I've commented previously on a large national(Canadian) pharmiceutical chain now carrying Wii & DS systems and games.  Since then I've noticed a toy store chain (perhaps just one store not sure) who never carried vg stuff now selling Wii & games and I was just in Sears and noticed they had Wii (and Wii only) games for sale in their electronics dept.

Obviously Wii & DS are getting more mainstream acceptance and are appearing in more non-traditional places for sale than competing systems (or any system in history).  These places seem to be buying directly from Nintendo as it's only Nintendo games they carry.   

Obviously VGChartz and NPD don't track sales from these types of establishments and while I doubt they have big sales, they must have some sort of decent sales or they wouldn't bother to carry Wii/DS games at all.

So the question is - how much do these places sell?  How common is this?  Is this just a Canadian thing? How much higher are Nintendo's system and game sales then places like VGChartz and NPD can track?

On the same token, to be fair - Sony sells PS3/PSP games in their electronics stores which are likely untracked so this also holds true for them to that extent.

I haven't seen this on the western side of Canada, so it's hard to say.

In the UK some supermarkets sell significant quantities of video games and consoles - I saw some in Morrisons (Wiis out of stock obviously).

I'm in Western canada and I haven't seen any new sellers. The non-traditional sellers have the other products as well. Superstore and Costco come to mind, but I must admit I don't spend very much time in other retail stores.

I think casual gamers are more likely to pick some random title on the shelf because of the box art than hardcore gamers. These UTR sales don't show up on the charts, but added together could be a large number.

Probably not. These retailers' contributions are probably too small to make a big difference in the long run, and the trackers (like this site) have formulas to account for the retailers that they don't directly get data from. I could be wrong, though.

Sears used to sell PS1 and N64 games also...

Sears still sells games for all the systems. I actually bought Okami Wii from Sears.com because I returned a gift that I didn't need and I got stuck with a gift card. I only ever buy tools from there, and I don't think I'll need any more for quite a while, so I got a game.

They didn't have Okami in the store I was at, but they did have a decent selection, so that is why I bought it online.