Wow! (wish I'd known about that - would have made me at least THINK about going!)
I hope they had some sort of new system in place for handling customers, because anytime I've been to Dick's, more than one gun sale going on will practically shut down their gun counter for a while. With hundreds of people there, if even 15 of them were buying guns at the same time, I'd say it literally took them all night. If things were that busy elsewhere, the NICs center was probably giving 'callbacks' to everyone anyway, due to the volume(a few big gun shows will slow them to a crawl). Most likely all of those folks at Dick's picked up their gun purchases the next day(or two).
You are right. It took them most of the night to handle all of the customers. And TICS (the Tennessee system) wasn’t even open so you had to fill out the form, pay, and then pickup the gun the next day. But the savings were decent. :)