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I have been planning on getting my good lady a Nintendo DS for some time, and unfortunately, due to one thing and another, this has been the earliest I've been able to get one. However, a quick trip down the high street resulted in me being told that the only things more in demand than the Nintendo DS are the Wii and Cameron Diaz flavoured lollipops.
Fair enough, I figure that I'll just have to get it online - sure, I'll have to pay a little p&p, but I might be able to get me a decent deal to make up for it.

Nope, everywhere is sold out. Play.com haven't got any at all, amazon only has traders (or Christmas Mercenaries, which is the absolute politest term I can possibly use for them) selling the DS on for £160+ ($320) just for the basic DS with no games.
Sensing a pattern here, but wishing to be thorough, I checked ebay. It was even worse - a basic DS is going for about £170 once p&p has been factored in. Out of sheer morbid curiosity I checked the prices of the Wii, and my jaw almost unhinged itself. There were auctions well into the £300 area, and more than just a couple.

I'm not sure who I hold the most responsible for this - Nintendo, whose poor forward planning is costing them tens (hundreds?) of thousands of pounds a week, the absolute scum-sucking lowlife who stockpile things they don't need with the intention of selling them on to hard-working folk who have promised their kids christmas presents for prices in excess of two or three times their retail price, or the idiots who, no matter what the Christmas Mercenaries charge, are still stupid enough to hand over the money for it, and hence drive prices up even further.

I eventually managed to pick up a brand new import DS lite for £108, which was a little more than I ideally wanted to pay, but only £8 over the RRP, so I can't really complain too much when you compare it to the market.

*steps off soapbox*

And you want to know what the real b*tch of the situation is, a few days after Xmas, most the stores will magically come up with a whole new stock of them.  Stores do that so people can go blow their Xmas money, thus screwing the general public in the month of December.

I used to be an inserter at a local newspaper plant.
One of the things that used to bug the hell out of me, was that I'd always get those ads for doorbuster sales a few days, or even weeks in advance. There'd always be just one thing in those ads that I'd been hunting high & low for, at a price I could actually afford.

Trouble was, being the newspaper, we always had to work weekends, holidays, inclement weather, Gojira attacks, etc.

Nowadays, I'm on a fixed income, & I'm just not a morning person.

I remember back in the 90's when the Nintendo 64 came out I saw two women get into a full fledged cat fight as Sears had literally the last one in town that particular Christmas.

I was in there paying my (at the time) mammoth credit bill payment in the electronics department and I guess that they had called and hit the road at exactly the same time from the same distance away getting there at exactly the same point. They actually jumped in front of me when it happened.

They started yelling obscenities at each other and then one of the women slapped the other really hard and the next thing I knew the other lady had reached out and ripped off the other lady's multistrand pearl necklace sending pearls flying all over the place.

I mean, they were literally beating and scratching the living hell out of each other. Blood was flying! Someone called the cops and security and I think that they were both arrested.

I also saw 3 women get into a brawl at a Toys 'R Us back when that stupid Tickle Me Elmo came out.  That fight was was even worse than the other one I just mentioned.

I completely understand people getting upset when there's something that they really want to get someone but there's  a short supply which is what Nintendo seems to do every single freaking year to deliberately drive up demand.   

Last year when the Wii came out, I tried to get one but couldn't.
Funny thing about the Wii...
To this day, not only have I not played one, I've never even seen one in person.

You'd think that Nintendo would want every household in America to have a Wii but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Oh well, I'm more than satisfied with my Xbox 360.   :smile:

Send me $320 and I'll send you one of our DS's. They were selling them here at Game Crazy for $129 with the new Zelda.