The retailer and producer should have a right to sell it however they want at whatever price they want. They aren't forcing you to buy anything, so quit complaining that you are forced to buy a wii bundle because you could just not get the product in the first place.

@exo: Already got the component cable I need for my set for under $20.

Next.

@lintacious: Not required. Next.

You also have no idea what is in this bundle. It is simply an extra controller, an extra nunchuck, wiiplay (which is great), and a charge station. Unless you like buying batteries every 3 days, the charge station is a must.

the xbox arcade is a horrible deal. As the other commenter mentioned, you don't even get a LAN port to go online, so your stuck buying the $100 wifi adapter ($82 if your lucky at amazon). You may not think youw ant to play online, but the first time you play an awesome game and realize you could be downloading extra levels and stuff for it... well, then your 'great deal' is going to really slap you int he face.

@ribex: No, but we did get invited to a whine-tasting party.

No one is being forced to buy bundles. Even in cranky consumer-speak that's a big stretch of the word. In reality, Fry's is just giving customers a new set of options:

1) Buy the Fry's Wii bundle.
2) Buy the non-bundled Wii somewhere else.

This is a surprise from Fry's, but I never shop there for game stuff so I don't know their MO in that department.

@Jeremiah1977: @Corporate-Shill: The point the op was trying to make wasn't the availability of the Wii, it was the fact that this retailer was banking on customers being so desperate for the system that they felt that they could add on unnecessary items during the holidays and make a few extra bucks. He pointed out that during the rest of the year you can buy just the Wii, but during the busy holiday season they ONLY sold the bundles. They didn't give the consumer the option of purchasing it unbundled. No, it's not the biggest deal ever, but forcing an upgrade is a consumer issue.

I work at a location that sells the WII Bundles and I don't see how anyone can have that big of a problem. We have 3 different ones ranging from 350 to 699.

Ours comes with a ton of stuff with it. And yes, I don't feel like it is illegal because as one previous poster put it, it does come with a bunch of other stuff and games as well.

Price gouging normally would be considered raising the price of the system to something over 249.99 and not getting any extras. That is mandated by Nintendo and most retailers do not have the option of changing the prices.

That being said, for the 10 people that ask about our Nintendo WIIs, 9 walk away and continue to look, 1 still buys it. And we are currently sold out of all our bundles. Must not be a bad deal after all.

The way I see it, people need to quit complaining every time they don't get their way. Some people are worse than my 2 yr old daughter.

I remember one year selling 50 remotes and 50 rf switches on Xmas day when I was at Blockbuster. A bundle might not be such a bad idea when the person buying is not the person using it.

I kinda wished mine came in a bundle. We got our Wii at the company picnic this summer (WOO! Free Wii!) And then we went out and spent about $250 in accessories and games. So, yeah. A bundle would make sense if it had decent accessories...

Bundle packs are purchased as such from the manufacturer, and thus cannot be broken up and sold individually by the retailer. That's okay, though, because as has already been pointed out, there's a need for the additional items.

The Wii however is not essential to live, its just another video game system.

Most of these bundles are just "suggested" bundles, many companies bundle items at Xmas time because they are the most common items to purchase with the big item. Also because sometimes things are required to operate it that are additional and not packaged with the item such as memory cards, imagine getting a system and games on Christmas and not getting a memory card to save your games. This is also done so that they don't have a million parents coming in on Dec. 26th complaining that they didn't get a memory card with their console. You can't exactly run to a store on Dec. 25th to get that missing item. Bundling the system, a memory card and games solves a lot of those problems and makes sure every customer gets what they need to use the item in question. I know memory cards are kind of obsolete now but this was the situation a couple years ago.

Try asking to buy the item separately without the bundle, I know they allow you to at Toys R Us. There might even be a law on the books in some states that requires stores to sell you the item without the bundle.

@tc4b: Yeah, and that's certainly not what I expected when my companions found a map to Candy Mountain...

@SMSDHubbard:
Yes yes shop at sams and costco. I have a sams card, cant comment on the Wii bundle as I bought mine almost 2 years ago from target. No bundle forced, but he wasn't going to let me buy games either.... Kinda weird.

Anyhow I bought the RockBand 2 Xbox 360 set for $167 and change, where its usually $189. It came to $181 with tax. Still lower than average retail. And it wasn't any kind of special sale either. Minus their crappy selection of games, large items like consoles and big kits like RockBand, those are the places to go. Even for accessories like controllers.

@B: Word.

@Rhayader: You're right. Mario Kart is a blast on Xbox.

