So it's officially December now, which means I have officially failed at the one shopping mission I set for myself this year: getting my hands on an NES Classic Edition for something close to its actual $59.99 price tag.
I want to be clear that I didn't even want it that bad at first. It seemed like a cute little box, thirty games baked in, HDMI out, done. Then Nintendo shipped it on November 11th, every single unit evaporated within hours, and now it's become a whole thing. Cyber Monday came and went this week (Adobe's numbers put it at something like $3.45 billion in online sales, a record, apparently everyone bought everything except this one specific $60 plastic box), and I still don't have one.
I checked three Best Buys and a Target on Black Friday morning. Not "checked the website" - physically drove to three Best Buys, because a guy at the first one told me the second one "might still have a pallet in the back," which is the retail equivalent of a ghost story. Nothing. The Target employee just laughed at me, not unkindly, more like the laugh you give someone who asks if the ice cream truck is still coming after wintertime.
So then, like every other sucker in America this month, I ended up on eBay at 11pm doing the thing where you refresh a search and watch the "Buy It Now" prices creep up in real time. Units that Nintendo sells for sixty bucks were going for $180, $220, one listing I saw hit $275 with "still sealed, ships same day" like that's a selling point and not just a description of theft via markup. I did not buy one. I want to be very clear about this because past-me would be extremely disappointed in present-me if I'd caved and paid scalper prices for a machine that emulates a console I already owned as a kid.
Heres the part that actually annoys me, more than the scalping itself (scalping is old as dirt, nothing new there): Nintendo had to know this would happen. Theyve done this exact dance before, with the Wii, with amiibo figures, and they keep manufacturing like they're allergic to their own popularity. Somewhere theres a supply chain meeting where someone said "lets be conservative on the first run" and I would like to shake that person's hand and then also yell at them a little.
In the meantime I've fallen into a genuinely weird corner of the internet: NES Classic restock-tracking Twitter accounts. There are bots now that scrape retailer inventory APIs and tweet the second something shows stock, and people (myself very much included, dont judge me) have these accounts on notification, phone buzzing at 2am because a Kmart in Ohio briefly had six units listed. Its a strange little ecosystem that basically didnt exist a few years ago and now it's how you buy a Nintendo product in 2016, apparently. Half me finds it kind of impressive as a piece of scrappy engineering. The other half thinks its insane that we've built infrastructure around the specific problem of "company underestimated demand for nostalgia box."
Unrelated tangent, but this same week Amazon's been running their re:Invent conference out in Vegas, cranking out a pile of new AWS services (they announced a bunch of machine-learning-flavored stuff, image recognition APIs, that sort of thing), and I kept thinking about the contrast. One company spending the week showing off infrastructure that can scale to basically infinite demand on command, and another company that cant seem to keep a $60 gray box on shelves for longer than a coffee break. Different problems obviously, and Im not pretending theyre the same kind of hard, but it's a funny juxtaposition to have in your feed at the same time.
Anyway. Ive decided Im holding out until January at the earliest, on principle, unless my brother-in-law's "guy at a warehouse" comes through, which I am not counting on given that this is the same guy who once promised me Beats headphones at cost and delivered nothing but a lot of texting. If any of you actually managed to snag one at retail price this weekend I genuinely want to hear how, because at this point Im half convinced the only real way in is knowing somebody who works overnight stock at an actual store.
Until then, the original console is still hooked up in the closet, dusty cartridges and all. Turns out that one still works fine.