Line-sitting obssessive Greg Packer is at it again, camping outside of the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City for the iPhone 4. And this time he’s got a sponsor!
The sponsor is Gazelle.com, a site which buys up your used gadgets based upon a cash offer from their dynamic pricing engine. They then either resell your used gadget or recycle it.
Packer himself — more enthusiastic about line-sitting than he is functionally knowledgeable about tech — doesn’t really seem to have a very nuanced understanding of what his sponsor does, describing Gazelle as an “eBay for electronics.” It’s not, really, but either way, it looks like a pretty cool site for individuals who don’t want to go the eBay or Craigslist route for selling their old gadgets… or at the very least, recycle their own tech easily and responsibly. Their sponsorship of Packer has certainly raised my awareness of what they do, so in that, their money seems well spent.
As for Packer and his motivation for sitting in line, “I was the first in the US to have iPhone 1, so why not do it again?”
Shhh! No one tell him that FedEx is already delivering iPhone 4s to customers, no line-sitting required.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
