My point was that if they only release twenty toys a year, all twenty might be shit you don't want. Law of averages and all that. Then you'd have nothing cool to buy all year.Shockwave wrote:I guess it's just a difference in preference then. I'd prefer to have more opportunity to get the toys I want than to be "shotgunned" with a bunch of shit I don't want.
They actually do that: often a 'new' wave of toys will also include figures from previous waves, albeit in reduced quantities. Sometimes a 'shortpacked' figure will have a wider release in a later case revision, makeups of them aren't as clear-cut as you'd think.And really with as many lines as they have, there's really no reason why they can't just do both. Maybe switch things up a bit. Alternate waves between new shit and restock old shit. Then everyone gets shit they want. Case in point, if they were still refreshing the GDO cases with Hot Spot, more people would have Hot Spot.
As for stores and how they order things, that actually has a lot to do with why you only see things sometimes. See, a lot of stores, especially these days, order shit-tons of the first wave/case assortment of a line. Just piles of them, and throw them in the back. That's why you might see shelves get lower for a while, but then they just get restocked with more 'Wave 1' stuff, over and over again. This hit the later movie lines, especially ROTF, rather hard. It was cheaper (shipping et al) for stores just to order a whole season's worth of toys at once and sit on them until the next reset, than to order them piecemeal throughout the season, ensuring that later waves/cases would get shipped to them over a more natural progression. This is why a lot of late-line toys end up being hard to find; not many stores order them because by the time the line is winding down, they've got enough stock of earlier waves to just sit on until the line resets. It's why a lot of that hard-to-find late-line stuff turns up at closeout chains like Marshall's or Ross instead. That stuff's all produced and ready to go, but no regular retail chain wants to order it because their shelves are still being refilled with old shit they ordered four months ago.
In the case of the GDO waves, saw that my TRU did restock those a few times, but they were still rather hard to find for many people. This all comes down to economic rule #1: Supply and Demand. The amount of those toys produced, ordered, and shipped to the stores was likely based on sales expectation numbers the people representing TRU came up with. Yeah, they conceivably could have ordered more than they did, but their statistics showed that they might end up with more unsold stock if they did that, which is something they don't want, since that's effectively money lost. Given that it was an all-repaint line that was already exclusive to one retail chain, sales expectations for the GDO line were clearly not that high to begin with, which would explain why most TRUs only got a medium amount of them.
That's another sales expectation thing, and it's technically a good thing on Hasbro's part. The idea is that you want more of the toys you expect to sell to be packed into a case, with the ones you don't expect to do quite as well taking up less space. The idea is to avoid the dreaded shelfwarmers by making it so that the toys you expect to warm won't have as much of a presence to do so, and the toys everyone will want will be readily available. Look at the first wave of Transformers Prime Robots in Disguise Deluxes/Revealers: Hasbro packed like three Bumblebees into those cases and only one Soundwave. Bumblebee's a kid-appeal character: He's bright yellow and stands out on the shelf, turns into a cool car, and is based on the memorable mascot of the bazillion-dollar movie franchise, kids fucking love Bumblebee, so Hasbro packed a ton of him in cases to make sure kids going down to the store with their parents could readily nab one off the shelves to beg their parents to buy. Soundwave, meanwhile, is a villain, which traditionally don't perform well in toylines, is an understated shade of blue that doesn't really grab your attention, lacks the most basic facets of a memorable character personality, and doesn't turn into the most cool or photogenic of vehicles. Hasbro doesn't really expect a bunch of the target audience to go after Soundwave, but they pack the toy in anyway because they know SOME kids (and collectors) will want him, so those are still sales to be made. Now in this case, that assortment backfired spectacularly, as kids had finally grown sick of Bumblebee, leaving piles of him all over the shelves at stores, and collectors went crazy trying to get Soundwave, but you can still see what they were going for here. Hasbro can only make the best estimated guesses that they can, and that's why some toys get more priority over others.And that's another thing that annoys me about toy distribution: Shortpacking. Why the fuck do they do this? Seriously, why design a toy if you're only going to release like, ten of them? That's the kind shit that should be left to TFCC/Botcon exclusives, not retail product that you want everyone to buy and have access to.
Hey, you know I know where you're coming from. I hunted for an Animated Arcee for weeks, and ordered most of the GDO figures I bought straight from TRU's online store. The caveat with the scalper factor is that it's difficult for Hasbro to predict. Just because it ends up shortpacked doesn't guarantee that collectors (or kids) will want it, and even 'longpacked' toys can end up as desirable scalper-bait (Sunstreaker vs. Octankor in the first Universe wave was a good example of this). That such things can also vary depending on region is another factor that's difficult for Hasbro to figure out in their distribution equation.Of course, I'm sure most of my frustration comes from living in the scalper capital of the world. If the toys aisles here didn't get picked clean the second shit drops I might not be so bitchy about it. But, that's the other thing is that the current model allows for that shit to happen and even causes it. I mean, If MP Starscream was getting refreshed throughout the year he was released and we knew he'd be available all year, do you think it would have been scalped as much as it did? Or even at all? What's the point of scalping something that you and your scalpee base knows is going to still be available later on? There would be no point to it.
Believe me, I don't spend my whole life on the internet either. I don't even visit any of Tigermegadeth's 'Top 10 Transformers fan-sites', just here and regular browsing of /toy/ is all. You just gotta pay attention to what people are talking about when you are on (I know we had at least two threads about those GDO toys back when they were first revealed), and it's not like threads here move quickly enough that you could 'miss' them. See, at least you always feel like you're a part of everything that happens here!As for the internet thing, again, that's making a pretty big assumption about "fandom". Not everyone has unlimited hours to spend on the internet. In fact, I know a lot of people that don't really spend a lot of their free time online. I run into this attitude a lot on TFW regarding discussion threads that new members weren't there for. Like every time someone who just joined starts a "FIRRIB" thread and swear to God, the first ten posts are all "oh not this again" or "Weren't you here for the last one" and shit like that. Well, no, they weren't there for the last one. That's the point. Not everyone lives their entire lives online.
I dunno, maybe I'm more atypical than I thought in liking TF so much that I'm always keeping an eye out for whatever the latest toy releases are going to be. Plus, like you, I know you have to keep on exactly when stuff's going to be hitting stores to have a chance of getting it before the scalpers do. So maybe that's a contributing factor to my attitude in keeping on these things. *shrug*
