Solar Eclipse Queues - the view from inside

Over 600 People, One very long Queue, and a Lot of Ice Pops: Our Solar Eclipse Day

After we sold out of our own stock of Solar Eclipse Glasses we cooked up a plan with Astronomy Ireland to host a fundraiser here in designist, to try and get as many pairs into as many hands as we could, so folks could enjoy the eclipse safely.  Somehow, that snowballed into us having a queue of 600 people outside the store waiting very patiently in the hot sun for glasses. 

We supplied customers with 2400 pairs on their behalf, and were covered by every kind of media imaginable - from RTE to the Irish Times, The Sun, Breaking News, FM104, The Irish Independent, The Mirror, Alternative Dublin, Joe.ie and the Journal and even made it onto the BBC and the Washington Post. 

We really weren’t expecting the queue or anything like it. When we arrived into the shop at 8.30 there were already a few people milling about but by 10am when we were supposed to open there were already 300 people queuing outside. While we'd hoped to let people know on Instagram given the size of the queue already we were pretty sure we'd sell out before most people made it in, and were quite concerned about shutting down the street entirely.

Despite a wee hold up with the courier that delayed us getting started till 10.30 we were sold out by 2.30. Our staff worked amazingly well as a team, and I’m really proud of them. We had loads of compliements saying it was really well managed but mostly that was due to the folks queuing, they were amazing. Folks were absolutely having the craic while they were waiting and the sense of camaraderie among them was really palpable. There were people sharing ice pops, comparing notes on the best places to view the eclipse and making what it seemed like lifelong friends. It was wonderfully life affirming to be part of such a shared experience, that definitley seemed to carry on to the eclipse itself, we've heard loads of stories of folks sharing glasses. I could probably wax lyrical on the phenomenon of social queues for hours but that’s one better explored over pints.

The queues weren’t unique to us either - there were folks queuing in Cork outside the Blackrock Observatory, all over England, France, Spain, Canada, the USA, basically anywhere you could see the eclipse.

As it turns out we were one of only a handful of places in Dublin selling Solar eclipse glasses ahead of the eclipse on 12th of August. Back in 1999, for the last major eclipse there were solar eclipse glasses everywhere. They were giving them away free with magazines, every supermarket had them, Romania even printed a commemorative two thousand Lei bank note with a solar eclipse viewer built into it. Cereal boxes came with instructions for making pinhole viewers and there was no talk of using colanders anywhere. 

Like many of our customers, we’ve been trying to figure out why there was such a shortage of glasses this time around? Of course there are a multitude of factors but for my two cents, I reckon it’s the shift from physical to digital media. Without the printed cereal boxes we wouldn’t have known how to make pinhole viewer - the likes of Tomorrow's World might have covered it on TV but unless you recorded the episode there was no playback. In 1999 there were approx 60 million magazines sold in Ireland, by some estimates in 2026 there will be less than a quarter of that many sold, and with all the advertising money being directed to google and instagram the idea of a free giveaway would get you laughed out of the editorial meeting.

The other curious thing was the types of businesses that had glasses in stock. While the Greenwich Observatory in London reportedly sold 15000 pairs and blackrock observatory in Cork gave away 6500 pairs, the queues were often outside of newsagents, printing places, toy shops and cafes rather than the places you would expect to be selling them such as opticians and camera shops. This suggests they were mostly bought in by astronomy enthusiasts, the like of whom you might find in Astronomy Ireland: A fabulous organisation dedicated to educating and informing people about the field of astronomy. 

They’ve been going since 1990, which is some mean feat as they are entirely volunteer led. They are the most popular astronomy association (relative to population size) in the world, and run regular lectures, events, like their upcoming star-b-q, and publish their own magazine as a way of sharing their passion & knowledge with the world. They don’t receive any government funding, so they are a cause we were very happy to support. It seems very fitting that a shortage caused by a lack of coverage of astronomy would benefit the folks in Ireland most likely to solve it. 

In 1999 there were hundreds of sales reps out on the road making suggestions to buyers about products they might like to stock, but with current super fast social media fuelled trend cycle even an event that’s been foretold for hundreds of years can get easily overlooked.