I've not payed a ton of attention to stocks of hardware in the marketplace recently, but I have noticed that my local Target stores (I frequent 2 of them) have been consistently low or sold out of 360s.  Also, at the super wal mart center near my home, they used to have 4 or 5 glass cases with 360s in the bottom that were full all the time but they are now containing just a handful at a time.

I've been in Gamestop twice in the last week and in both occasions, someone was checking out with a premium 360 in hand.

Before anyone attacks me as biased, blind, stupid, uninformed, a fanboy, clueless, lying, spamming, inciting riot, exaggerating, misleading, annoying, lame, silly, idiotic, flaming, delusional, etc., please just tell me what you have seen in the last couple of weeks and what you see currently and leave it at that.

The reason I ask is I'm wondering if Microsoft's price cut to "clear" old inventory in preparation of new inventory with all the "fixes" has dried up stock and new units aren't arriving fast enough for the Halo launch as well as general rise in demand from great games, holiday season coming soon, price drop, etc. 

Mate i love the 360 and i would think its great if it were selling out, but a few thousand years ago, a businessman somewhere made a shocking discovery......storing supplies in a back room actually increases productivity.

I understand that fully... But when the shelves that were quite recently full of boxes go bare, there are a few possible scenarios.

1)More sales of the unit and the stockers aren't keeping up.

2)More sales of the unit and there isn't more stock in the back.

3)Stockers are on a general strike at the major retailers and therefore all stocks are in back instead of on-shlef.

 Based on NPD, clearly there was an increase in sales... 

I fully understand the concept of "stock in the back" but I also know that any person who has a basic clue in merchandisng knows that they HAVE to have SOMETHING on display to sell it.  If the shelf goes bare, most customers will just walk away and not ask... 

I haven't been to many retailers lately to check but the few I have been to look to be out of stock for all systems. So I wouldn't read too much into it.

IMO I think there are 2-3 reasons for it......

1) Microsoft is trying to drain the channel of the old ~11.6m units that it sold, ensuring the older, faultier X360s are totally out of inventories before Halo3's launch. They are probably stockpiling the new ones at various distributor points in preperation for Halo3's launch.

2) Retailer stocks ARE dwindling vs. the rate of refresh. If ioi's 88,000 h/w sales is true, that's a huge step up from the tepid 40k it was seeing at one time 2 months ago. If that's true, the system could theoretically be supply constrained from the distributor>retailer point of view, again with MS cutting supply of the older systems.

3) Ninja Monkeys have invaded your local store of choice, and are hoarding the Xbox 360s for the release of Halo3, in order to ransom the scant few systems available for tons of bannanas.

Mr. Stick... I saw the sales numbers after my post so obviously (assuming the numbers are pretty accurate) there are more consoles moving out the door...

I'm guessing it is a combination of 1 and 3 since I DO see a lot of Monkeys at my local Wal Mart.

I just checked gamestop inventory within a 200 mile radius and almost all stores have "4+" (seems to be the maximum the system will show) of both Elites and Premiums.

I have to conclude no inventory problem exists.

I think there might be a chance for some sellouts this holiday season, but then again, microsoft knows supply is an advantage, so I think like last year they'll flood the market with enough systems it will be impossible to sell out.

I was at Best Buy today and they had Elites, Premiums, and I could have swore I saw the Halo XBox's though those might have been display only since I assume that those will come with Halo 3 (though I don't ever remember Best Buy doing display boxes).

The H3 360 does not come with Halo 3. I think retailers are actually allowed to sell them now.

The Halo boxes just released Sunday so it depends when you saw them. If it was before that then it most likely was the display. Either that or the store broke the street date.