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Retail Chain Scalping Wiis?

Dec. 22 4:52 PM by Lynxara

This is an interesting story that's been evolving quite a bit over the past few days. It began when Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog broke the news that Midwestern games and music chain Slackers was reportedly scalping every Wii Nintendo sent to the store for retail sale via e-bay. Note that the three Wiis up for sale in Slackers' e-bay store at the time the story was posted have since been yanked.

Gizmodo has reported that Slackers initially scalped Wiis online for the higher price of $499.99, but lowered it when some units went unsold. Gizmodo also reports that doing this at all breaks the store's terms of sale with Nintendo, which would allow the manufacturer to deny Slackers any future Wii shipments.

More behind the cut.

Later, former Slackers employees wrote Opposable Thumbs to explain the policies the store used to move all of their Wiis online. Essentially, employees were asked to tell customers that stores had no Wiis in stock when it in fact did, and was simply trickling them out in small groups online. One former employee suggests that roughly 20 Wiis have been sold on e-bay this way.

The story gets interesting when Slackers president Kurt Jellinek sent an open letter to the game community alleging that much of the Opposable Thumbs reporting was wrong. He claims no more than five Wiis were moved through e-bay and many of them for charity. He admits that Wiis weren't being sold to customers who walked into stores, but that this was only because units were being spoken for by employees as they arrived (by itself kind of problematic, don't you think?). He claims varyingly that Slackers has never made money off of Wii sales, and that they made only $75 per system on e-bay Wii sales. He cites a lot of other Slackers work with local charity, and generally tries to make everyone who called them bad names feel like a jerk.

So if Jellinek's post is entirely true, then where were Opposable Thumbs' sources coming from? One side or another in this situation has to be lying, and I'm sort of inclined to think it's Jellinek (otherwise, why yank the Wiis?). And even if he's not, it's still a violation of his terms of sale with Nintendo to move anything online. Sure, dipping in to that Wii flipping money probably sounds tempting, but it's only ethically allowable for non-retail third-parties to dispose of Wiis en masse this way.

If Jellinek did decide to have his store scalp Wiis, another Opposable Thumbs post covering the way distributors screw over small retail chains probably explains why. Especially when it's suspected that most Wii buyers are just flipping systems at the chain's cost, then it probably gets tempting to start selling them at mark-up yourself. Doing it via a bundle is a practice Nintendo isn't happy with, but is at least not in violation of any particular agreement.

Of course, Jellinek could be the victim of simple ignorance and some malicious lying being done by former employees with axes to grind. If so, that's also an interesting story, since Opposable Thumbs has cited its sources on the story as "numerous". Here's hoping some more facts emerge over the holidays.

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