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Yeezy's release spread sneaker chaos around the world

Lines, fights and confusion

Yeezy's release spread sneaker chaos around the world Lines, fights and confusion

This morning panic scenes spread on social media for the release of the Yeezy Boost 350 V2 "Black Reflective".
From Milan to Naples, it was since the release of the Nike x Off-White sneakers that there haven't been such scenes with masses of kids - but also many parents - crowded outside the sneaker stores like adidas, Foot Locker, Aw Lab and sneaker shops throughout Italy, in some cases resulted in riots.

This rotten hype it's the main cause of the bad reputation of the sneaker community, fueling the mistrust of public opinion that is captured by this kind of scenes. At the same time, this violence could be the right moment to rethink about the sneaker game and to control the hype, which now is mainly driven by the resell market.

The lines outside the stores have created confusion that in some cases has resulted in violence, the most serious case has happened in a mall in Marcianise near Caserta in front of the JD shop. Since 8 am there were over a thousand teenagers, some have unleashed a brawl appeased later by security. The release was cancelled and the store remained closed.
In Naples, in one of the stores adjacent to the Spanish neighbourhoods, some sources gathered by nss magazine even talked about the intervention of some well-known armed criminals.

In the rest of the world, it did not go better than in Italy, with actual fights in Israel in front of an adidas store and the infamous run in China.

 

 

The reasons for the panic

The wild camp outs outside of the stores were caused by the fact that the release wasn't paired with any kind of online raffle, it remained the old rule first come first served. It's a kind of policy that does not protect the consumers, on the other hand, expose them to risks and dangers. 

The second reason for the panicking was the resell market. The drop of the Yeezy Boost 350 V2 was actually limited: about 90k pairs in Italy, but there's who says that the actual number was much lower. The retail price was €220, but from this morning there have been posts on the Facebook pages of sneakerheads communities where the prices were ranging from 350 and 500 euros.