After facing backlash over its customer service practices last month, some additional changes may be afoot over at Newegg. The retailer has seemingly put its Newegg Shuffle drawing system in timeout. The once-frequent shopping event hasn't happened since February 22.
According to Newegg, the Shuffle "[offers] our customers a fairer way to purchase products in short supply and mitigate behaviors that would give anyone an unfair advantage." While you'll find various items in the Newegg Shuffle, the hottest devices that appear include the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series, AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
Interestingly, Newegg hasn't held a Shuffle since February 22, which is somewhat curious timing. That date is just one week after Newegg's lingering customer service issues were unearthed, after which the company updated its hassle-free return policy to cover all open-box product categories sold by the company.
While it may be a stretch to directly link the two incidents together, it's worth noting that the Shuffle program hasn't been without criticism. While Newegg bills it as a more democratic way of getting hot-selling items into customers' hands, many customers and commenters have lamented the fact that the Shuffle is often filled with unappetizing bundle offers (adding in superfluous things like monitors, motherboards or SSDs).
And even if you look at the most recent Shuffle from February 22, the prices attached to the promoted GeForce RTX 30 Series cards were well above MSRP. For example, we don't know how many people would be ecstatic about winning the "privilege" of purchasing an Asus TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 Ti for nearly $2,000. And according to our reporting from April 2021, customers' odds of winning an individual shuffle are just 0.01 percent. Given the steady erosion of GPU prices in general, it has often cheaper to purchase a new graphics card from eBay than through the Newegg Shuffle.
Perhaps the Newegg Shuffle is on hiatus due to increased scrutiny placed on the company, but it's also possible that increased supply and cooling demand from crypto miners has made the scheme less successful for the company. Of course, a bit of both is possible as well.
We reached out to Newegg for comment and were told that the Shuffle will return at some point. All we can say is that we wouldn't be sad to see it disappear forever. Unless the Shuffle becomes a lottery where you only need to buy the product you want, at reasonable prices, it will always feel like a tool to push unwanted products on enthusiasts who just want a graphics card upgrade.
Then again, at least Newegg isn't putting its graphics cards behind a scalper-friendly $200 paywall like Best Buy. Hopefully, the prices for graphics cards will continue to fall and all these consumer-unfriendly practices will soon be a thing of the past. We wouldn't bet our RTX 3080 on it, but better days ahead for hardware enthusiasts at least seem like a possibility now.
