Oh, I'd totally do a executive carpet bomb as well as stand in front of your local Toys 'R Us and protest for hours on end.

Or..I'd suck it up, refocus my energy,and go Wii hunting.

If I were you, I'd write a massive executive carpet bomb followed up by mass organized protests over this injustice!

Or maybe, I'd just suck up the disappointment and refocus my energy into finding a Wii.

I'm probably gonna go to Nintendo World Store to get a Wii while i'm in New York over the summer.

Just hit up Walmart every day around 10am. I found mine within three days of starting to look. They don't force you to buy silly bundles either.

I found mine on a random Saturday morning about three months ago. And now...it's broken and I just sent it to Nintendo yesterday to fix. Oh well. Their customer service is pretty good at least.

This might just be a minnesota and iowa thing but I've noticed that most places (best buy, walmart, gamestop) get wiis on sunday and in large quantities (10+). This doesn't happen every week but thats how I and everyone i know have gotten a wii.

I've had mine for a few months now. I walked into our local Walmart asked the kid in electronics if they had any in stock. He was reluctant to go back to the stock room to get one but there was a supervisor along side him who told him that since they had one, and I asked he had to go get it.

I got mine the first day they were released at a Target. Barely any people in line, and it took ten minutes.

The Best Buy down the road had hundreds of people lined up in the parking lot.

Suckers!

Had mine for a few months now. Wondering if I made a mistake being that the 3rd party games, online content and comunity seems so anemic!

C'mon Nintendo, where the hell is my WiiWare?

Is he trying to pick it up or have it delivered? Sometimes a site lists in stock because local stores have them for pickup.

boo

"unexpected delay"? hilarious. what planet is ToysRus on?

Got my wii really easily - just look in the papers tomorrow morning at all the ads - if a store has a pic, that means they should have it in stock. I got mine at Circuit City - just had to show up an hour before opening to get a voucher - then came back later. There were just a few people there, and they had extra wiis.

Good luck

Boo hiss, indeed.

Here's my Toys 'R' Us/Wii story:

Last Thursday, I saw an ad in the paper for Wiis - and JUST the Wiis (at $249.99) at Toys 'R' Us. I called, they said the had some in stock. Cool! I was gonna get one!

I get to the store, ask for one. They bring it out and then...

"We're only selling these as a bundle. For $289.99 you get the Wii, an extra Wiimote and a 2-year warranty."

I was stunned. I've been looking for Wiis since they came out and every store around here has been out.

Then I got mad. I went to customer service and, politely as I could (fuming though I was), explained to the customer service person that I wanted a Wii at the advertised price (there was no mention of "bundling" in the ad).

She made sure that I'd been told about the bundle ("You sure you don't want the bundle? It's a good deal.") and then relented and told the associate to let me have the Wii sans bundle.

Me happy. I thanked them both and took my Wii home.

Love it :)

Still, when I think about what happened, I get pissed.

I used [wiitracker.com] to locate one online. True, I had to buy a bundle, but it was games - Zelda, Super Mario Galaxy, Rabbids - and accessories - rechargable batteries and charging dock, extra remote and nunchuk and upgraded grips - that I would have bought anyway. And it only took a few days to find it, then about a week to have it delivered. The shipping was only $9.99 for ground. Seeing as how I didn't have to time to skulk around in Best Buy parking lots at 2 a.m., that was a pretty good deal.

The Wiis are out there; you just have to hunt them down. It's actually kind of fun. And we love the Wii!

I have purchased 6 Wii's over the last year (I'm not an eBayer, alot of my friends wanted them, and I keep finding them) go early to Target on Saturday mornings.

A Toys r Us problem is no surprise. That is one of the worst places on Earth to even be near at Christmas time. I'll stick to online at other retailers.

I've wanted to get the wii for some time, but I'm really starting to think the waiit is getting stupid and manipulative. I mean, at some point, fix your stupid supply chain already... Pretty much getting to the point where I'm done wanting one. But for the average, everyday consumer (which is exactly the one Nintendo was targeting) this is getting stupiid.

@lightaugust: Nothing wrong with the supply chain. Nintendo has ample demand and is running at capacity. I wouldn't change a thing.

Call the local game stores. Ask when they get their Wii shipments. (For my area, it was Tuesdays @ Noon for GameStop) Called at noon the following Tuesday, was told they got 3, drove down, picked one up.

TrU is so going the way of LnL and others.

