How Would You Allocate iPhone 3G-S?

The retailing question of the year is: if you had a supply of 1 million iPhone 3G-S handsets, and you had Apple, AT&T, Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores to sell them, how many would you allocate to each chain? If’s pretty obvious that, if you were Apple, you’d deliver most of them to Apple’s retail stores in insure a “surprise and delight” experience, and then give most of the rest to AT&T. Given that there are just over 250 Apple stores, but over 2,000 AT&T stores, you can pretty easily calculate that each AT&T stores isn’t going to have more that 40-60 handsets on the first day. Best Buy may be getting a fairly large allotment, but Wal-Mart will probably be constrained severely. On the debut day of the original iPhone in 2007, I personally photographed the Fed-Ex shipment of iPhones to the Palo Alto (N. Calif.) store, and estimated it to include at least 700 handsets. That will give you an idea of what Friday’s supply might be, and also what an AT&T per-store allocation of 50 to 100 phones would represent–not much.