games and $40 pieces of hardware – were depleted, and fans were left with nothing but anger.

Customers outside stores were having their own problems, finding little in stock the moment doors opened and taking the complaints to the Dick Smith Facebook page. Many customers seemed concerned that Dick Smith was selling clearance stock to its staff first, cutting them out of the picture.

A representative for Dick Smith told GadgetGuy today that:

“Due to the popularity of today’s Dick Smith gaming sale we understand some customers did not get what they wanted and were disappointed. A number of stores sold out of some products within the first hour and the Dick Smith website received an unprecedented volume of traffic.

Today’s sale was a clearance of stock from each store which means the amount available was limited and varied in amount and products between stores. This was clearly outlined on the Dick Smith Facebook page when the sale was announced last week. Information regarding pricing was available from the time the sale began at 8am AEST today and was consistently applied across identical products in all stores.

We have seen some isolated reports of staff purchasing products and we will be looking into these claims.”

It doesn’t appear that this sale has gone incredibly well, although with most items out of stock, Dick Smith would probably disagree with us. Those of you that were able to pick up a bargain should be pleased; everyone else, you’ll just have to keep your eyes peeled for some more potential bargains.

At $5 a copy, L.A. Noire was a great deal, even if the stock was lousy.