No End to Wii Shortage in Sight

Mar. 20 10:13 AM by Alicia Ashby

Anecdote time! A good friend of mine manages a local GameStop. It's such a great store that when I read complaints how shitty GameStop is online, I'm usually confused for a minute before I remember all the crappy ones I visited in other areas.

In the few weeks before Brawl shipped, he mentioned to me that he was seeing the signs of Wii scalping pick back up, this time with the usual suspects making big runs on controllers along with systems. Obviously they were gearing up for a round of Brawl-specific scalping. There will probably be repeats for Mario Kart Wii and Wii Fit, too.

Don't expect Wii scalping to stop anytime soon. The mothership reports that GameStop expects the Wii to continue through September of this year. Any shortage lasting that long is almost guaranteed to run through the 2008 holiday season, too.

GameStop COO Dan DeMatteo confirmed, saying that with the Wii, the company anticipated the console's supply "won't meet demand for the next 2 quarters," at the very least. The estimate would put the duration of the Wii shortage at almost the two-year mark since its launch in November 2006.

Comments

Wonderful! I so wanted to field more calls about Wii systems for the next forseeable year!

And yeah, Gamestops are vastly different. At our store, we're total game nerds and nice guys, constantly bending over backwards to help out our customers, and have an overall ball doing it. At the same time, I've often seen other stores containing workers that have lost their smile for their employment positions long ago.

Then the Internet comes into play.

 

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