I don't understand why they would refund money for games that you bought as part of the bundle. Clearly on your receipt it would show the entire bundle purchase and not the individual game purchases...

Pick up a freakin' book every now and again, people.

Related to the actual post, though, I bought a Wii last Christmas from Amazon for a friend. They didn't make me bundle, so you may want to do some shopping around. Fry's is obviously not your best option there.

As a general rule, retailers can set their own prices for whatever they choose to sell. Consumers can choose not to buy them. Feel lucky they include the extras. They could charge you the higher price for just the console, if they so chose.

There are options with Fry's. You can appeal the decision of a supervisor/department manager to the Person In Charge at the front of the store. That decision can be appealed to the Store or Ast. Store Manager. Any of those decisions can be appealed to Fry's corporate customer relations and Fry's maintains feedback forms all over the stores that actually are read and responded to by Corporate President Randy Fry himself. Has the OP availed himself of any of these options?

Of course, it is usually easier to go down the street, because, as I said, it is Frys.

@unobservant: That was my thought.. he says, "mine!!". That just seems to be the look a cat has when they're watching you verrrryy carefully..... Maybe they spilled some Starbucks oatmeal on it.

Anyway, this is a common situation, but it's not specific to the Wii. It's been going on for years with various consoles (or counsels, YMMV).

I seem to recall that this first happened when there was a shortage of Gameboy Advanced. Places like Electronics Boutique and GameStop and Funco sold what little they had in very large bundles. People ranted and complained but they bought anyway. So, lots of retailers do it now.

It's not pre-ordained by the manufacturer. There are usually other retailers that aren't selling consoles in bundles.

This is illegal, and against their license agreement with stores.
you might not get a wii out of the deal, but at least you can possibly get the store's contract with nintendo revoked

Try Walmart instead, apparently they have a glut of Wiis right now

I'm actually surprised people are complaining about this. I say this because of the laws of supply and demand. If you really want something and there is a small supply of it, you should be willing to fork over more money.

When I worked in retail, it was right as the Wii was coming out. I had one guy ask me if I would save him one. I said, "Sure. It will cost you $200. But that's just for me to save it. You'll still have to buy it."

He didn't go for it. Needless to say, no one did. They just didn't want it enough, I guess.

So jump in your time machine and buy it back then, douche, or find something valid to complain about. The point a couple people have made about returning the unopened games is valid, too. JEFF is a sad lonely person desperate for attention... oh wait, a troll.

Disclosure - I work for costco.

Ahem Given our business model of trying to keep the prices low on quality goods we do run into problems with items like the Wii where we cannot negotiate a significantly lower price for our members. So what the buyers will do is bundle in an extra remote and nunchuck and keep the price down by what the console goes for around 250.00. so there is some value add there.

@Segador: I thought his name was Menace. And he looks rather protective of it to me. At least he's wearing the wrist strap as advised.

I got my wii off of craigslist, from a guy who bought them on amazon and sold it to me for $20 more, but it was okay since none of the stores had it in stock at all at the time (this summer). The extra nunchuck and wii mote are great, as for games, I suggest renting them from places like Hollywood video or Blockbusters or something to see if you like them before dishing out $30 to $50 for a game (was definately worth it for me).

I used to hate having to do the bundle thing when I worked retail during the release of PS2 and Gamecube (surprisingly, I do not recall us doing bundles for Xbox), partly because we ended up forcing people to buy crap titles because we had already sold out of Tekken Tag, but mostly because I did not like to hear the whining about it; yes, I know it sucks, no I cannot make an exception.

My Wii was bought unbundled, but last year we ended up getting a bundle for my neice and nephew, but I didn't really mind because it actually good games in it, as well as a total of 3 Wiimotes and nunchuks. We ended up keeping two of the three bundled games, and one of the Wiimotes and nunchuks.

Mind this year's bundles seem a bit lamer, so I probably would have minded more, although I walked into Best Buy Green Friday morning around 7am, and they still had a stack of unbundled Wiis

I don't see the reason for anger here. If you do not like the bundle at FRY's, go elsewhere. It is not against the law to sell bundles. THey do it in cars, and call it a package. Usually, it includes things like AC, pin striping, car mats, etc. If you want to purchase the items seperately, it will cost you more. Now, if a hurricane were on its way, and they were bundling plywood, chinsaws, water, and generators in a lifesaver bundle, and you couldn't buy them individually, that would be a problem. No dies or loses a home because they had to get a wii bundle. Priorities people.

This is pretty much also the case for Nintendo DS, and GameBoy Advance titles, where the average quality is very low, but there is a high enough volume of titles that there is a healthy ecosystem of quality games.

