I did once.
It was Black Friday of 2006, a week after the release of the Wii. My friend had to work at a store in the mall in the wee hours of the morning, and he dropped me off to wait at GameStop so I could test my luck. Nintendo has always been infamous for engineered scarcity, and the Wii was no exception, so I was fully prepared to leave with nothing but an interesting story to tell. I had never seen the horrors of Black Friday, and was morbidly curious to experience it for myself at least once.
The experience was pretty tame. At first I waited outside the mall. I had my guide dog with me, and I allowed other people in line to give her pets and scritches as we waited. Not gonna lie, me bringing her was a bit of social engineering. Who’s gonna hit a blind guy? We got to chatting about what the line was for, and I discovered it was for an unrelated promotion. I asked if I could be let in to wait in front of the GameStop in the food court out of the cold, and they let me enter.
I can’t remember if others in the same line came in with me, or if they had already been there, but I ended up behind a dad and his two kids, and they were both getting a Wii. There were only three in stock, so I ended up getting lucky. I even got a copy of Twilight Princess, as well as FF XII on the PS2 as a Christmas gift for my sister.
tl;dr: veni vidi wiici
Context:
In cologne Germany there is a huge carnival culture, historically carnival is sorta anti establishment, but for a variety of reasons in post ww2 cologne carnival is the establishment. So the Karnevalsvereine have shows/plena called Karnevals_Sitzung. Because these events had lost their anti establishment air, at some point a reaction formed called the Stunk_Sitzung (roughly grievance session as opposed to carnival sessions) which re focused on anti establishment satire, both satirizing main stream carnival and broad local to global politics. This event then became the de facto cultural institution in terms of carnival satirical stage show running several shows weekly throughout the entire season (Nov-Feb/March).
Story:
Getting tickets for this show for a weekend close to the end of the carnival season (the season ends with the main parades and festivities)requires ordering tickets in person on the day the tickets go on sale, with the ticket offices opening 9am lining up at 10pm isn’t uncommon, and I have been part of such a line. Although it is also common for the spot in line to be transferable, so I did a shift roughly midnight to 5am at which point I went home to bed and someone else did the last 4h shift and bought tickets.