Almost every store in the toys r us chain has Wii in stock at this very moment, they've had them since last Sunday (quote"their biggest shipment ever") call them up, take a drive, save on shipping, and get Mario Kart. not only do you get 50% off another game when you buy mario kart (ends today) it's freakin' awesome!

When I bought my Wii at Target last week, the guy at the checkout let me know that Target (at least his store) gets between 10-15 Wiis throughout the week, but the store is under some sort of obligation to hold them in storage until Sunday morning.

He said, in general, any Sunday you can arrive within the first hour of opening and pick up an unbundled Wii with little effort.

Mike626
[injoke.org]

I really don't understand how these things can still be in short supply. It's been out for almost two years now. I can understand the first month or two maybe, BUT TWO YEARS?

@weave: "BUT TWO YEARS?"

I've heard, but cannot confirm, that Nintendo isn't in a big hurry to supply the US market because of the weak dollar.

Toys R Us website now lists them as "Temporarily Not Available Online"

I would file a complaint with your state attorney general. This is, at best, false advertising, if not wire fraud.

@metrophage: Isn't $289.99 for a Wii AND an extra Wiimote actually a decent deal? Sounds like you'd have been getting the 2-year warranty for free..

Not that that excuses forcing people to buy bundle.. Just sounds like a decent buy considering they're not forcing you to buy Petz 2: Gerbilz or whatever..

I gave up on the Wii about 6 months ago. Nintendo had more than enough time to spike the supply, but it seems they like people's stories of how lucky they were to find one. I hope no other console decides to use this strategy in the future.

@postnocomments: Ditto. I'd rather purchase a Nintendo product than a Microsoft or Sony product any day, however; my opinion is probably biased because I'm an Apple fanboy. :)

@postnocomments: That's too bad...

But when you have a product that is selling like mad and has already caught up to a competitors product that came out well over a year before yours did, you'd be hard pressed to come up witht he supply.

That and the fact that the US dollar is very weak right now and they are supplying these consoles to an ENTIRE PLANET...

But no, your problems at not finding one and giving up are totally justified. In fact, Nintendo should realize they are losing a customer and personally send you one.

Just from the last couple of days, it looks like the Wii supply problems are turning around; on the 30th, the unbundled $249.99 systems came in stock (briefly) at three retailers online, and Costco had it too, if you were willing to buy the $349.99 bundle (not a bad bundle in my opinion).

But then again, I've thought that same exact thing at more than a few points in the last two years, so take it for what it's worth...

@iEddie: That's odd then since Apple wouldn't be where it is today without a: MS Windows buyers buying up the iPod once iTunes went to Windows and b: without AAC...which was, in part, developed by SONY.

What the hell has Nin ever done for Apple?

@SuperJdynamite: Sorry, a great theory, but it doesn't fly. Nintendo competes with Sony and eventually both have to convert their profits into yen, and neither should want to give up market share to the other one (or to Microsoft) over a temporary blip in currency markets.

I think this is more about price. Already the PS3 (admittedly overpriced to begin with, but probably for good reason) has come down in price since it's launch. Nintendo, I think, wants to hold off on discounting the Wii (which is already way below the PS3 price point) as long as possible, and if that means playing games with supply to keep demand frothy, that's what they'll do.

It's simple supply / demand price elasticity at work.

that sucks. i just got back from the k-mart down the road - they have at least a dozen in stock.

@humphrmi: I should point out that Michael Pachter at Wedbush Morgan is the origin of the weak dollar theory, and it's not as easily dismissed as you may think. The Wii is not as direct a competitor to the PS3 or Xbox 360 as the latter two are to each other because there's so little overlap in the kinds of games that they offer. I mean, I've never heard of a retirement home playing a PS3.

Plus, the theory is that the extra consoles go to increasing the Wii's market share in Europe. That would handily explain why Europe is getting Mario Kart and Wii Fit before the States, and it's darn near unprecedented for them to get games before us.

I also used an RSS feed to find one for a 'relative' about a month ago.
[www.xpbargains.com]

It happened to be from Toys R Us and I received my bundle with 5 games the next week.

This backorder is probably due to Toys R Us probably does not actually have any of the Wiis in their warehouse but are probably utilizing a third party supplier's warehouse.

And $289.99 for a system with an extra Wiimote is a great deal that you should have help your temper on and gone ahead and bought.

