MAC manufactures the limited quantity panic experience so that customers are conditioned to buy now without even testing items or seeing swatches. Then 2 weeks after a collection magically sells out, there's a restock of their supposed limited stock. If I am guilty of anything, it's of buying into the MAC hype and the thrill of owning an item that's hot... that is, until the next collection comes out in a few weeks. Most of us collectors know it and we play the game anyway for fun. This launch was different in that it's the first time I have seen customers get blamed for MAC's blunders, ranging from poor relationship management (snatching boxes off UPS trucks) to complete system failure (gateway timeouts). To blame a very small group of makeup collectors is to miss the big picture: there were thousands of customers in the waiting room at noon, and MAC's technical errors forced customers to place multiple orders or none at all after 3-4 hrs of waiting, or even purchase the wrong items (RRW kept ending up in my cart). MAC failed to meet its own stated goal of ensuring that each customer got to own something from this collection. The stock was there but customers couldn't get to it through no fault of their own, or the fault of other customers. No, really. If everyone had to log in through 5 devices and slow down the server, that's MAC's fault for failing to predict a great public interest in a five-piece collection as opposed to the one-piece RRW collection. The "leaked link," "greedy collectors," and fairness lectures are flimsy smokescreens for very major corporate failures, IMO. I understand you are trying to be accountable for your own collecting habits, but looking at the big picture, I think blaming any one customer (yourself or others) is not helpful. We need MAC to improve its CS and IT so we can all have better experiences in the future.
And I was assured by the CS rep I spoke to yesterday that if I resubmitted my orders to replace the other legit orders that were also canceled (and bring me back to my max limit of 4 separate orders), they would be fine. I have little hope that this will be fixed, but I'm going to try.
