Best Buy's Restock Vanishes in Minutes, and the Console Shortage Grinds On
Best Buy's 9am PS5 and Xbox restock sold out almost instantly, underscoring how deep the holiday console shortage still runs.
If you set an alarm for 9am ET this morning hoping to grab a PS5 or Xbox Series X from Best Buy, you already know how this went. The restock window opened, carts filled up, and by the time most people refreshed the page a second time the units were gone. Some reports have them lasting minutes, others say a couple hours depending on region and SKU, but either way it’s the same story we’ve been living with for over a year now: demand still dwarfs supply, and it’s not close.
This one followed Walmart’s restock on December 8, so we’re now a week deep into two of the biggest retailers both proving the same point. The chip shortage isn’t easing up just because it’s the holidays — if anything the timing is almost cruel, since this is exactly when demand for these consoles peaks.
Why this isn’t getting better
The uncomfortable truth is that console shortages were never really a “restock and it’ll settle” problem. They’re downstream of a global semiconductor crunch that’s hit everything from cars to laptops to, yes, gaming hardware. Sony has been pretty candid about this — they already trimmed their PS5 production target for the fiscal year from 16 million units down to 15 million because they can’t source enough parts. That’s a real, concrete signal that this isn’t just retailers being cautious with allocation; it’s an actual ceiling on how many consoles can physically get built.
Microsoft hasn’t been as vocal with hard numbers, but Xbox Series X units have been just as scarce as the PS5 all year, and the Series S — the cheaper, easier-to-manufacture option — has been the more findable of the two, which tells you something about where the bottleneck sits.
What this means if you’re still hunting
Honestly, at this point the advice hasn’t changed much since launch: follow stock-tracker bots, keep notifications on for Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and GameStop, and be ready to check out fast because these drops are not scheduled to give you breathing room. Scalper bots are still very much a factor, which is part of why “minutes” is a realistic sellout window even when a retailer pushes a decent batch of inventory.
The bigger question is whether this eases up in 2022. Sony’s production cut suggests the parts shortage isn’t a Q4-specific problem — it’s structural, and it’s going to take fab capacity actually catching up to demand before things loosen. I wouldn’t bet on a normal, walk-into-a-store-and-buy-one experience until well into next year at the earliest. For now, if you scored a console today, congratulations, you beat some genuinely brutal odds. If you didn’t, there will be another window. There’s always another window.