It's a trick to pull consumers into stores during the most important sales date of the year. On black friday, customers go to stores planning to spend hundreds of dollars. The trick is getting them into your store by any means possible.

If they put it on the shelves today, the customer will buy the Wii and nothing else, simply because they aren't planning on buying anything else.

Your assumption that a Wii is worth 250 dollars today and 250 dollars on the day after Thanksgiving is false. That's the problem.

A Wii is much more valuable on the day after Thanksgiving than it is now. 

dumb question: when are thanksgiving and black friday?

Thanksgiving's the last Thursday of November...Black Friday's the day after.

We enjoy big dinners on Thanksgiving with family, and then on Black Friday we go shopping like there's no tomorrow.

Last year, I got a printer for $10 after rebates...a very good printer, 200 blank DVDs for $10, and a DVD burner for $20...I do love Black Friday.

Wii sales should probably be a little higher but probably only in the Europe/Other market. And I'm not talking about a mass increase. Just maybe a 100k-150k increase.

As most of those lag in shipments were probably on route from Japan to Europe/Other and America. So always going to be some kinda lag.

Anyways just in case anyone cares here's the state of the console wars in shipments:

360- 13.40
Wii- 13.17
PS3- 5.59

Halo 3 keeps 360 up over Wiii for one more quarter haha.

Rol , you also must remeber that for Sony hardware like PS1 and PS2, SCE reported shipments as units manufactured and not sold to retailers ( unlike Nintendo ) until last April

Overall you are right, obviously . 

This seems most likely to me. They wouldn't have exact numbers for sold software either - its the same problem. Even the tracking agencies will have trouble real numbers of all software sold.

Ultimately, Nintendo is paid by retailers - not consumers. And this is based on order/shipped software.

Retailers (sometimes) have the option of returning some boxed software - but I doubt it would happen often to Ninty. 

I'm staying home on black friday! I live very close to a major shopping/eating/drinking/movie watching hub, so with traffic and all I'm pretty much trapped in my neighborhood on days like that.

Sold to retail. For both software and hardware. End of story.

Think about that statement. You hold your Wii's (lol) until black friday and put them on the shelves then to sell them immediately. Whenever a parent races to get a Wii, because it is holiday time they will also grab a game or two.

More foot trafic that time of the year, and with more people buying hardware. Consequently, so will they buy software.