I stopped into one of our Best Buys here in Ohio, this evening, and went through the gaming section.  They usually have quite a few Xbox 360 stacks but the shelves and nearby floor space were empty of systems.  I asked one of the employees working in the area what was up, and he said they've been out of stock of all 360 models for a few days.  He mentioned the Ultimate Alliance/Forza bundle had been depleting them fairly regularly since sometime in Oct.

I found this a little surprising considering I hadn't heard of the 360 being supply constrained.  Anyone else seen this? 

No

Perhaps it's a localized situation.  I did get on Best Buy's website and tried to find a 360 in this area, and all stores show non-availability.

Weird. 

it must just be local, because all the store in my area have many.

The dude doesn't know...

Working for Circuit City, I can tell you that the Premium, Elite, and to a lesser extent the Core consoles were consistently sold out during the holidays...in all locations. The only thing always in stock was the remainder of our Halo Edition 360s and both PS3 SKUs.

Now that the Holiday Season is over, you can expect stock to return to normal soon.

This is interesting.  I was aware that the Wii was in short supply in NA during the holidays, but I had no idea the 360 was as well.  I wonder what the sales differential would have been had everyone looking for a 360 this Christmas been able to find one on their first trip out.

I will tell you this, because I know it is fact through years of experience in logistics - during the holiday and around releases stores take in ALOT of extra stock so they are not short (if it's available). Once the first week or two is over, or the holiday has passed, they send alot of the excess back to their warehouse to be redistributed as needed, back to the same store or another store somewhere else. So they may have had stacks and stacks of 360's, the holiday came and went, it was always available and no one was unable to purchase one at any point. Now they may send back 90% of the left over stock, and perhaps then someone comes around and buys a few systems and now its time to replenish it.

That trend is most notable during DVD release days, follow it a week or two later and the 9 trillion copies the store had are gone.

That occurred to me at the store, hence my question to the sales guy.  He said they had been selling out on a regular basis.

Perhaps this is unique to specific regions of the country, or perhaps as was mentioned earlier in the thread some store chains just had problems keeping machines in stock.

I'm trying not to read a lot into it, but I was a little surprised to witness it firsthand. 

Some stores sold out, most didn't, otherwise I guarantee that MS would have put out a PR piece.

Excellent point.