Jeez.
I'm not one of em.

Gees...that's damn insane.

Game over.

Amazon wins.

This hurts my brain

@john B
Dont blame the messenger son.

Wow...

I'd like to know the total number of Wiis they actually sold in that average 17 per second figure. For all we know it could be equivalent to one second per week. I like the Wii pretty well now that there are some decent games out for it (for a year it collected some serious dust) but what is up with these shortages? I read where Nintendo said they wouldn't contract out production like Microsoft did, but that was like 6 months ago and the shortage issue still hasn't been resolved. I haven't seen an actual Wii on a store shelf since I got mine on launch night. Seems Nintendo is shooting themselves in the foot to me. If they do make money on every system sold, it seems like they'd do more to get them into the hands of people who want them, even if the casual gamers never buy another single game.

I go to Best Buy, on average, once a week. And I’ve never seen a Wii just sitting there, waiting to be bought. It’s amazing to me that, over a year after the damn thing launched, people still have to go through the rigamarole of calling around to stores, or getting rain checks from GameStop, or waiting in line before a store opens up, etc. I’m not calling shenanigans on Nintendo’s shortage — I believe them when they say that they’re putting them out as fast as they can — but I am calling shenanigans on their production process. Seriously, Ninty...get your shit together.

Wait a minute, those are Harry Potter boxes in the photo. Shenanigans!

If they had remained in stock for the entire year, and sold them at a rate of 17 units per second for 365 days.

That would have a been a total of 536,467,742 Units.

More realistically...The wii probably sold for around 1-2 Days, which would fall in the mark between 1,468,800 - 2,937,600 units. It may have been in stock for a full 72 hours, which is possible but doubtful. That would have been pushing 1/2 of nintendo's units sold.

God, I'm such a fucking nerd.

@tehArtist
I was thinking the same thing, but Nintendo's units sold is nearing 20 million worldwide lifetime, and I'm assuming that the majority of them were in 2007. So for their number to push 1/2 of Nintendo's units sold, they could conceivably have had Wiis on sale for up to 6.8 days.
But this is purely hypothetical, and it's probably much less.

I wonder how many people must have been constantly checking Amazon's stock in order for the systems to be so instantaneously devoured...

The first time I did the calculations, I thought they must have screwed up "per second" with "per minute", until I read the article again and understood their tricks.

Also, you may be a nerd, but you say that sentence as if nerds aren't awesome. Be proud!