Nintendon’t Supply Chain
It is hard to believe Nintendo when they talk about supply and meeting customer expectations. This is the second classic system release we have seen in a year that doesn’t have supply to meet the demand. As many predicted, Super Nintendo Classic pre-orders sold out in mere seconds with many being scooped up by bots and scalpers. As predicted, they are now on ebay:
SNES Classic scalpers have flooded ebay. Image Snippet: ebay.com
At this point there are only two logical explanations and both are equally terrible:
- Nintendo senior leadership can’t run a supply chain and they succeed as a video game company in spite of their lack of business acumen. Somehow they manage to turn a profit even in the face of gross incompetence.
- Nintendo willfully shortens supply to create “rarity” and inflate demand. They are fully aware they are not supplying enough to meet demand and they don’t care that their products end up in the hands of scalpers (who then turn a profit through auction sites).
Supply chain management is MBA level education. I’m not kidding when I say a fresh MBA grad could run their supply chain better than what they do now. That’s giving Nintendo the benefit of the doubt that they aren’t simply doing this on purpose.
This is unacceptable. Consumers need to boycott this type of anti-consumer business practice. That is the only way Nintendo will listen.