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: I follow Pachter fairly regularly, and I can't see anywhere that's he's proposed that the weak dollar is why Nintendo is throttling sales. I'm happy to stand corrected, but I just don't find that position in any of his analysis.

@humphrmi: It's here:
[www.dallasnews.com]

@humphrmi: I don't know if my last attempt went through, so here is the link again:

[www.dallasnews.com]

Cancel your order. Toys R Us are being irresponsible, but not necessarily deceptive. Discover the magic of craigslist.org

@A.W.E.S.O.M.-O: Thanks for the reference. I still am not convinced he's not underestimating the impact of Sony on this. You can throttle sales of lower profit units, but you do that in the U.S. market at your peril. Even in this economy, market share is still important.

Still he points out that European demand is expected to taper, and then supplies in the US will pick up.

Their website is grossly inaccurate about stock and other material. For example, I ordered a game from there. the game was already released, but their website had an inaccurate date listed for it. So instead it lists the item as a pre-order instead. When you contact them by phone, there is nothing that they can even do to push along the shipping on it. In the end, I ended up canceling and ordering it elsewhere.

Their online store is also a separate entity from their retail stores. So do not expect any help there either.

I ordered my Wii on May 1st and I didn't get a cancellation e-mail. Maybe you just got unlucky?

I don't understand the huge fascination with Wiis. I've played my uncle's Wii and virtually all the games for it except 2 or 3 are terrible. The controller is a dumb gimmick that you couldn't play a real game on. The graphics on all the games are PS2 level.

I was reading the other day that the great majority of Wii owners never even buy another game outside of the Wii Sports game.

Such a terrible fad exacerbated by the limited release of the consoles themselves.

I'm sorry you guys are having a hard time finding one, they're easy to get in my town.

+1 for going to Nintendo World for a Wii.

My wife wanted a Wii for her birthday, so I just sucked it up, got up an hour earlier than I normally do for work, caught an earlier train, got to the line at Nintendo World at 7:30. I was 25th in line. The store opens at 9:00, and I was on my way out the door, with a Wii, a copy of Wii Play (which includes an extra Wiimote), and a spare Nunchuk at 9:15. Less than 2 hours, and boom, done. They've got Wiis every single day there. That was back in February.

Yeah, it's in NY, but that's not a problem for me, living in NJ, with my office at 1 Penn Plaza.

@xthexlanternx: Wow, you've played every single game on the Wii? You must have a lot of time on your hands!

I've bought 5 games so far for the Wii and I like them all. I'm planning on buying Zelda too once I finish Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. I'll admit that there's some terrible ones, but every console will have a few black sheep.

And in case you haven't noticed, graphics don't make a game great (Crysis, for instance); Without good gameplay or a good story if applicable, all you have is a well drawn turd. Hell, Earthbound is on the SNES and is still raved about, and people are chomping on the bit after seeing a hint it might be on the Wii Virtual Console. Same thing with Chrono Trigger, even after all these years.

Eye candy is pretty much forgotten after you realize the game blows goats.

No problems with the Wii in my local area in the UK. Not only is my local game store keeping stock in, they've got one or two pre-owned sitting and not going anywhere. To quote the owner 'the bubble is bursting'. Let's hope the US learns not to buy into hype soon too.

@SaveMeJeebus: Losing customers when your competition will supply them doesn't seem like a wise idea to me, especially on something that will give you income in the future due to purchase of accessories and software.

Once those customers are locked into someone else's system you've lost them for a long time, maybe for good if the competition makes their next system backward compatible with the one they bought instead of yours.

Plus, "can't seem to fix its problems" doesn't seem like a good thing to have said about your company.

Now, I'm no economist but I can't be the only one reasoning along those lines.

Two weeks ago I checked the toys r us site and it said Wiis were in stock...but I didn't buy. Then last week I saw it on techbargains.com and didn't buy...and now I check consumerist and see this. I knew it was too good to be true.

I got one for my mom for Christmas, because she really liked the bowling game when she got to play a Wii at a friend's house at a Thanksgiving party. I'm not sure if she plays with it anymore. I considered maybe "borrowing" it from her, but there is just not a game out for the Wii now or coming out that I care to play. (I'm not a fan of any of the Nintendo character franchise series -- i.e. Zelda, Smash Bros., Mario.)

I'm not interested in gaming much these days. But I have to admit that GTA IV might entice me to buy either a PS3 or Xbox 360 just to play it.