Zhu Zhu Pet Countdown: Still No Robot Hamster? Here Are Your Zhu Zhu Options

I’m not quite sure why I feel the need to track the Zhu Zhu Pet fad, but I do. (Note to self: File “Zhu Zhu” in the category of “Unresolved Issues,” somewhere between “Never Got Air Jordans” and “Wasn’t Allowed to Go to Beastie Boys Concert in 8th Grade.”) With one week before Christmas, here’s how things are looking, Zhu Zhu-wise.

Toys R Us (via the WSJ) says it will have at least 100 Zhu Zhu toys at each of its stores today, and that more shipments will be coming in over the weekend and next week. This very well may be true, but it also seems like a pretty good ploy for getting shoppers to pop into the stores on a regular basis—and if there aren’t any Zhu Zhus, perhaps the shoppers will be inclined to buy something else. The WSJ reports that Toys R Us has a special Zhu Zhu promo on Saturday:

it will have the newest line of Zhu Zhu hamsters—Jilly, Winky, Scoodles and Nugget—available to the first 50 customers at stores on Saturday.

Meanwhile, the Zhu Zhu business continues to boom over at eBay. eBay, which has created a digital heat map to show what parts of the country are buying the most Zhu Zhus (or at least buying them on eBay), just sent me a bunch of Zhu Zhu stats, including:

More than 550,000 Zhu Zhu Pets and related items have been purchased to date in 2009 on eBay

The number of Zhu Zhu Pets and related items purchased the first two weeks of December (12/1 – 12/15) already surpass total amount purchased in all of November

For the first two weeks of December alone, there were more than 5 million Zhu Zhu Pet and related item searches on eBay

If you’re truly desperate, or simply have a lot of time to kill and want to make some people laugh (and perhaps make some children cry), you might try to put together your own Zhu Zhu (or rather, “Zhi Zhi”), as suggested by Consumerist and demonstrated in this YouTube video.

As Consumerist notes, to make the Zhi Zhi, you’ll need a cheap remote-control car, glue, some fur, and “probably a beer.”

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