A lot of sites are reporting that the following retailers have units that they aren't releasing until Sunday. According to GoNintendo, Best Buy is stockpiling Wiis to be sold on December 17th, with at least 40 units in each store. I've heard similar rumblings about Gamestop/EB getting similar memos (but not as many units).
The BestBuy memo goes so far as to outline their reasons for doing so:
- This is the last competitve weekend for holiday shopping, which encourages a large amount of traffic to our retail stores once customers realize the system is available.
- Customers shopping for other products will have the ability and be encouraged to purchase the gaming console.
- The system is more readily available than other competing gaming systems.
I'm not so sure about points 2 and 3 -- my guess is that by the time BestBuy opens, all the Wiis will have been accounted for by those standing around, and that unless they're holding a massive supply of Wiis for Sunday -- much, much more than 40, the Wiis will be gone within the first hour. Now they could stagger out their supply throughout the day ("Attention BestBuy customers, we've just found 10 Wiis in the back, form a line for them NOW!"), but I don't see why they would want to do something like that, given the potential for scary bad publicity.
Leave a comment