Turkeys were forced to take a backseat as Tesco's most popular Christmas line yesterday, as shoppers battled to buy one of the grocery giant's secret stash of 2500 PlayStation 2s.

Tesco put Sony's video games console and DVD player on sale at 2pm (GMT) yesterday at its Peterborough, Watford, Cardiff, Inverness and Newcastle stores. Eager shoppers snapped up the consoles within an hour, a Tesco spokesman told vnunet.com, making it one of the chain's fastest selling lines ever.

He estimated that in the five stores where PlayStation 2s went head to head with turkeys (about £10), Tesco's perennial Christmas best seller, the console would have outsold the turkey by more than 2:1.

In a cunning promotional stunt, the grocery giant claimed to have bought the PlayStation 2s over from Continental suppliers to beat UK shortages, placing them on sale yesterday.

Less than 200,000 of the consoles were made available in the UK before Christmas, because Sony could not make them quick enough to meet global demand.

Some purchasers have even sold on their machines for hefty profits on the second-hand market and through auctions on websites. Persuading an owner to part with one is now the only option for prospective purchasers, as they have now sold out everywhere.