![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Uncle Mark Gets It Together
May. 14th, 2006 09:09 amI'm pretty lousy about birthdays, but I had asked my parents a month ago what my niece would want for a gift, and they described something that I realized was a tamagachi -- as soon as I said the name, they said yes, that's what she wants. I had to remind them what a tamagachi was -- those little virtual pet electronic toys that were such a huge hit back in the early 90's. I had no idea they were still around.
Anyway I figured I could drop by the local Walmart and buy one for her at some point, but I didn't actually get around to doing that until yesterday. I searched the toy section, but didn't find anything like a tamagachi, although there were a lot of handheld games of other sorts. While there I picked up a few other things though -- including my second pair of sandals in two weeks. These aren't flip flops though, these are the kind I can wear when I have socks on, and they stay on my feet better. What can I say, Walmart has cheap prices, so I went for it.
So this morning I started doing some research on the web. I figured it would be easy to pick up a tamagachi from Amazon.com or something. My first problem was that I was spelling the word wrong -- "tamogachi" -- and while I actually managed to find a few pages using this word, I realized that it was actually tamagachi. But at least I'm consistent -- one of the few pages that came up with a search on the misspelled word was one of my very very very old anime gaming pages that I created on geocities, which is still there.
When I got the word spelled correctly I quickly learned that Amazon.com was sold out of all of these toys. I found some other shops selling them for much higher prices... and reading one of these pages, I learned that these are all "limited edition" models, the Japanese toy company does this with every run of these things, and therefore while some of these places were still able to get ahold of the toys, the distributors were charging higher and higher prices.
This, however, was a good thing in my book. Having waited so long to go looking for these, I was thinking that maybe my parents or my sister and brother in law would have bought one for my niece by now. But knowing that they're pretty scarce, I am fairly well convinced that they probably haven't found them. Never mind that you can just do a search on Google and buy one off the web, I've noticed from observing my friends at work and my relatives that your average person never actually tries to do such a thing. So Uncle Mark has the inside track on getting the cool present that his niece really wants. Score!
Anyway I figured I could drop by the local Walmart and buy one for her at some point, but I didn't actually get around to doing that until yesterday. I searched the toy section, but didn't find anything like a tamagachi, although there were a lot of handheld games of other sorts. While there I picked up a few other things though -- including my second pair of sandals in two weeks. These aren't flip flops though, these are the kind I can wear when I have socks on, and they stay on my feet better. What can I say, Walmart has cheap prices, so I went for it.
So this morning I started doing some research on the web. I figured it would be easy to pick up a tamagachi from Amazon.com or something. My first problem was that I was spelling the word wrong -- "tamogachi" -- and while I actually managed to find a few pages using this word, I realized that it was actually tamagachi. But at least I'm consistent -- one of the few pages that came up with a search on the misspelled word was one of my very very very old anime gaming pages that I created on geocities, which is still there.
When I got the word spelled correctly I quickly learned that Amazon.com was sold out of all of these toys. I found some other shops selling them for much higher prices... and reading one of these pages, I learned that these are all "limited edition" models, the Japanese toy company does this with every run of these things, and therefore while some of these places were still able to get ahold of the toys, the distributors were charging higher and higher prices.
This, however, was a good thing in my book. Having waited so long to go looking for these, I was thinking that maybe my parents or my sister and brother in law would have bought one for my niece by now. But knowing that they're pretty scarce, I am fairly well convinced that they probably haven't found them. Never mind that you can just do a search on Google and buy one off the web, I've noticed from observing my friends at work and my relatives that your average person never actually tries to do such a thing. So Uncle Mark has the inside track on getting the cool present that his niece really wants. Score!
