Bunco Is Back

The old dice game is being played in suburban homes all across the nation, as neighborhood bunco leagues form, women get together to roll dice, chat ... and eat. About 59 million women in the U.S. have played bunco, with 21 million playing on a regular basis. Six out of 10 women said they made buying decisions based on recommendations from members of their bunco group. So P&G decided to jump on the bunco bandwagon.

The admission of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE:WMT) on Monday that it had "found" a new hidden cache of the hot holiday gift item T.M.X Elmo (tickle me xtreme?) caused massive hysteria this week and a flood of customers who had tried to get an Elmo for months. It seemed that, suddenly, everybody wanted to buy one of the T.M.X Elmo dolls from the newly discovered quantity Wal-Mart announced. This pent-up demand and subsequent website traffic actually brought the website of the nation's biggest retailer to its knees yesterday. Walmart.com was down for a brief period during the day.

With Wal-Mart announcing that it would make the new cache of Elmo dolls available at noon (EST) every day until just before Christmas, that was just asking for the equivalent of a huge line outside the store and mass pushing and shoving when the doors actually opened. In fact, in this case, shoppers all got caught in the entry door and nobody could actually get it. Is that picture being painted good enough?

Well, what's surprising here is that the world's largest retailer apparently can't anticipate web traffic to the level it needs to, even with its IT resources. Remember that on Black Friday, Wal-Mart's website was down for almost 10 hours due to a still-undetermined technical issue (most likely), with 5am web visitors seeing a "closed for maintenance" sign upon trying to access www.walmart.com.

Let the consumer virtual hysteria being anew -- as retailer Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE:WMT) has located a "hidden cache" of the T.M.X. Elmo doll (apparently) and will be selling 4,000 dolls every day this week on its Web site at www.walmart.com. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. initially experienced a severe shortage of the hot holiday gift item, but now will be sitting pretty on sales of the doll, which are likely to go nuts as December 25th gets closer. Let's start the race, please.

The T.M.X. Elmo doll will become available at Wal-Mart's website at precisely 12:00pm EST today (get in cyberspace line now) for a "first come, first serve basis" and at the price of $39.97 each. If only I could be watching Wal-Mart's web traffic stats in real-time today.

With retail experts warning that the T.M.X Elmo would be in short supply over the holiday season, the doll instantly sold out almost everywhere when it was launched in September. Mattel, Inc. (NYSE:MAT) -- the doll's manufacturer - -warned that it would not have enough supply to meet demand, causing a frenzy that I suspect may have been by design and not accident. In fact, I wonder if Wal-Mart announcement here was designed? The retailer said that "We recently secured more Elmo inventory from our supplier and we wanted to give our customers one big opportunity get the toy before Christmas."

I agree with many analysts here in that Wal-Mart probably designed this to ensure a ton of new Elmo dolls would be available just a few weeks before Christmas as a way to entice shoppers to its virtual store and pump sales. It's not a new trick, but a sly one.

Just when I thought some parents couldn't act any loonier, the venerable Tickle-Me-Elmo doll has made a strong comeback in popularity, as Mattel, Inc. (NYSE:MAT) designed TMX Elmo (that's Tickle Me Extreme) for the 2006 holiday selling season. Many of you may remember the Cabbage Patch Doll craze of the 1980s, and I remember watching newspaper ads go up left and right for those dolls, asking thousands of dollars.

Parents would rush out to buy all they could, with the intention of re-selling the dolls for a profit. Times have not changed at all -- just the medium. EBay has now replaced the local classified ads and other physical mediums to ensure top dollar is made for goods that are high in demand -- but low in the supply side.

The holiday season each year is a study in standard economics, with hot sellers, especially those with surprise popularity, demonstrating the supply and demand pricing theories that have been found in economics textbooks for over a century of not much, much longer.

The TMX Elmo doll, whose predecessor was a holiday gift sensation just a decade ago, is back with its eXtreme 10th-anniversary edition. And unsurprisingly, eBay to explode a little with the new dolls going for $5,000 and more. I wonder if there will be an "11th anniversary" edition. Heh.