If you consider it from their point of the view, the most profitable thing possible would be to sell all 8,000 to one Customer. I admit I was a bit surprised to see it set that high but with 8,000 tins, I would have been surprised to see it set at 5 for example. That would be 1,600 packages they'd have to ship out in a couple of days. Given they pre announced when it would be available, if someone didn't get some, they have nobody but themselves to blame.
Mostly in setting the limits we're trying to balance getting it to as many people as want it against inconveniencing people unnecessarily. At a limit of 25, moving it down a bit doesn't really make that much difference: very few people are buying that much (so, say, moving the limit from 25 to 20 would have only freed up about 100 tins). The limit just exists to keep people from buying truly huge chunks, which would screw up availability for others.
Different per order limits serve very different purposes, both in obvious ways--capping out big orders--and in non-obvious ways based on how the order counts are distributed. So, for example, on Penzance at limit 1 or 2, that is lower than what the average person would buy given no restrictions, but a limit of anything over about 8 is well above median and mean count per order. In the first case, it changes almost all behavior. In the second, it just serves to eliminate statistical outliers which can nonetheless affect things because they can be so big.
Just for fun on CRF yesterday:
Mean CRF tins/customer: 5.32
Median CRF tins/customer: 3
Mode CRF tins/customer: 2
(Other popular quantities (50+ orders per), in descending order of frequency: 1,3,10,4)
And for anyone actually trying to work the math backwards, Smokingpipes had a big chunk, but that 8,000 number for the run was global. 6,000 for the US market; 2,000 for other markets. Smokingpipes was just a part of that 6,000 (so, no, we didn't have 1,500 orders with CRF yesterday at Smokingpipes).
Oh, and for the record, everything received before about 4:30pm yesterday shipped same day...it was a busy day in the warehouse, but we knew in advance that it would be, so it wasn't hard to organize and schedule around it.
Sykes