Goodness gracious, we certainly are mired in the throes of the holiday shopping season, aren't we? Throngs of stressed consumers are one missed discount sale away from painting their faces with pig's blood and running amuck in the mall with crudely-fashioned spears. Having been a member of that "community on the edge of a nervous breakdown" this past weekend, the AtAT staff is well aware how close some of these people are to cracking-- so we're glad we steered clear of our local Circuit City location, because it sounds like people looking to score a good deal on Macs may have had their frustration levels pushed to the limits of human endurance.

See, Circuit City had advertised several Macs at $100 off the retail price, and even listed some extremely tempting deals on discontinued models. Really, who wouldn't want to snap up an original 300 MHz iBook for a mere $799.99 after rebate? But according to MacCentral, many shoppers who ventured into Circuit City hoping to pick up a cheap Mac instead found themselves faced with the three most dreaded words in the English language at this time of year: "out of stock." MacCentral spot-checked twenty Circuit City locations in "major US metropolitan areas" and found that "the majority of stores didn't have the configurations in stock." The ones that did generally only had a couple of systems to sell.

Worse yet, there were Demo Days events scheduled at Circuit City this weekend-- meaning that Mac fanatics were extolling the virtues of Apple's products to frazzled holiday shoppers who then couldn't even buy the products being demonstrated. We can see the situation now:

Demo Days Rep: ...and that's iMovie 2. See? Editing your home movies couldn't be simpler. And all you need is a digital video camera and an iMac DV.

Stressed-Out Shopper: That's perfect! My husband will love that! Thank you so much-- he's so difficult to shop for, and I was at the end of my rope!

DDR: All you need to do is pick out a color...

SOS: Indigo. It'll go with the drapes. Here's my credit card.

DDR: ...and, er, go somewhere else to buy one.

SOS: Excuse me?

DDR: Well, we're sort of out of stock.

SOS: But I just spent twenty minutes of shopping time with you while you persuaded me to buy one.

DDR: Yeah. Fun, wasn't it?

SOS: Eat lead, you time-sucking (though obviously intelligent and tasteful) retail spawn of Satan!

(Nasty, ratings-boosting violence ensues.)

If you find Circuit City's lack of inventory somewhat askew, you're not alone. After all, Apple's about to post a quarterly loss of up to a quarter of a billion dollars because of a massively overstocked retail channel; if they're not at Circuit City, just where are all those undersold Macs? And why would Apple and Circuit City spend time, money, and energy promoting merchandise that they don't have to sell? We're not big Circuit City shoppers ourselves, but we've heard rumors about the chain using rampant bait-and-switch tactics in the past... we wonder how many extra Wintel systems were sold this weekend?