No,my walmarts have decent TF toy selections.

 

thenatureboywoo was not making a blanket statement with his post. He did the exact same thing that you did with your post by simply contributing to the conversation and giving an example from personal exeperience.

To add my own personal exeperience to the mix, it's not just from my one local Wal*mart that I can comment from, but from the several that I've frequented over the last month over a good portion of eastern North Carolina. Wal*mart vastly overordered on wave 1 of Generations and HftD figures. Also, the other persons who report in the NC Sightings thread generally report the same. Additionally, I've talked with a few members here on TFW2005.com who are spread out over the US reporting much the same. To summarize all of this, I think it's pretty safe to say that, Wal*mart overorderd on wave 1 of Generations/HftD toys.

This tends to be Wal*mart's trend at some point with waves. They base their order placements from previous sales, and TF sales have been up quite a bit, hence their orders. Their larger size can accomodate the larger shelfspace, too. They can also keep figures on the shelf longer, whereas a store like Target needs their shelfspace more.

As Wollstone said, it can come down to an individual store sometimes, but generally speaking, Wal*mart has the same trends like what I've described above.

This is NOT the trend here in the southeastern US. Wal*mart stores here tend to rarely drop their prices significantly. More often that not here over the last few years is that Wal*mart will place items on "clearance", but not lower the price.

 

A few of us locally had to take SKU's in to our WM's in order to get Wave 1 on the shelf. Even the employee herself said the boxes were waiting out back for over a month. We're still on wave 1 gen figures since the summer... 

 

My main question is WILL walmart get the newer waves of hftd and generations and if they do will they be in normal saturation? Its nearing November and walmarts still have overstock of wave 1. January will be the rts reset so will walmart skip the rest of the waves or will they have nothing but the newer waves of current fighures while rts is supposed to be out?

 

Walmart has dropped the ball, I haven't bought a single figure from there them since Feb.

I would prefer to get my figures from them since they're usually the cheapest. But now they take foreever to get anything that's anything.

Maybe things will pick up around the holidays but Meh, if they don't.
TRU and Target aren't that much better with new releases, which is why HTS has been my outlet the past month.

 

i think Walmart's size is a benefit and a detriment. it has the resources and infrastructure to guarantee swift and accurate distribution.

the problem lies with individual stores. having worked for them, there are too many wannabe indian chiefs running around second guessing the Big Chief's intentions and that creates logjams.

Like for the upcoming Thanksgiving-Christmas holidays, our particular Walmart will order way too much of certain items and wind up with a huge sale right before the doors close on Christmas. and still can't give it away.

(Like ordering 5 full pallets of 5 gallon bottles of cooking oil one year and only selling 2 of those pallets' worth by January.)

they don't let the Point of Sale (POS) system update, they don't let the department heads do manual updating, the assistant managers are just punching in orders or canceling shipments.

The Bentonville HQ collects tons of data and researches trends daily. and i respect that amount of work. the individual stores, it seems, they sometimes hate doing their homework.

 

My Walmart is horrible when it comes to restocking. I got my first generations figures at a Target about two or three weeks after the first sightings, and my Walmart didn't get the figures until three weeks after that. They're still going on wave one of all the current stuff (except for powercore combiners. They sold almost NONE of them and for some reason they started stocking wave two), and the most recent thing I've found was a Battle Blades Prime at a Walmart over 250 miles away from where I live when I was on a vacation, and I checked 5 walmarts on the way from where I live to where I found Prime. It's a bit ridiculous.

 

Another problem with Wal*mart (but also with other retail stores) is that with things like TFs, they're only counting them by UNITS. When they look at current stock, they may have 30 Tuner Mudflaps, but their scanner just tells them they have 30 UNITS on hand and don't need to order any more. This has little to do with case assortment waves, let alone individual characters.

 

Plus the first waves of new lines seem to get over-ordered by all retailers. Target is pretty bad this round (atleast here) because they had that big display when the two new lines were first released, and then consolidated it into about 6-8 pegs. Every time stock gets low, more wave 1 HFTD and Generations appear from the back room. Christmas season in a few weeks will take care of a lot of it. Just glad that Scourge and Wreck-gar are in the early waves of the next line, as I am hoping they won't be too tough to snag a few.

 

Bingo.

The Wal-Mart local to me, last I checked, was stocked full of Gears, Tuner Mudflaps, Skids, and WfC Bumblebee and OP. They aren't ordering any more figs until those are gone.

Do they care other stores are on Wave 4? Nope. To Wal-Mart, it's just numbers, they have Transformers and that's all that matters.

Not entirely sure what Hasbro can do to ensure a fresh batch of figures is hitting daily. They have to be aware of some of these issues by now.

 

Exactly. As long as they have enough product from the brand to stock their shelves, that's the extent of their interest.

Also, Wal*mart has the shelfspace and the budget to allow said figures to continually sit for long periods of time. Target, on the other hand, doesn't. Before the recession, Target would keep stock on a shelf for a certain period of time, and if it didn't sell, it was red tagged until it did. Target responded to the recession by drawing back on their orders. While they still clearance things, it's not nearly as much as they've had to in the past. Also, Target takes a little longer to do this, as they're slowly starting to have the capacity of what I've commented above about Wal*mart.

 

I actually haven't been in to walmart since the post movie lines started (very little of interest).

But for the last couple years walmart here has been much better about getting new stuff than TRU or Target. I'm assuming that's still the case.

Tformers are pretty much the only reason i go to that evil place.

 

I have to be honest here in saying that all stores in every location that carries TFs no matter where it is, the amount of product varies. As some have said. Walmart don't care how old a product is. they won't put out or order anything new until whatever happens to be clogging the pegs at the time sells. They don't get paid to care. they get paid to do what they are told. end of story. and if something doesn't sell they lose nothing. they just write it off. Walmart makes too much money to give a damn about what people are or are not getting. they have little interest about who's a fan of what. they just wanna make sure their shelves stay full of product.