Hank's Take: Can't find PS5 or XBox Series X? Bucknell students have a solution

PHILADELPHIA - It’s been a couple of weeks since Black Friday, but PS5s and the Xbox Series X are still nowhere to be found on store shelves, or online.

If you still want one, it seems hopeless at this point, right? Well, maybe not.

Anyone still searching for PS5s or the Xbox Series X may have turned to prayer as a way to find the elusive and very popular products. That’s the long and the short of it, unfortunately. A person can appeal to whoever they want, but it doesn’t guarantee the game consoles can be found.

Empty shelves at Walmart and Target and a Best Buy display is simply a mock-up. The sign on the door at Game Stop in the Northeast clearly tells consumers to keep shopping.

Is online the only place worth searching? Bucknell University students have worked out a browser extension for Chrome called OctoShop that might be the salvation.

“The extension will give you links to all of the sites that carry the PS5. And, if it’s in-stock, you can literally click on the link and it’ll let you buy it. If not, you can use the tracking feature on any of the sites and track the products. Then, when it does come back into stock, you’d receive an instant notification,” explained Emma Arrighini.

Arrighini says her team of fellow students just wanted to do a good holiday deed and give stressed-out parents a fair shot of competing with resellers.

“These bots are taking up all of the inventory. And, then people are selling them on eBay or Amazon for two and three times the original retail price, which is where regular people run into issues, because they’re stuck between not buying it, or paying two or three times what they were willing to do,” Arrighini stated.

OctoShop is available on the Chrome web store. It’s free and it works all year long on most any product a person is interested in. The Bucknell students have Instagrams to walk people through the process, which Emma says is easy.

A holiday good deed to get through the holiday shopping season with a little-less stress, courtesy of Bucknell students. It beats shuffling from store to store and leaving the odds of success to blind chance.

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