If you aren't in the market for a Nintendo Wii this holiday season, be thankful. If you are in the market for one, I feel your pain.

Somehow, in this information age, it is still possible to want a commercial product but not be able to buy one. If you go into a local store to ask for one, the clerk will look at you as if you just asked to buy the current model of the space shuttle.

I thought, "that's OK, I'll just turn to my friend the web." Surely you can pick one up on Nintendo's site or Amazon or somewhere. It's not like the internet can be sold out of something, right?

Wrong. Unless you're willing to pay a couple hundred dollars extra, the Internet is sold out of the Wii. Sigh.

I'm not sure if this shortage is intentional by Nintendo to create extra buzz or a miscalculation of production capacity, but it's remarkable to me that so many people (I know half a dozen) want a product but have to go to some extreme extra effort to buy one. That's just, well, un-American.

UPDATE: Thanks to my mother-in-law, I have a Wii! She was shopping at Circuit City on Sunday and asked the sales clerk if they, by chance, had any left. They did, and my mother-in-law jumped on one, so I was able to achieve my goal of getting a Wii without standing in line for hours on a dark, early morning.