Animal Crossing Build-A-Bear Go On Sale This Morning, Could Be A Clusterfluff – Kotaku

Build-A-Bear’s eagerly-anticipated line of official Animal Crossing: New Horizons plushies go on sale this morning at 11 am Eastern. In order to handle what’s sure to be massive demand, Build-A-Bear has set up a virtual queue for customers to gather in to await their chance to purchase items that haven’t even been revealed yet. Nothing could go wrong with this plan. Update: It’s just Tom Nook and Isabelle. Boo.

Here’s how the Build-A-Bear virtual waiting room works. Customers can start queuing at 10:30 am on the Build-A-Bear website. In the queue, they will be randomly assigned a place in line. Once a customer’s turn comes up they’ll have a limited amount of time to purchase items from the Animal Crossing: New Horizons collection. Once purchased, customers are free to go to eBay and put whatever they’ve just purchased up for sale for at least double the price.

There are a few problems with such a system. For one, as we’ve seen with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S sales since the new consoles launched in November, bots and scalpers love automated queuing systems, regularly dominating sales of hard-to-find items.

Second, Build-A-Bear isn’t even revealing characters and items until 10:30 am Eastern. For all fans know they could be gearing up to queue for Barold the neckbeard bear or Candi, the mouse whose eyes look like boils and eyebrows look like eyes. I’m sure they’ll have Isabelle or whatever (we’ll update once the collection is revealed), but what if?

If you’re really into Animal Crossing: New Horizons and want something to cuddle, your best option, aside from becoming very good friends with my spouse, is to wait until the summer, when the Build-A-Bear collection hits stores. You’ll have a better chance of getting what you want, plus you’ll get to see someone in a Build-A-Bear polo fill them with fluff. It’s the miracle of life, and afterwards you can go to the food court for some pretzel dogs. Everybody wins.

Update 10:30 am: It’s just Isabelle and Tom Nook. Why keep it a secret if it’s just the two most obvious? Who knows.

Update 11:05 am: Queue times already over an hour.

Update 11:20 am: The reselling has begun.