OK so...I totally understand why you'd be a little miffed at them. This was a marketing failure, for sure: they made a second offer that violated the "first-come, first-serve" principle. Those who were first come and not first served won't be happy, and the person who thought up this second offer should have known this. Furthermore, when you came in and brought the problem to the attention of the staff, they really should have tried to make you happy - by giving you a discount, or free merchandise, or doing something else for you. This is the real failure, right here: the fact that they weren't even nice to you. The service personnel who dealt with you should be demoted, fired, reprimanded - something.

But: BB is a big company. There are many thousands of SKUs, and probably hundreds of promotions. They should, but may not, have a comprehensive system to keep track of all of this. It makes a lot of sense to you that they should have notified you that there was a "new deal," but the fact of the matter is that their system would not have caught that unless someone programmed that in - and someone didn't program that very specific logic into the system (if any new product has a second deal, the people who got the first deal should get first dibs or be notified). It got lost in the shuffle.

This is the type of service that a small, mom & pop shop would give you - because mom & pop would think things through and realize how the customer would feel if Second Deal customers were served before First Deal customers. At the very least, mom & pop would be nice to you when they realized they made a mistake, because mom & pop would care about your business. But you didn't buy your Vita from a mom & pop store - you bought it from a big box retailer. If there were any mom & pop stores around - and there probably aren't, because you and me and everyone else fled to big box stores, and Sony probably wouldn't even give them stock of new products, to boot - they would charge you $20 more for the system.

It's a tradeoff: low price for low service. Service is getting better over time as people are figuring out the mechanics of database marketing, but it hasn't quite replaced the service that you could have gotten from the mom & pop stores. There is no big-box-store customer-service artificial intelligence that would think about these things the same way human beings would. You really shouldn't expect such an AI to exist, either, at this early point in the ascent of big box retailers - you should take your lower price and realize that there are things you're giving up to keep that extra $20 in your pocket.