With the Wii, I feel like I have pretty much every release I want (I have about a dozen Wii games, and some of them are kind of crap), and I also haven't picked up a game since SSBB, unless you count Mega Man 9 (which was multiplaform).

The first party titles are far and away the strongest offerings on the Wii. If you're not into any of the Nintendo franchises, I don't really see the draw of the whole system. Comparatively, it's not even that cheap any more with X360 and PS3 having seen deep price cuts in the last year. I also do not understand its lasting appeal.

@unobservant: @snowburnt: @lisa1120: @satoru: @impetus:

Thank you all! I apparently have one and don't even know it. Do I get my Consumerist commenting privileges revoked for making a purchase when drastically uninformed?

I don't see how this is "Christmas gouging" since:
). I got my bundle in May or June, no where near the holidays, so they bundle year 'round;
and
2). we don't know if the aggregate price was higher than the components separately. Jeff says that the bundles are "($325+)". What comes with it?

And since it doesn't sound as though any violence or blackmail was involved, no one is forcing Jeff or anyone else to purchase the Wii.

Buy it. Don't buy it. If stores are making money by bundling because people are happy to pay the price, they'll continue bundling. If they aren't, it is safe to assume they won't.

Best Buy, CC, and others have the bad bundles. This is where some asshole sales manager has taken all of the Wiis from the floor and put them in bags along with a handful of crap accessories and games. The price is exactly as much as it would be to buy each item separately. This is why I say just shop online and skip the assholes.

For those shopping for Wii's, you will want extra controllers and nunchuck attachments right away, so bundles including those are relatively fine. Beware of the ones that come with lots of crappy licensed property titles, like "Happy Feet + Spongebob + My Little Pony" games. Those probably are all garbage unless your child is very, very young. Even then. You should start your kids on better games!

Just go to smaller retailers and you shouldn't have that issue. Independent retailers, if they can even get the system in, should sell it to you with no bundling.

Either way, the Wii has nothing I'm interested in, and I can't believe how wildly popular the system is. I haven't bought a game for it since Brawl came out back in March.

As for which games use it; many (probably the majority) do. Consider it a necessity. Most of the best games - and by design, any 3-D platformer - will require it. Listing them would be an exercise in futility, but some key examples Mario Galaxy, Zelda, and Wii Fit.

I avoided the $300 Xbox Holiday Bundle and made my own bundle:

$199.99 Arcade Console + $40 Refurb HDD and Wireless controller @ Circuit City.

$250 w/ tax (or close to it) for a system with two wireless controllers, a HDD, and absolutely no games I did not want. Then I bought Project Gotham 4 and got the Live 12-month sub, a headset, and a chatboard for $70.

You just have to know how to shop.

The most fun with the nunchuck is to get a couple to play Wii Sport boxing against each other. Just turn on your video camera and I guarantee you'll get lots of fun footage :P

To make my purchase faster, I just selected 4 games at random, got the bundle in the mail, and then...

Ready for this????

I TOOK THE CRAP GAMES THAT WERE BUNDLED DOWN TO MY LOCAL WALMART WITH THE RECEIPT, AND I GOT MY MONEY BACK!

@Youthier:

Also the Wii comes with one remote and one nunchuck intially. So your husband will be able to play any single-player games he wants. The only reason you'd need a second nunchuck is if you and your husband will be playing two-player games that require a nunchuck (such as Wii Boxing as mentioned already).

I'll call the Wiiimbulence.

@Youthier: Well, if you want to beat the crap out of each other in Wii Boxing (which comes with all Wiis), it's worth it.

@snowburnt: That and Shoppers Drug Mart in Ontario - for Wiis, anyway. That's where I got mine (with a Wii Fit, no less!)

On my way home that day, I stopped in Target, where they had at least a dozen unbundled Wiis. The rarity of the Wii seems to be mostly legend.

Pick a different retailer. Problem solved. Next case.

@UTC: Seriously. It says a lot about the way the editors feel about the OP that they didn't even bother to spellcheck his post.

Hey, I have a Wii question. I avoided the bundle b/c I thought my husband had no use for the nunchuck.

Does he indeed have use for that? What game does that go with?

Like many posters above, I also purchased my Wii as part of a bundle (not during the holidays, but in March of 2006) but our bundle actually saved us money. We would have bought the two games it came with anyway, and we also got an extra Wiimote and nunchuk back when they were difficult to find anywhere in stock on their own. When you added it up, we saved about $45 over the combined retail of all of those items.

