Zune quest

Recently I decided I wanted a large-capacity portable music player with video capability. After deciding on my criteria and doing some research I settled on the Zune 80. It’s only a coincidence that I made my decision a week after it was released – the Zune hadn’t even been on my radar since I’d only heard negative things about the first generation Zune.

The first sign of trouble came when I went online looking at major retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Walmart…). None of them had Zune 80s in stock; they were either unavailable or backordered. No problem, right? The Zune 80s had just been released; of course demand was high and I wasn’t in desperate need of one. I could wait. There were two problems with that. First, I had a nice discount coupon at Best Buy and there was an online sale at Circuit City – unfortunately both expired that weekend. Second, I was worried the Zune 80 would go the way of the Nintendo Wii. It’s approaching Christmas and a salesman told me Zune 80’s scarcity was due to production problems. Ouch.

On Saturday I drove to multiple locations of Best Buy and Circuit City but none proved their online information wrong – none in stock. Eventually I decided to take advantage of Circuit City’s online sale regardless of how long I ended up waiting for the backorder. Then something unexpected happened. Circuit City’s website has an item-locator function where you can see which stores have a particular item in stock. I’d used this feature previously in my quest for the Zune 80 and came up empty. However, as I went through checkout I discovered that the Zune 80 could not be shipped. In store pick-up was my only option – at a location 50 miles away that didn’t appear in my initial search. Eh?

This is what confuses me. The item locator feature came up with 7 – 10 Circuit City locations based on my zip code – none of which had the Zune 80 in stock. However, when I placed an order, Circuit City now tells me that not only will they *not* ship it to me, but that I have to pick it up myself at a location too far away to show up on their item locator! What the --