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Originally Posted by MGlitch
The world sort of caught fire this year disrupting supply chains for electronics in a major way.
Nintendo who is easily a bigger company than Kobo has struggled to get the Switch out to vendors until recently.
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Switches are still not out (unless you want to be "scalped" on price). Apparently people set up "bots" to buy every one in the supply chain, then they jack up the price (often doubling the normal price) and sell them on sites like Walmart and Amazon. The only reason I know all this is because my son wanted to buy one (right at the beginning of the lockdowns) and they still haven't showed up the regular sites. (He got lucky, for some reason our local Fred Meyer's got six of them in a couple months ago and there happened to be three left when I went into the store, so I picked one up for him. They haven't shown up since.) I've kept myself on the B&H product notification list just so I can see when these things actually come back at normal price. So far, every two weeks I get a "we haven't forgotten you but they're not here yet" message.
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EDIT: J
ust checked B&H, they now show Switches back-ordered until November 16th, so this shows how badly the supply chain was damaged. I'm guessing Kobo is in th same position.)
In the news section there's an article linked quoting someone at Kobo on the need to diversify vendors so not all manufacturing is from one region. So they're definitely having troubles getting the Kobos manufactured. Still, if Walmart sold the Kobo Clara, they should give more information than the one word, "Delayed." That's horrible customer service.