I wanted a Wii game console for my daughter. I wanted one for Christmas ’07, but none could be found easily. So I waited. In April 2008, I started checking again, and I STILL couldn’t get one. Retailers all told the same story. Each store receives a shipment of 10 units on a random basis, every few weeks. No telling when they’ll be in. No way to reserve them. You just have to be lucky.
Most retail stores had taken to putting Wii status messages on their automated phone recordings. “If you are calling about a Wii, please press 1 and then go away, because we don’t have any.”
Not being able to get a Wii really started to bother me. . . so much so that I started wondering about why it bothered me so much. And I came to realize that we really are spoiled, folks.
We live in such an affluent society that the idea of scarcity is foreign to us. Anything we want is readily available; the only reason we don’t have everything we want is because we don’t have the money. You want a bushel of pomegranates? Those are exotic fruits and only avaialbe in the fall here in the US, right? Nope. Go on-line and buy a bushel now. You want a hundred pairs of designer jeans? Go get ‘em. No sweat. You want designer Indian tea for breakfast? Go to the store and get some.
It seems almost un-American for me not to be able to go out right now and buy a Wii (or ten Wiis) if I want to.
No comments:
Post a Comment