Come to a free show, but you cant come in..

Tonight my girlfriend and I had the pleasure of standing outside the Regent Street Apple store for 3 hours in the cold waiting for a free show to see Simon Amstell and Eddie Izzard, only to get turned away.

We had noticed the posters in store last Saturday, advertising this free show starting at 9pm, so we thought we’d arrive early to try and beat the crowds. I asked one of the Apple staff inside about the show and he advised us to wait outside by the doors where there was already a queue forming (this turned out to be round the corner). We joined the queue and there was only a handful of people in front of us so we thought great, we have a really good chance of getting in. Some security came past and told the guy manning the barriers that once 10 more people joined the queue he was to start telling them that they had a minimal chance of getting in.

A couple of hours passed, it was freezing cold, and I noticed a queue starting to form in front of where we we were standing. Two guys walked past and asked us if we wanted to buy tickets for the show. Err BUY tickets? For a free show? What’s going on?.. At about 9:30 the queue in front of us started moving around the corner into the Apple store…excuse me, we were here 3 hours before you! WTF is going on?! Another 20 or so minutes later they moved the barrier from in front of us and a handful of people went through and joined the back of the other one. We were stopped right in front of the barrier and told to wait.

We didn’t get in. It was full. 3 hours in the cold, first people there, and we didn’t get in..

This was a really badly advertised show as we later found out after I managed to grab someone who was head of the security and seemed to know what was going on. He told us it was at maximum capacity and that we were not guaranteed a place, we could only get in if ticket holders failed to show up. What ticket holders? its a free show! There was no mention of getting tickets anywhere on the posters in store, or on the Apple website. He said it was an online competition, and I should have checked the Apple site for details. Well the Apple site mentioned nothing about it, it only said a limited amount of tickets would be available. I complained about everything to him. I told him what the security guys manning the barriers had told us about the first 50 getting in, about the posters not mentioning anything of a competition or any sort of ticket, about not knowing there was to be another queue for ‘competition winners’, and that there was nothing in the 20 emails a week I get from Apple advertising other things. We weren’t told anything, only to stand in line.

He told me it was supposed to be a quiet thing, only 250 tickets had been given away to competition winners and they didn’t expect such a big turn out this evening. Well you shouldn’t have put posters up in the store telling people to come along to a free show then eh?

This is really bad on their part I think. There is another ‘free’ show on Monday evening with Stephen Fry, I was going to try and get in for that, but I don’t think i’ll bother now as even Stephen himself doesn’t know what going on, he tells us on Twitter.

No one from Apple was available to actually speak to me about this, so I couldn’t tell them directly how annoyed, misled, and let down I felt.

/rant

Comments