I'm glad I have a good shop near me. I walked in today to buy a 3ds game for my kid's upcoming birthday and he said he already put me on the list and I should be getting one, never had to even ask. He also said it was pretty chaotic and he will be removing double orders from the pre-order list as he rather sells to people that actually use it themselves.
On the other hand, it has come so far with Nintendo that you can only get their stuff if you know the store owner...

Nintendo doesn't sell blood, oxygen, water or food. They sell OPTIONAL distractions that enhance a boring life. Can't buy one of their toys? Go cry in a corner.

I never said I do this. I've thought about it in past, but never actually have. 

Supply is Nintendo's issue. Retailers are just the pipeline in which that supply is delivered. Retailers generally do put qty limits, at least they did last time I looked. However, online systems can only be so smart and scalpers do use bots as well as groups of people. 

NES Classic was never easy to find. Every bit of stock that came in was gobbled up instantly. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get one much of the time and then just gave up.

Alternatively there is another solution. Put the price at the appropriate amount. People are obviously willing to pay $200. Put the price at $150. That will make scalpers rethink the risk involved, buying less, as well as still be in the realm of where folks see value benefit for the product. It would also be more in-line with the VC cost per game ($7*25=$175), especially when you include the unique hardware, new features, and games not available in VC. I'd argue this is still a customer focused change as the total price is less than VC games overall and it would allow stock to not automatically shift to scalpers.

Yes.

Nintendo is making the biggest mistake any for profit business can make.

• ruining customer trust
• feeding a scalper model
• turning their backs on easy profits

You are missing the meaning of what I am saying.

lets say Nintendo shipped 10m of SNES classics at launch. But 5m ends up destroyed through some accident at sea during shipping by the shipping company (made up 'Maston'). Would that be the shipping company ('Maston') or Nintendos fault that the end result is only 5m SNES classics are up for sale at launch? In most cases this is the shipping company's fault not Nintendo who did their best to ship to customers but another company was at fault for the large loss of inventory. In a way this is the same thing as a scalper who is taking a large portion of product away from others by ordering 10's and in some cases 100's of product to resell that the average consumer won't look at, which puts blame on nintendo for lack of supply when customers look to retailers for the item.

In addition just because more supply is available doesn't mean scalpers still won't grab every product they can get there hands on, because of the NES Classic effect. As it's still in demand. The only time scalping will decrease is if the items they bought dont sell for more than the MSRP they bought it at.

Also if you don't believe Amazon was a huge issue..I give you this image that was a comment on Wario64's twitter. A single order, that likely other scalpers did the same (maybe not as much quantity).

Nintendo is not trying to overprice a product just because of scalpers. Companies spend time on R&D, and marketing to calculate a MSRP. That's why it's not the $150-200 you are suggesting.

For previous pre-orders such as this, Amazon has instituted a post-sale 1 item limit.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-07-05-amazon-uk-retroactively-imposes-one-per-customer-snes-mini-limit

I remember Amazon doing the same with other hot pre-orders and if UK is doing it, I expect to see reports of US as well soon. This is usually not a regional decision and I'd expect scalpers were a bigger issue in US than other areas of the world.

I fully understand your statement but I think that pricing, plentiful stock is well within the area of a manufacturer to combat scalping and demonstrate actions that are best for their customers. 

I would like to point out that limited buy logic on websites isn't a fool proof mechanism. What happens in that scenario is bots appear that make buys much faster than people can and at a far higher frequency. This causes websites to be overrun as well. Remember when orders for NES Classic went up with a 2 max limit? That shit brought down several Amazon detail pages for hours. That was when Amazon started putting new stock out without notice. That is also why Switch stock replacements continued that trend and took it further by only going up behind the Prime wall.

I concur.

As do I.

Also, I do not understand why owning a small box of the original thing with emulated games is a thing.

They could be planning VC on the Switch for both NES and SNES.