The long wait to buy socks begins: The highs and lows of life in Penneys’ virtual queue

This is my life now, I live on this virtual holding page

Denise O'Donoghue after making her way through Penneys' virtual queue and successfully getting a shopping appointment

This morning, Penneys announced the opening of its booking system for appointments, allowing customers to pick a time and day to visit the store next week, ahead of its full reopening on May 17.

For journalistic purposes (cough) I logged on to their website in time for the booking system’s launch to see what it would be like to be in a virtual queue after such a long time. I actually almost miss the thrill of booking concert tickets on Ticketmaster and this seemed like a great placebo.

I won’t be getting near any Golden Circles, but I’ll have one of the first tickets to the opening night of Penneys’ 2021 comeback.

Here’s how I got on.

10am: ‘We’re opening our Irish stores safely using shop by appointment. Book here.’ 

Oh boy, I’m in bright and early for the queue, surely I’ll fly through it. I click into the booking system and a holding page loads.

10.01am: ‘Your estimated wait time is 50 minutes’ 

A screenshot of Penneys' virtual queue as the wait began

Oh well, I’m sitting at my laptop for work anyway. I’m sure it will fly by. Maybe I’ll even do some real work while I wait. I keep the queue open in one tab while I finalise and send out our weekly Lifestyle newsletter (subscribe here, it’s great). 

10.30am: ‘Your estimated wait time is 8 minutes’ 

Great, people must be picking appointments without delaying or else they’re dropping out of the queue. Either way, this is good news for me. I glance at the clock and think I’ll be back on track work-wise by 10.40am. Great.

10.41am: ‘Your estimated wait time is 5 minutes’ 

Hmm. Those three minutes really dragged. I start to lose faith in the queue gods.

10.50am: ‘Your estimated wait time is 6 minutes’ 

Wait, what?

10.57am: Nothing

The moment the wait time vanished from Penneys' virtual queue

My estimated wait time has vanished. Does this mean I’m almost there or has the queue system given up lying to me? The thoughts of picking up ‘just a few bits’ on the way to the tills sustained me in my darkest hour. Tiny candles and gadgets, I’m coming for you.

11.09am: I’m in!

I check at the tab with the queue after getting distracted doing some actual work for a change (imagine), and am surprised to see it has changed to Penneys’ distinctive blue and white colouring. I’m faced with a blank map and it takes me half a second longer than I’d like to admit to realise I need to search for my local store.

What Penney's appointment schedule looks like

I quickly type ‘Cork’ and up pops Patrick’s Street and Wilton. I click into the city centre store and see to my delight that both Monday and Tuesday have approximately 15 appointments left each. I selected an evening slot so I could go after work (I just about got away with sitting on Penneys’ website today “for research purposes”, a full-on spree during work hours probably wouldn’t go down well), submit my name, email and phone number and that’s that. 

An email confirmation appears in my inbox almost immediately and I can spend the weekend dreaming of all the affordable fashion and homewares I can soon browse.

Now that is a conclusion more satisfying than the Line of Duty finale. Oh, I wonder if they’ll start doing AC-12 t-shirts soon?

The satisfying finale

• Penneys' booking system is now live on primark.com for shopping by appointment from May 10-16, with the full re-opening of stores going ahead on May 17. All Brown Thomas and Arnotts physical stores will also be open for shopping by appointment from next Monday and customers can pre-book online at BrownThomas.com and Arnotts.ie.