6 BILLION VERUKA'S:

Console yourself and celebrate the genius of capitalism (Leo Lewis, December 27, 2007, The Australian)

AFTER a vile-tempered traipse across Tokyo, I finally laid hands on a Wii Fit Balance Board, and the store assistant slid it over the counter in a thick brown paper bag. It was horrible: the must-have toy of the season bundled discreetly like porn or hard liquor. "It's so people in the street don't see you managed to get the last one," muttered the sales girl, darkly.

Something else was wrong: I wasn't overjoyed, just relieved that the retail ordeal was over and oddly furious that, in this day and age, it had taken so much trouble to get what I wanted. "Why can't those clowns at Nintendo make an extra million more units?" fumed my shopping wing man, as if these machines could fly off a conveyor belt like tins of soup.

A million units? Can we really be spoiled this rotten? Has mass production truly lost its capacity to amaze? It is, after all, easy to overlook the wonders of capitalism at this time of year, when we feel like its servants. The true miracle of Christmas is not that you or I have beaten the crowds and triumphantly snapped up the last unit in the production run, but that a single one of these units exists at all.

Think of it as the globalization of brattiness.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 26, 2007 1:44 PM