In Sony’s defense, they have much less of a direct-to-customer channel than Apple does. They’re at the mercy of their retail partners (which they don’t directly control) to fix this problem.
I would have been happy to place an order and then wait a year. Instead I did the follow a guy on twitter to find out when consoles are available and then use Firefox containers to make a bunch of simultaneous orders. It worked, but I’d rather just pay some money and sit in a queue.
where the buy button should be, they instead invite you to sign up for email notifications for when it's in stock
AT&T losing their iPhone privileges would hurt them far more than Target or Walmart would from losing their PlayStation privileges.