Went to three stores after work today looking for an NES Classic and came home with nothing but a bag of clearance Halloween candy from the Target endcap, because apparently thats the only thing they're not sold out of.
If you haven't been paying attention: Nintendo put out this little box back on November 11th, sixty bucks, thirty games built in, looks like a shrunken-down version of the console I grew up with. And it has been basically impossible to buy since about November 12th. I've checked Target, Best Buy, and the Walmart out by the highway probably eight times combined over the past three weeks. Today was Friday, I got out of work around 5:30, figured I'd swing by before dinner. The Target guy didn't even let me finish the question. "NES Classic? No, we haven't had those in since launch day." He said it in that flat customer-service voice where you can tell hes answered the exact same question forty times that week.
So I did what any reasonable person does at this point, which is open eBay on my phone in the parking lot like an idiot. Going rate right now is somewhere around $150 to $180 for a unit that retails for $59.99. Some listings are pushing past $200 if the seller throws in extra controllers. Theres a guy with 4,000 feedback and a "Top Rated Seller" badge who's clearly just buying up stock with bots the second it lands and flipping it for triple. I get that its a free market or whatever, but it still annoys me in a specific way that regular scalping doesn't, maybe because the whole appeal of the thing is nostalgia for a time before everything felt like a hustle.
Nintendo hasn't said much beyond "more are coming," which is the same thing every company says when they either underestimated demand or did the math and realized artificial scarcity is basically free marketing. I lean toward the first explanation honestly. This is the same company that a few years back couldn't keep the Wii on shelves for over a year. You'd think theyd have learned something about production forecasting by 2016, but here we are.
Part of why I want one so bad, and I'll admit this is a little embarrassing, is that I want to show my nephew what I was playing at his age. Hes seven and thinks anything without a touchscreen is basically a museum piece. I tried explaining Mega Man 2 to him over Thanksgiving using words alone and it did not land. A physical box with the actual cartridge-era games on it would do more work than any explanation I could give.
Unrelated tangent, but it's been on my mind: Cyber Monday numbers came out last week and online spending broke records again, somewhere north of $3 billion in a single day just in the US. Every year I read that headline and think, huh, and then I go stand in a physical Target parking lot hunting for a discontinued-in-1995 form factor being sold new in a box. There's something a little funny about being exactly the target demographic for the "everyone shops from their couch now" story while also being the guy driving to three stores for a plastic rectangle. I dont really have a tidy point about that, it just struck me as funny standing there in the cold.
Anyway. Plan for tomorrow is to set an alarm and try calling the Best Buy right when they open, since apparently thats sometimes when new stock quietly shows up before the website even updates. A guy on a forum I frequent swears by this method. Ill report back if it works, though given my track record so far I wouldn't bet on it. If anyone reading this actually managed to snag one without paying scalper prices, genuinely curious how you pulled it off, because at this point Im starting to think the honest way just doesn't exist for this particular object in December 2016.