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Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Friday, February 27, 2004
14:31 - It's all the rage in Japan
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,62455,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2

(top) link

Damien sends this odd little story. We're about to get our very own flagship Apple Store in San Francisco, to match the gigormous ones in New York and Chicago; and this opening-day ceremony appears to have something a little different in store for the faithful lined up thousands deep at Market and Stockton:

On Saturday morning, the first few hundred people through the door will have a chance to buy a $250 "lucky bag," which may or may not contain one of the company's popular, just-released miniature music players.

Lucky bags are a shopping craze imported from Japan where, on New Year's Day, many stores offer these bags full of surprise items, explained Ron Johnson, Apple's senior vice president of retail, during a press tour of the store Thursday.

He said Apple sold them recently at its Tokyo store, and the concept proved so popular the company decided to bring the idea to San Francisco.

Priced at $250, nearly the same price as the iPod mini itself, the lucky bags contain seven or eight items worth a total of $600 to $1,000, Johnson said.

"We've got a really popular product that sells for $249," he said, referring to the new music player, which went on sale last weekend. "So some of them might have a nice surprise."

Holding up one of the mysterious black bags, which looked like a bank robber's swag sack, Johnson fielded more questions about the gimmick than even the store's magnificent glass staircase.

According to reports, lucky bags, or fukubukuro, attract tens of thousands of consumers to Japan's New Year's Day sales. One store alone claimed 25,000 lucky bag shoppers, and there are reports of injuries during lucky bag stampedes.

The Disinfotainment blog has video of a near riot as 16,000 young women storm a popular Tokyo clothes store, a scene described as "materialism run amok."

At the Apple store, Johnson failed to explain why anyone who wants an iPod mini would spend the exact purchase price on a grab bag that had a good chance of not containing one.

In Japan, a fukubukuro purchased at the Apple store by shopper Keita Suyama (report here: scroll down) contained six items, including an iSight camera, a Bluetooth USB adaptor, Bluetooth mouse, Apple's Keynote presentation software, a package for the .Mac online services and a 10 percent discount card for the store. The bag cost 27,000 yen (about $250) and Apple claimed the goods were worth 62,000 yen ($570).

Ye gods! So... what are the chances of winning, anyway? This is like a lottery without the low-cost-of-outlay attractiveness. It'd really, really suck to pay $250 for an empty bag...!

It'd be cool just to pose with one, though. I wonder if it's made of burlap and has a big "$" sign on it?

I'll be up there tomorrow morning, probably, just to take part in a little relaxing mass hysteria before Lance and I fly down to Monterey to pick up my parents, and thence to Harris Ranch for some more of those insanely good steaks with the private airstrip right next to the restaurant on I-5. No, I'm not going to attempt to be first in line. According to ifoAppleStore, people have been lining up since Thursday night.



UPDATE: Okay, I'm an idiot. The lucky bags aren't intended as a sustainable lottery kind of thing-- they're a big-ticket giveaway thing, just for tomorrow's one-time event. The goodies in the bags are costly, but they're in all the bags, with some random variation (average bag value $600). It's like a regular old grab-bag, but with much higher stakes.

Considering that the things they've quoted as being in the bags (iSights, iPod minis, copies of .Mac, copies of Keynote, BlueTooth stuff, etc) are things I already have, I probably won't be plunkin' down. But it's still pretty bloody cool. And there are no empty bags.


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