Less than 50 percent of buyers continued to use Spectacles just a month after purchasing them. By October, it had been reported that hundreds of thousands of pairs of Spectacles sat in warehouses, unsold. Evan Spiegel said in early October during Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit that the company had sold 150,000 pairs of Spectacles, it gradually became evident that the product had missed the mark. It retrospect, perhaps it was a blessing for Snap that the partnership had an expiration date. Most days, I didn’t see any customers at all. During my commute past the clunky yellow box every weekday, twice a day, between July and December 2017, I never once saw a line. Instead, as part of a limited-run partnership, Snapchat installed a number of vending machines across the country, one of which was housed in the Oculus, downtown Manhattan’s upscale indoor shopping mall. But weeks later, the Manhattan pop-up shop closed down as enthusiasm waned. In the immediate wake of the hype wave, Spectacles resold online for hundreds of dollars each. When I finally reached the Snapchat vending machine, I inserted my card, selected my purchase, and walked away with a pair of coveted video-recording glasses, ignoring the dejected attendant who called after me, “You don’t want to take a video in here with us to test them out?” For weeks afterward, the hours-long line stretched down the block and into a nearby subway station.
I was maybe 40 people back in a queue that wrapped around an entire storefront, and like the inhabitants of some sort of capitalist introvert dystopia, we were all staring resolutely at our phones. Not bothering to fully regain consciousness, I threw on a sweater and hopped a train to Midtown to do something I’d sworn I would never do: stand in line to buy a gadget. Snapchat had announced its new Spectacles product two months earlier, after a promotional video for the smart glasses product leaked, and had been placing strategic pop-up shops around the country ever since. I landed on a tweet from Snapchat: a picture of a storefront with a bright yellow facade, a stone’s throw from Apple’s flagship Fifth Avenue store.
I woke from a dead sleep in the early hours of November 21, 2016, and scrolled, bleary-eyed, through my Twitter feed.
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