Plenty of PS3/360/Wii available as always.
I have never seen a console shortage in my life.

Ohio - can't find any PS3s still.

At one retailer: 11 X360s, 0 PS3s, 0 Wiis
At another retailer: 8 X360s, 0 PS3s, 5 Wiis

in france, there is all systems in stock... but plenty of 360, there is a lot of christmas bundle ( pure/lego) and arcade (promotions arcade+20 GB hard drive+forza 3+halo odst= 169 euros!) and many ff13 bundle...

denville new jersey, at my local bestbuy crap load of ps3s and xbox 360's of all types. All the other stores that sell games also have a few of each console

111 euros... this is the price of ps2! good 360 deal in netherlands.

anyway, I predict 41.9M shipped for 360 and 35.5/36.5M for ps3.

I live in Maryland. The closest Wal-mart has no PS3's at all. A couple of Wii's. And like 4 or 5 360's. I went to a larger Wal-mart a few weeks ago and it was pretty much the same scenerio. Not sure if they got any new PS3's, yet.

So, given the shortages (which are supported by the poll), can we expect there to be a max of ~1 million units difference between shipped and sold to retail?

I thought they banned threads that try to bring up stupid and already gone over a million times things regarding the numbers.

Reporting your thread to ioi so he can close it. There was really no need to include stuff like:
"Various times in the past it was claimed the bigger boxed fat PS3 had about 1 million more units on the shelves than 360s, which sounded weird to me (a lot of extra needed shelf /storage space in comparison to the 360)."

Basically this whole thread looks like your attempt to shove something in the faces of VGChartz numbers if it doesn't agree with an unreliable, anecdotal, and impossible to prove poll.

So you expect Sony and MS to roughly ship the same amount of consoles for this past quarter?

I would think so, I would think a "normal" difference between shipped and retail - that is when you can easily go in any store and find a system - would be 1.5-2 million, anything less than that would cause shortages I would think. With that  said, that's not reflective of what we have here at VGC, but I trust ioi and his numbers and if adjustments are needed I'm sure he'll do so as he did with GOW and GOW II.

shipped, yes... don't forget, MS is  alway playing with numbers, I remember when they annonced 10M for europe in august 2009 (continental europe) and 10M in november 2009 (include africa and others parts of the world).... what?! 0 360 sold between august and november with more countries (negative number!?). They can grow their numbers...

I think sony shipped 36 M maximum, ps3 sold arround 2 millons scince juanary 2010, 33.5+2= 35.5, and maybe 500 000 systems on the retailers shelfs.

I didn't vote because here in Gold Coast, Australia both consoles are hardly ever sold out so there's no issues of sold out PS3s or X360s. Wii is the only console to face shortages from time to time.