We also resold Zelda (one of the two bundle games) to a friend of ours for $20 when we were sick of it. I know a lot of people who put the bundle games they don't want up on eBay or on their local Craigslist to pull some of their money back out of their bundle purchase if the games weren't ones they wanted anyway.

@amuro98: He was talking about Fred Meyer, a chain grocery/department store here in the PNW. I'm in Seattle and we have many around here, and they can be a great place to look for in-demand electronics, since a lot of people seem to forget about them as an option. I have an oddly strong love for Fred Meyer and their natural foods section...

@ribex:

No, it is slow reporting day.

So I bought one.

@amuro98: Fred Meyers is on the west coast. Not sure about California, but you can find Fred Meyers stores in Washington and Oregon.

In fact, I always assumed Fred Meyers was a west coast only chain.

There is no way that this is "obvious attempt at price gouging." Any half way informed consumer would buy it some where else or realize that they are going to need some of the stuff it is bundled with.

In the Wii's case, unfortunately, they're only bundling unpopular or bad games, as a way of just getting rid of them, even though the store is selling them at a loss.

If you look carefully at the bundles, most of them end up saving you $20-30 if you had bought the items individually. Only the Circuit City "bundle" for the Wii-Fit (see my post above) is rather awful and abusive as you aren't getting a price break on the other stuff at all, and the stuff you're being told to choose is ridiculously overpriced to begin with ($19.95 for a set of wrist straps that say "Wii-Fit" on them!?!)

Bundling in the console world has been around for a long time now. It's especially nasty during the holidays, or when the console is first released, as retailers use the bundles to try and dump unpopular games or useless accessories on consumers. Careful shoppers, however, will know to check several stores and compare their options.

Post holidays, we'll see the stores go back to just selling items separately, or offering open bundles, meaning you can pick what items get included. Again, careful shoppers armed with calculators and a web browser can easily find the best deals.

I got mine from the company's general manager who was walking in with a bundle she got from Costco... I asked her if I could buy it and she actually said yes.

i went to buy just a wii. then sitting there decided how much fun can it be with one controller? hmm this wii play game comes with a controller and game for $50, no second nunchuck better add that $20, omg a wii fishing game, surely bowling will get boring better add that $30. probably would have been better off getting a bundle. barely got out under $400.

Anyways, Circuit City has them in stock. However, you have to buy 4 additional Wii-Fit accessories at full price as part of their "bundle." This includes the Wii-Fit skin, available in 4 fashionable colors, the Wii-Fit mat (on which you place your Wii-Fit supposedly so it doesn't slide around) also in 4 fashionable colors, and don't forget about the Wii-Fit branded water bottle, wrist bands and head bands! No, I'm not joking. Each is available for the "low" price of $19.95 each! (yes, a water bottle that says "Wii-Fit" is $19.95! WTF!?)

Don't forget the Wii-Fit itself has a MSRP of $89, but at Circuit City, for the low-low price of $169, you get the Wii-Fit and 4 useless accessories...for $80 more!

I'm actually surprised there's still any demand for it, given how poor its game lineup is for the next few months.

Nintendo: Localize Project Zero/Fatal Frame 4 nao!

Bring Disaster: Day of Crisis to the US while you're at it.

But that's the point I raised: What IF a peanut butter (or any other food item) were in limited supply and a grocery store required that it be sold as part of a "bundle"? Would that be legal?

Would a grocery store be able to get away with a sales tactic like this?

No... because there really isn't a limited supply of peanut butter, and in most places people could go to plenty of other places to buy it. Wiis, on the other hand, are in limited supply (although they've been in stock at Amazon quite a few times recently), so stores know some people will pay for the bundle rather than keep hunting or risk going without.

Another thing you could do is sell the extra pieces on eBay (or some other reseller market.) Again, depending on the nature of the extras, you could find your $250 console ends up costing $225.

[kotaku.com]

[www.walmart.com]

Captain Duvel Moneycat seems quite suspicious of that Wii-Mote.

Also: it's called a CONSOLE

Do a bit of leg work then? While there's no sign of Wii Fit anywhere to be had, I've seen several Wii in the wild, unbundled. There was a stack of them at the Fred Meyers I was just at last yesterday, in fact.

So they are out there. Just keep your eyes open.

(Of course if I was after a Wii for xmas, I would have been looking LONG before December rolled around. Consistantly trying to find one this close to the 25th is just folly.)

Joking aside, bundles are a pain. However, sometimes you'd have been buying all that anyway. $325 bundle likely has a spare wiimote and nunchuck, that's $60, and probably a game. Depending on the game, it may worth it anyway.