iTrackr now claims that the Nintendo Wii is at 39% availability nationwide. But what I found more interesting is that it said for my area 8/10 stores had the Wii in stock. I don't believe them so I decided to do a test. I've called all 8 of these stores.
First off they warn that Gamestop and EB Games are unreliable at feeding current data to their system, and being that 7 of the 10 stores were gamestop and EB Games, it hardly seems worth bothering with a test at all. But here goes.
Since it seems Target would be more reliable I started with them. There was 2 Targets in my area that iTrackr claimed to have Wiis. Upon calling BOTH Targets neither one had a Wii in stock. In fact you can tell how high the demand is in store by the fact that the store operator asked me up front without even me saying a word if I was calling about a Wii.
then I moved on to the 3 Gamestops, all 3 that iTrackr claimed there was stock in were upon calling sold out.
Now the 3 EB Games that iTrackr claimed had stock 2 had no stock, 1 didn't answer the phone so I couldn't check.
There you go folks 8/10 ended up really being 0/9(discounting the one that didn't answer).
Now there is one other factor here the little clock symbol next to each store, explains how old the status of the store is. 9/10 of these stores symbols were gray meaning the information is 10 hours old or older. 1 store updated no longer then 10 hours ago, that store was an EB Games that when called said they had no Wii in stock. Of course seeing that so many stores information was at the very least more then a day old, it's hard to trust iTrackr's accuaracy.
So my conclusion is iTrackr was not designed track a product that sells so quickly. They are either continually outdated, or they have a really poor system. And if the 80% in my area is really 0% then I'm sure the 39% nationwide figure is closer to 0% too. I conducted this test because people here tend to like to throw around itrackr numbers, we need to test how accurate they are if we are going to use them to make an argument.
