Vice Vice (Not Your) Baby
Let me introduce you to the URL that ruined my hopes and dreams of reselling a pair of shoes for a big profit:
https://www.vicegolf.com/us/vice-golf-shoe-by-adidas-2020
If there were a list of ways an initial shoe drop could go wrong, Vice Golf experienced almost every one of them today. Vice does a great job with golf balls and the rest of their apparel, but they just dropped the ball in every sense of the word with the drop today. The following is my experience trying to get the shoes in eight acts...
I will give them this, the shoe design is SUPERB. If they had been available in greater quantity, I may have tried to buy a pair for the season and not just to resell. I thought the concept was great, design was unique, the buzz created on Vice’s Instagram was larger than the company expected, the concept of a dozen limited golf balls with the limited shoes was something different than your normal shoe drop. The only negative thoughts I had on the shoes were the price was pretty steep (almost $215) and it just wasn’t truly clear how to buy them. I would have liked to enter all my information ahead of time like when you register for the Nike SNKRS app. A step like that, would have saved me all the issues I experienced after number 3 below.
Let’s walk through the issues the site encountered today:
Starting at, or just before, 11:00 am the site crashed. It was a good 15-30 minutes until you could get into the site. (Great start)
Once the site was back up, it intermittently crashed or took ages to load. (Progress)
I was able to get my shoe size in a cart and then when I tried checking out the site crashed. I experienced this for another good 15 minutes. (Sweet...)
I was finally able to check out, it takes you to another page where you are supposed to put your information in. I proceed to do so, but the options for “States” in the address box wouldn’t load. There were several delays for each next step. When I hit update, the site just spun for quite a while. (Cool...)
Spinning wheel of death
5. After getting everything in, I get a message that there was an error with no explanation of what the issue was. The error persisted for another 10-15 minutes. (Anger begins to build)
6.The last epic fail of my endeavor, was when Vice let me know the size I was trying to buy was sold out in the process of me just trying to input all the information. (I guess I can go fuck myself)
Rage…Rage…
7. The site then told me to remove the size from my cart, I did so and then tried to get a size 9.5. I had the same experience. (Sure they will be tight, but I’ll manage)
8. To put a cap on everything I checked what they were on sale for on eBay: (Aaaand we’ve officially lost cabin pressure)
Neat…
There are many things I want to know about the drop. Why were there only 1,000 pairs? If you are only going to have 1,000 pairs, why not set up a lottery so that your site isn’t overwhelmed? Why, if the shoes are in my cart, are they not saved for me for a certain amount of time? I have too many why’s from this experience and just telling me that they had a much larger turnout than expected doesn’t cut it for me.
At the end of the day, I hope everyone that lucked out and got the shoes enjoys them. The shoes look like they are going to be some of the coolest shoes released this year. I am bummed that I didn’t luck out, but I will make it (thoughts and prayers.) I am hoping next year Vice learns from these issues they experienced today and have a much more successful second run into the shoe game. Any of you guys snag a pair? Happy golf-gear shopping 5 & fore readers. Oh, and by the way, “you’re still away!”