Wii 'Scalping?' - Retailer Responds To Claims

Thursday ArsTechnica published a story about a small Missouri/Illinois video game chain selling their inventory of Wiis on eBay instead of selling to it's in-store customers. Apparently an employee of the chain, Slackers, contacted them claiming the stores sell their entire inventory of Wiis on eBay at a $150 markup over retail price.

"In the past year, none of the 12 [Slackers locations] have sold any Wiis except for a one-time promotional deal, where we did force customers to buy a game with it," the employee told Ars Technica. "The real crime is that we get Wii shipments regularly. In fact, right now we have about 20, but none of them make it to the store front. They all get put on the store's eBay site at a minimum $499.99 buying price."
Our source then told us that the price has since been lowered to $399.99, (they weren't moving at $499) and sure enough, there are three Wiis available through Slackers' eBay storefront at $399.99.

The next day ArsTechnica followed up with a post stating 'numerous' employees of the chain have contacted them to confirm the store's practice.
A visit to the Slackers website reveals a different story. An official statement by the chain called ArsTechnica's claims 'sweeping and factually incorrect statements' and stated they make no profit on Wii sales. When addressing the chain's eBay sales, it said:

Does Slackers’ sell Wii systems on eBay? Yes. This holiday season, Slackers has sold a total of 5 Wii systems on eBay at a price of $399.99, while a couple units remain in stock. Why do we sell the Wii systems on eBay? Like all small retailers we are trying to improve our profile on the web. We have a website and an eBay store site. By offering even a small quantity of a hot system like the Wii on-line drives many hits to our sites. As for the price, Mr. Kuchera claims we are “scalping.” At the price Slackers offers on-line, when you factor our cost for the unit and shipping, and after eBay and PayPal take their cut, Slackers makes less than $75 per unit we sell on-line. For this holiday season, we made a whopping $375 from the eBay sales – that’s it. We gave away 2 systems at a cost of $500, and on every other system, we either broke even or lost money. Slackers does not make money on the sale of Wii systems.

A look into Slackers eBay feedback history reveals they indeed only sold 5 Wii systems during November and December for $379-399. Five out of 44 units they were able to get during the holiday season they sold on eBay. The majority of their eBay inventory consists of game accessories, DVDs and older games for sale. This hardly seems like the chain is 'scalping' their entire Wii inventory on eBay, in fact it seems to disprove the employee's claims. Unless Slackers has other eBay usernames they sell under, they are not selling as many Wiis on eBay as the employee claims.
One things for sure-with only 11 stores, I'll bet this is not a good time for Slackers' employees as the higher ups are undoubtedly going to try to find out what employees are spreading this information.