Not a new phenomenon.
When I was in high school I worked at an Otasco. Cabbage Patch craze took hold that Christmas. People figured out that we got deliveries on Tuesday and I'd come to work to find a mass of people crowding the door waiting for us to open every Tuesday morning.
The first Tuesday we just opened the door and let the trampling begin. Old ladies bashing each other with umbrellas and canes, grown ass men snatching Cabbage Babies out of women's hands. We'd gotten 12 of the things in but only put out six. There were probably 200 people massing at the door. They trashed the store when they all didn't get Cabbages.
The next week Wilber, the assistant manager, tried passing out business cards with a number written on the back. That didn't work because people overran his work area, took all his cards and wrote their own numbers on them. Thirty people had a 3. Brawls ensued. Some of the dolls were damaged in the scrap.
The next week we were told to use the bullhorn and announce that we had received no dolls. Wilber and the manager were running a black market out the back door. Each employee was allowed to purchase two dolls and do whatever we wanted with them. Wilber and the manager kept the others. We were getting a dozen or so a week and there were still four or five weeks until Christmas. It was nothing to get $500 for one.
Then customers started hiding in the hills behind the store watching the delivery trucks with binocs. They stormed the store one Tuesday afternoon demanding access to the dolls they'd seen being unloaded. And that got ugly.
By then I had started drinking before and after work. The store sold those gravity boot things where you strapped your feet in, released a latch and then hung upside down like a bat. I endured work just to hang upside down, smoke cigarettes and shoot the shit with the married receptionist after hours. I don't remember how the rest of Cabbage Patch season turned out. I gave my two dolls away, but I'm pretty sure Wilber and the manager ended up with about $10k each out of it.