Police Prevent Sales of iPhone 4S in Beijing Due to Unruly Mobs

The launch of the iPhone 4S in China has been pushed to turmoil. A large crowd of fans and scalpers went berserk on launch day, after having waited overnight in freezing weather in front of Apple stores in the country. The mishap occurred on Friday at the Apple store in Beijing’s trendy Sanlitun district. Apple had announced that the iPhone 4S sales will start at 7 am. But as the sales counter did not open at the scheduled time, shoppers turned violent.

The violent crowd started to pelt eggs at the store and fisticuffs broke out with police when the officials announced that the sales will not start. It is reported that a man brought raw eggs in a plastic bag and distributed them so as to attack the store.

Along with this, the gangs of scalpers trying to get their hands on a large number of iPhones, started to fight with the officials. In China, scalpers are now common at all Apple stores (watch a YouTube video below), as there were online advertisements seeking to hire thousands of people to stand in line at the Apple stores.

They offer 100 Yuan ($16) plus dinner for every person to do the job. It is reported that groups of 50 people wearing the same hats or gloves were queuing up on behalf of scalpers in the front of the store. We also hear that the scalpers get 1,000 Yuan ($160) profit from the sale of each iPhone 4S unit.

As the incident slipped to uncontrollable mode, police entered the site and started hitting and dragging the people away.  Later, the police ordered the officials to shut stores.

After the unhappy incident, Apple declared that they are stopping all retail sales of the latest iPhone in China for the time being. They revealed that the phones will be available online via their partner China Unicom and official Apple resellers.

Meanwhile, the iPhone 4S sales at the other stores in Beijing and Shanghai saw stocks finish in a jiffy. The handset is available at prices ranging from 4,988 to 6,788 Yuan ($792 to $1,077) for different variants.

In China, similar riots had occurred when the iPad 2 and white iPhone 4 sales began too.  Similar incidents had happened in the past in different countries like Indonesia. Riots had also been triggered when the BlackBerry Messenger service went into trouble mode in London back in August.

Do you think similar mishaps could occur in the UK too when companies launch new products?