London's chaotic scramble for solar eclipse glasses, secret WhatsApp drops and all

[Cheugy]

A near total solar eclipse crossing western Europe on August 12th triggered a genuinely chaotic scramble across London for protective viewing glasses, complete with secretive WhatsApp groups, 2am queues, and opportunistic resellers cashing in on the shortage

The eclipse, visible to tens of millions across the region for the first time in more than 25 years, required special glasses that filter visible, ultraviolet and infrared light, since viewing it directly without protection can damage the retina, as supplies dwindled at corner shops across the city, a secretive WhatsApp group began pinging members with notifications about where the latest drop would take place, one message reportedly read to my day ones, please come quick, followed by a location, within minutes of one such message going out at Old Spitalfields Market, hundreds of people poured into the concourse

The scenes that followed were genuinely wild for what is ultimately a pair of cardboard glasses, a teenager who secured 25 pairs for £5 each at the front of one queue immediately walked to the back to resell them at £10, outside Whitechapel tube station a makeshift stall sold glasses for £10 a pair, and someone posted on Reddit offering to sell pairs outside Camden Town station for £20 until they ran out, Ali Raza, owner of the AM2PM convenience store in Whitechapel, said he'd had to turn people away all day, adding that on the Sunday before the eclipse people had traveled in from as far as Surrey and Southend on Sea specifically hunting for glasses

Tempers frayed badly enough that shop owners had to appeal directly to the community for basic civility, one corner shop owner wrote to members of a pop up WhatsApp group saying we are hearing very bad things about customers and how they are treating the employees and the stores, threatening with bad reviews, do not drive across the country and then blame the store if they don't have them

For context on the astronomical event itself, this was a total solar eclipse crossing the Arctic, Greenland, Iceland and parts of northern Spain and Portugal, with the partial phase visible across much of the UK covering more than 90 percent of the sun in some areas, it was the first such event over the region in more than two decades, which goes some way to explaining why demand for a few pounds worth of cardboard and specialized film outstripped supply this badly

WhatsApp 'drops', price hikes and queues: scramble for solar eclipse specswww.theguardian.com

[SuperPosition78]

The image of grown adults forming secretive WhatsApp resale networks over cardboard eclipse glasses is genuinely one of the more delightful bits of low stakes human chaos I've read about in a while, completely disproportionate to the actual item but that's exactly what makes it funny