I keep meaning to buy a Nintendo Wii.

I meant to buy one when they first came out, but I didn’t want to queue forever at some goddam electronic store just to become one of the look-at-me-I-camped-out-for-a-Wii gamesters. That was Xmas 2006. So I waited through 2007 and every time I was in a Best Buy or Fry’s, I asked if they had a Wii and they politely informed me that whenever they got an assignment, they sold out in a day.

As Xmas 2007 approached, I noticed that Time Magazine was fawning all over Apple, and gave the iPhone its coveted-product-of-the-year award. I wrote a sarcastic posting: Apple v Nintendo, iPhone v Wii: Who Wins? to call attention to  the fact that the Wii had been overlooked – despite the fact that it was, by any reasonable measure, more deserving of the award than the iPhone.

Meanwhile, Nintendo failed to anticipate demand for the Wii correctly in the 2007 holiday season, and yet again, I failed to acquire one of those elusive Wii games consoles. But hell, it looked likely that there was a recession around the corner and I could wait. Who knows, perhaps I’d pick up a second user Wii on the cheap on eBay in 2008. But the Wii kept on keeping on. By May of 2008 the Wii had overtaken Microsoft’s XBox as the highest selling games console of recent times in the US (having given the Xbox a year’s start and having left the PS3 in dust from the get go.) My occasional requests for a Wii at Best Buy were met with the usual rebuff and then, in October, the economic bomb dropped and I looked into my 401k and discovered that there were still sufficient funds there to buy a Nintendo Wii, but dammit…

The problem with the world economy can, of course, be laid at the feet of the US regulatory bodies that didn’t regulate and the negligent-and-now-bankrupt banks that bundled up junk mortgages into bonds and then sold them all over the world. The mistake that was made was they should have bundled up advanced orders for the Nintendo Wii into bonds and sold those all over the world and we’d not be in the economic mess we are now in.

Is Nintendo Incompetent?

And that brings me to the point of this posting. The simple fact is that after 2 years of incendiary growth and the sale of millions of Wii consoles, the demand for the damn Wii was still well ahead of supply. In fact, the Wii had been in chronic short supply all over the world for two years.

Responding directly to this rosy situation, and in the expectation of raising revenues beyond all growth expectations, Nintendo promised to supply 50 percent more Wiis this holiday season – and they did – right into the teeth of the recession.

So the question was:

What happens when an irresistible games console meets an immovable recession?

And the answer is, the bloody Wii sells out again ahead of all expectations, including those expectations that never anticipated the worst retail holiday season since the early years of the Black Death in the Dark Ages.

Nintendo sold over 2 million Wii consoles in the US in November, more than doubling the 981,000 it sold in November 2007 and 500,000 ahead of analyst expectations. The overall videogame industry recorded growth of 10 percent, which was probably entirely due to the Wii.

Now I’ve never worked in manufacturing, and I’m no expert on supply chain issues, but if Apple, Rim, Sony and Nokia can provide roughly the right number of units of their popular products to satisfy consumer demand, then I’m tempted to suggest that one of those companies should lend Nintendo a few of their forecasting spreadsheets to show them how it’s done. A little bit of resource planning here and a little bit of outsourcing there and I’m sure Nintendo could, if it really put its mind to it, get me a Wii console before my 401k becomes completely worthless and my funds dry up entirely.