Has Christmas become too competitive? From tagging Christmas trees at farms just after Halloween to lines of gamers camped out all night for the latest hardware, we add another dimension to the work-hard, play-hard lifestyle. Now we celebrate religious/commercial holidays hard. Are retailers responsible?

The manufacturers of video-game consoles and the retailers who "sell" them have apparently figured out what Santa Claus has apparently missed: scarcity breeds obeisance.

Today crowds of frustrated parents prowl the big-box stores having awakened before dawn to slurp coffee and peruse the glossy store advertisements stuffed in the morning paper. There they meet teenage clerks who shrug and say stuff like, "Yeah, we had 16 of them this morning, and they went like that." The clerks snap their fingers and wink for effect, inside their red or blue vests, nametags askew.

Other dispirited parents slink away from the store service counter after learning that there was a row of campers all night outside the door who were given "vouchers" at 8 a.m. The voucher-wielding campers grabbed all the Wiis and left feeling caveman-superior.

Vouchers?

Can I ask Santa to give my son a voucher for Christmas? Do his elves snipe Wiis and PS3s on eBay for the good kids on Santa's list?

So what is this supply-demand thing with Nintendo's Wii system at the stores in Concord? Rumors abound that Nintendo has a warehouse full of Wii machines, plenty for everyone who might want one, and that the company has some scheme in trickling them out. A variation has the retailers themselves engaged in trickle-out economics.

These notions have appeal. With articles over Thanksgiving weekend in papers around the country, including this one, they whip up public interest like meringue on a key lime pie. Then they hold forth in the flyers that the Wii is "in" but in limited quantity, presumably making the appropriate legal disclosures while also bringing shoppers into the store.

These motivated customers, upon failing to get the Wii, will almost certainly buy other things, either in desperation or simply because they're there and they see them. Perhaps it's a ploy to get folks out of the computer chair and through the electronically opened door to the store displays where games and accessories (high-profit-margin items) can be found, but no consoles.

Competitiveness is a powerfully manipulative force. It makes people do what they wouldn't otherwise do. A rational person will not sit in the cold for 13 hours outside a darkened big-box store to get a voucher to buy a toy. A rational person will not pay twice or thrice a toy's value on eBay. Since neither the stores nor the elves who made the toys reap any of the benefits of the eBay sharking, one might assume that there is some other marketing strategy behind this manufactured scarcity.

Apparently, even though the price is lower, the profit margin on the Wii system is slightly higher than on the Xbox 360 or the PS3. The increased margin is designed to make retailers more active in promoting, or pushing, the Wii. The higher-priced, lower-margin game manufacturers use a "pull" strategy by generating high consumer demand with advertising hype and scarcity. It seems that maybe both are at work in Wii-land.

In one article, Nintendo is quoted as saying it planned to ship 6 million units of the Wii console principally to North America before March 31, with 4 million of them going through a complicated delivery network suitable for organ donation to retailers before the end of this year. Nintendo conceded that demand might outpace supply. Hmm.

This push-me, pull-you retail strategy leaves the consumer stuck between teenagers in lawn chairs on frozen sidewalks on one side and shrugging teenagers in vests on the other. Maybe, or maybe it's just a result of mob behavior, of too much competitiveness for Christmas.

The solution is simple: Move on.

As one blogger noted on a forum set up by Nintendo, "if you aren't willing to sit out in 15 degree weather for 13 hours to get a Wii, you don't deserve one!"

Single page