Fun, Games In Short Supply Desperate Parents Compete For Most Popular Toys This Season
Surprised by soaring demand, the maker of Tickle Me Elmo is flying in the dolls from China. You’ll be hard-pressed to find the latest Nintendo, too. And Barbie on CD-ROM is gone as well.
Barely one week into the holiday shopping season, the blood pressure is rising among moms and dads competing for the hottest Christmas toys.
“Parents are breaking down doors for some of these toys,” said Frank Reysen, editor of Playthings magazine. “There’s not just one hit this year, but a couple that everyone wants.”
As in the Cabbage Patch Kids craze of 1983 and the frenzy over Holiday Barbie last year, parents are using guerrilla-shopper tactics. They’re lining up by the hundreds before dawn at stores rumored to have the toys. In a phenomenon satirized in the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Jingle All the Way,” they’re tugging and brawling to get a toy after the doors open.
At a Best Buy store in Aurora, Ill., police charged a woman with battery after she slapped another woman who grabbed the last Nintendo box on the shelf. At a Target store in Davenport, Iowa, a clerk handing an Elmo doll to a customer saw it intercepted by another customer.
“Grown people are willing to go pretty far for one of these dolls,” said Jen Smith, a mother who couldn’t find an Elmo at New York’s FAO Schwarz store. “It’s pretty crazy.”
Stores can’t keep Tickle Me Elmo in stock. It is a plush doll based on the Sesame Street character that giggles when you press its tummy. It sells for under $30.
Tyco Toys Inc. is flying the dolls from factories in China to the United States to get them here faster. The company will have shipped 1 million dolls between its July debut and Christmas and still doesn’t expect to meet demand.
“You can never plan a phenomenon,” said Neil Friedman, who heads Tyco’s Preschool division.
Also scarce is Nintendo 64, the new video game system that exploits advances in computer chip and software design to create 3-D play. The system costs about $200 and each of its eight games costs about $70. Many of the 1.2 million machines the company allotted for Christmas in this country have already been sold.
“It’s too bad, because my boys are going to be disappointed if I can’t find it anywhere else,” said James Lynch of Nashua, N.H., a dad who has been searching for a Nintendo since the weekend.
Even parents who succeed aren’t necessarily gloating.
“I don’t think I’ll do it again,” said Carmen Ruiz, who waited an hour at an Elizabeth, N.J., toy store last weekend to get a Nintendo for her 13-year-old daughter.
Finding a Holiday Barbie is a perennial challenge. But this year you can’t even find her new CD-ROM, which lets kids create their own fashions, print them and then make the outfits. It sells for about $40.
Jason Donnelly, a 12-year-old from Coxsackie, N.Y., still expects to find a Nintendo under his Christmas tree. “I told my mom that’s what I want and she said she’d get it. She’ll find it somewhere - she better.”