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How to Get that Must Have Gift By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman You’re a busy person, we all are. But what happens when you put off your gift shopping for too long and you can’t find that “must have gift” anywhere in stores? While there’s always the option of getting price gouged by a vendor on Craigslist.com or eBay, I find it rather hard to spend $400 for a Nintendo Wii that retails at $250. Or you could just opt to not get the gift for that special someone (I’ll admit that I’ve taken that road once or twice). But if neither of those options work out for you or if you just have an extreme desire to “save face,” here are some tips to almost guarantee you picking up that hard to find item just in the knick of time. 1) Go to a retail store in the inner-city/bad area: I learned this trick from my father back in 1990. When Super Mario Bros 3 was the hottest game on the market and essentially selling out in stores the second they hit the shelves, my father got a brilliant idea. He drove to a Toys R Us in the downtown area because he figured that the store would have received a shipment of the game, but many of the people in the area would be too strapped for disposable cash to pick it up on a whim. That man was right! Recently this has been my secret to finding rarer and older games, as I go to stores where I believe there’s low market interest for a certain product (ie: looking for J-RPGs in neighborhoods with below average public schools, since those kids probably aren’t going to be very keen on reading). 2) See if you can buy a product over the phone from a store that’s beyond your normal shopping range: Ron and I used this trick to get the original Guitar Hero guitar and game for the PS2 when they first came out. Every online scalper was trying to flip a Guitar Hero bundle, thus leaving very little in stores for the fans. Often times only the unemployed or children of stay at home moms stood a chance of finding a set in a retail store. However, after searching all of our regular vendors and finding nothing, we decided to start calling stores that were over 30 miles away from our house. By doing so we managed to stumble upon a Circuit City that literally had a mountain of Guitar Hero sets that just weren’t getting sold. Not only did the clerk offer to do the transaction via credit card by phone, he even told us about a little known service where they’ll ship the product to a store in our area for free. This goes to show you that something may be popular and hard to find in one region, yet completely undesired in another. Stores really need their products to be moved and will accommodate your needs if you’re moving their inventory. 3) Use an online tracker: Online trackers are awesome, imagine getting an email or instant message the second a product shipment has hit the stores. They’re truly a wondrous marvel of our modern network technology. This is one I highly endorse, but it comes with a very large caveat. You must use a good online tracker. This takes a bit of work in itself, as you need to have a tracker fail on you to prove that it’s unreliable. However, during the initial launch of the Nintendo Wii I was using quite a bit of online trackers and have this to say about them. Of the ones I’ve used the 2 most reliable ones were the Amazon.com tracker and the Toys R Us “Email Notification” function. They were very prompt and reliable (in fact, I think the Amazon.com one had only steered me wrong once, but I suspect someone else had picked up the product before me). Two of the worst ones I used were the Target product locator and Gamestop’s in-store availability report. They’re only update once per day and very early in the morning. So if someone happens to clean their store out, you’ll never know about it until you either call to verify the product is still there or when you show up and are given the bad news to your face. 4) Get help from a friend: Two sets of eyes are better than one. The saying holds true in gun maintenance, scouting, and shopping. I mean, you can’t be everywhere at once, so why not have a buddy help you cover more ground. Plus, if you both live in different towns that effectively doubles your shopping range. While I’m not telling you to make slaves of your friends (unless you’re that type of person. And if so we should get together and share strategies on how to manipulate people more effectively), I’m suggesting that you start a network with your friends and family and corporately start searching for potential presents. Now, don’t be foolish and send someone out to find their own gift. Actually, that would be so hilarious that I might try it in the near future. Hopefully, you’ve been a responsible human being and got gifts for everyone on your list. But if you’ve let things go too far and are now trying to race the clock, may this guide give you the advantage you need out there.
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