Gamer Gets RTX 3080 A Year Later, After Sending Retailer Literal Cake

If you wanted an example of just how bad the consumer chip shortages have been worldwide, this tale of an unrealised RTX 3080 should be exhibit A.

There’s plenty of stories of people who waited months for their next-gen hardware. The wait for graphics cards got so bad that Australians built an entire community spreadsheet, complete with visualised data to help everyone evaluate who was buying from where, who had their orders cancelled, and what the most popular cards were.

But some folks have had to wait a lot longer than a few months. Take this story, as shared by Polish bakery E-Torty on their Facebook page and reported by Techspot. The affected gamer, annoyed that they’d waited an entire year for their original order of a Gigabyte RTX 3080, asked the bakery if they could make a special anniversary cake.

“Customer ordered the #RTX graphics card exactly one year before and waited 365 days for delivery that extended due to shortage of stock products,” a translation of the Facebook post reads.

The anniversary cake? A traditional cheesecake with tons of white frosting, detailing the bloke’s order number and a photo of the RTX 3080:

Perhaps correctly, the affected customer figured that the cake might serve as a nice reminder of their unfulfilled order. Gracefully, they were right: the happy customer sent then back a photo with the RTX 3080 GPU in hand only three days later.

You have to admire the ingenuity, but also the good amount of luck that the user ended up getting an RTX 3080 at the end of it. Australian consumer laws protect customers from having to wait literally 365 days to get things that they paid for, but that’s not necessarily the case everywhere.

Take Poland, for instance, where Videocardz reported the editor of a local site ordered an RTX 3070 GPU back in November 2020. The card was never delivered, and the local retailer actually reached out to offer an RTX 3060 model instead, arguing it had “exactly the same performance as its predecessor” and that “it is not our fault that the originally ordered model was insufficiently manufactured”.

It doesn’t, of course. It’s just that RTX 3060s are now selling for the price of a RTX 3070 courtesy of the global shortage. Maybe the editor should have tried sending the retailer a cake instead? E-torty is happy to deliver.