Walmart Stores Have PS4 In Stock, But Won’t Tell You: Stockpiling for Black Friday? (Updated)

Giuseppe Nelva November 23, 2013 1:54 PM EST

Finding a PS4 nowadays may be a real pain, if not almost impossible through traditional retail chains, but those coveted consoles may just be hidden behind the safely locked doors of each shop’s storerooms, at least at Walmart.

If you check Walmart website, it’ll tell you that the PS4 is out of stock. As a matter of fact, not only the page shows the product as unavailable online, but it has no “also in stores” availability box at all.

But of course that didn’t stop us, and we did some more digging, to be more precise we dug up the code of the mobile store finder of the retail chain, and we got some interesting results.

Here you can see the store finder code for the PS4 around the New York area. To see other areas all you have to do is to change the latitude and longitude values in the url. And here’s the interesting part:

See the text highlighted? It says that the console is in stock. And it’s the same for all the other stores we checked. For the sake of comparison, below you see the same code for a model of the Wii that is currently out of stock at the same store.

Of course we tried calling the store (and many others), and in all cases we were politely but firmly told that the PS4 is sold out and not available.

Yet, while it won’t be openly displayed, the code of the store finder definitely reveals that the console is in stock. It’s just available for sale to customers. Why? The only reason that comes to mind is that stores may now be stockpiling for Black Friday, which will be on November the 29th.

It’s definitely not unlikely that other retailers may be applying the same policy, even if their store finder code isn’t as easy to dig up as Walmart’s. That said, if you’re still waiting to get a PS4, it’s probably going to become available soon in stores. They aren’t going to sit on those units forever, that’s for sure.

Update: we spoke with Walmart employees that confirmed the story and provided further details. You can find them here.