Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board - I wish I'd thought of that first

Don't tell my wife (shhhh...). For the last week I've been looking for a Nintendo Wii Fit Balance Board for her for Christmas.

Congratulations to Nintendo for creating the MUST HAVE Christmas gift for three years running. For the last two years the Wii and a wide variety of their games have been THE hot item at Christmas. This year it is the Wii Fit Balance Board.

I've tried searching the web. I can't find any Balance Boards anywhere for their real retail price of about $100 Cdn. I could buy several of them on eBay for about 3x that price. And, I could buy them from Amazon's resellers (again for several times their actual price). I found a couple of US-based e-stores that are selling them for several hundred dollars as a kit with different types of software and accessories. But, I just can't bring myself to do that!

Then I searched every retail store in town. Strike out! They are sold out everywhere. A few stores pointed me to other stores when they heard a rumor that the other guys might have the Wii Fit. My hope soared. I checked. NOPE.

But, I did find out the other day that a Toys 'R Us location was going to have 50 of them this morning. They expected line ups. They didn't even advertise it. They only went with word of mouth. By 9am the line had about 300 people in it. I wasn't one of those 300.

Going back nearly 20 years, one of the jobs I held down while in school was front-line retail. It just happened that those were the years of the Care Bear frenzy. I remember line ups in front of the store, and people literally fighting for their space in line.

So - aside from the fact that my Wii Fit Balance Board search continues, and I only anticipate it to get more desperate (and I expect that I'll have to change out my gift giving aspirations sooner rather than later) - at some point I want to be involved with the opportunity to help create a brand like the Care Bears or the Wii that absolutely changes consumer behavior.