And this little piggy went, "Wii, wii, wii," all the way home.

Sometime yesterday I decided to buy a Nintendo Wii with my Christmas bonus money. After bargaining with Mandi (she told me I had to sell the PS2 and games first), she agreed that this was fine.

Of course, the Wii is this year's Tickle-Me-Elmo, so it's darn near impossible to find one locally.

I've been watching wiitracker.com for announcements that sites like toysrus.com or walmart.com have received shipments. To give you an idea of how in-demand this console is, once these announcements are made, it takes no longer than 7-8 minutes before the retailer is sold out again.

Another major obstacle to my purchasing a Wii is that all of these online retailers force you to buy Wii games and additional accessories, sometimes taking it to ridiculous levels.

For example, Walmart will sell a Wii to you online if you pay for $427.38 of additional Wii stuff.

The basic Wii console and Wii Sports game costs $250 retail.

Oh, and it's $40 to ship the bundle at the cheapest and slowest rate, which would arrive "sometime between December 27 and January 3."

So while I could get the Wii from Walmart and take all the extra crap back to the local store and get a refund, I don't want to deal with that hassle in addition to paying $40 for shipping and waiting up to two weeks.

That leaves me calling local stores trying to randomly catch them after a shipment has just arrived.

This morning I called the Toys 'R Us in town at 8:45 and asked if they had any Wii systems. The lady on the phone told me they had three in stock.

I buzzed over there and within four minutes I was in the store's Gaming section. After scouring the area for two or three minutes trying to find the Wii boxes and coming up empty, I wandered over to the counter where there were two salespeople checking out customers.

Turns out they were both helping customers who were buying Wii's. "Oh great," I thought.

But I figured there was, at worst, one more left. While I waited in line as the employees gathered every conceivable amount of information they could from these customers ("What is your home address? What is your mother's maiden name? Who was the first girl you kissed?"), I became more and more frustrated.

Somewhere in my frustration, a woman somewhat in front of me (it was iffy who came into the section first, and the line after the two people that were being helped was nebulous), got dibs on a Wii that was behind the counter. Apparently the Toys R' Us employees had taken to hiding the consoles there, the better to prevent people from dashing in, grabbing one, and dashing out, all the while setting off two sets of alarms and running a couple hundred feet to the exit.

After waiting about fifteen minutes for the employees to help these people buy their Wii's, it was my turn. Pointing to the Wii being checked out on the counter next to me, I asked, "Is that the last one?"

Sadly, it was.

I cannot tell you how much it has been bothering me that I was one person away from getting a Wii. And there's the vague sense I got robbed by the lady who got the last one.

Back to calling stores around town.

Grrrr.