There are a few options to handle this kind of a situation. You can keep hunting all over town, check to see what is available online, or give your child a lesson in patience or not getting what he or she wants.

Driving all over town is often much too time consuming, not to mention plain exhausting. It's rarely your best choice these days, unless you can call a store and get them to promise to hold the toy for you should it be in stock at a distant location. This can be a bit risky, since the toys sometimes are not held, and you can drive a distance just to find out that it's gone.

Shopping online has its advantages. Auction websites often have toys available that you cannot find anywhere else. If the toy is too popular you may have to pay a premium price for it, but it can be worth it if this is what will make your child truly happy.

Giving your child a lesson in patience can be very much worthwhile if you know the item should be available again in a couple weeks or months. Few popular toys vanish permanently from the store shelves. It happens some of the time, but not so often that it's your only choice to pay a high price for a particular toy.

You can also give a lesson in how marketing can make a toy more seem interesting than it really is. This can be particularly effective if one of your child's friends gets the toy. Your child can find out first hand what someone else really thinks of it, not just right away but over a few weeks. This can be a great lesson in how marketing makes people perceive things. It probably won't stop the "I want's" but it gives you some ammunition against them.

But there is certainly something to be said for finding that hard to get toy. There's the light in your child's eye as they open the one present they really, truly wanted. That's a hard thing to give up sometimes, even when the lesson is good. The younger the child the harder the lesson can be to understand, and you have to use your judgement to decide if it's time for that kind of a lesson.