Telefonica Movistar completely screws up iPhone launch

My headline was going to be ‘completely fucks up’, but it seemed a bit too harsh for a title. The current timeline for the launch train wreck of the iPhone 3G in Barcelona has been:

10:20am: Visited El Corte Ingles, one of Movistar’s major distributors. They have received exactly zero iPhones. The queue is thus of exactly zero people.

10:25am: Passed this queue in Telefonica’s main Barcelona store, in the centric Plaça Catalunya:

I decided to skip this and go to the second main Movistar store in Barcelona.

10:32am: Arrived to the queue, much shorter this time, in the Ronda de Sant Pere store. People leaving the store with a very pissed off look, saying things like “and they didn’t see this coming?”.

10:35am: Confirmation that they had a total of seven (yes, 7) iPhones shipped to them, and they have all been sold. The queue is to sign up to a waiting list, WTF!!!

10:36am: I leave the store, and call one of Barcelona’s main Apple distributors, who was on the official retailers list that would have iPhones.

10:37am: The first time I get a 302 redirect over the phone. They confirm that they will receive one iPhone for display purposes today, but they have put up a website one can use to sign up…for a waiting list.

11:15am: Telefonica PR is saying that they could not have anticipated this level of public response, and are overwhelmed.

Now…they have been hyping July 11th for months now, and even setup a site one could sign up to be sent iPhone news – which by July 6th had over 140.000 signups! This is total incompetence, however you may want to make it look.