Yesterday, with the statewide switchover to digital television just hours away, the hot commodity wasn’t the converter boxes that people with older TVs need in order to watch over-the-air signals beginning this morning. The stores had plenty of those.

But at Target, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and other retailers, the shelves had been stripped bare — or nearly bare — of the antennas that consumers need to plug into the converter boxes to see the stations properly.

The old-fashioned rabbit ears many people have been using aren’t going to cut it. Even some of the more sophisticated antennas might not be good enough to pull in all the stations people are used to.