Wal-Mart's Terrible Nintendo Wii Knock-Offs

MaryAlan writes "Wal-Mart is now selling an electronic LCD game in the kid's section that resembles a Wiimote so closely that even Wal-Mart employees can't tell them apart in a picture. But the games — made by ToyQuest out of L.A. — are complete and utter crap, to the point of being unplayable. Their only redeeming feature is that they look like the Nintendo Wii, which means Wal-Mart is relying on brand confusion to sell any of these things to unsuspecting customers. There is a gallery of photos online, so you can take a look at side-by-side pictures with a true Wiimote, down to the fake speaker on the front. "

Comments

unethical

[rice_burners_suck]

I think this is a highly unethical business practice which must be stopped. It is somewhat akin to companies in China producing brand-name knock-offs that so closely resemble the original product that they can only be described as counterfeit.

The best thing to do is to take a few minutes of your time and send a short, concise, and polite letter to:

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Attn: Customer Service
702 S.W. 8th Street
Bentonville, AR 72716

Believe me, they will notice your letter and do something about it.

Re:unethical

[aichpvee]

Three points:

1) This "story" is really OLD. It did the rounds on the Internet MONTHS ago.

2) As stupid as I'm sure a lot of walmart employees are, I have a hard time thinking even many of them would be able to confuse these two items.

3)
a. Either zonk has trouble telling the two apart and thinks this is legitimate "news."
-or-
b. zonk believes that it has already been posted on /. and is posting it again just to make a dupe.

Re:Obvious

[KingSkippus]

I hope you get to +5 for that comment, because you're right on the mark. The reason why there's no huge incentive for Japanese workers to unionize is because the work culture is much different over there. I'm not saying it's necessarily better in every way, but there are reasons why U.S. workers had to unionize when they did. Working conditions were simply intolerable to the point of being inhuman, a situation they haven't had to deal with over there, thanks to a different culture and different regulations on what corporations can and can't do.

In our relentless strive for economic freedom, we've given corporations way too much power, power that corporations don't have in other countries such as Japan. As a result, we've had to, over time, develop organizations to protect ourselves from that which we have created. :-(

It's ironic that so many countries have learned lessons from us so well, lessons that we ourselves still haven't picked up on. While they're learning from our mistakes, we just keep right on making them.