Walmart is selling tfs again?
Oh.

 

In my humble opinion Hasbro should've slowed down when designing Bruticus in the first place.

 

I still can't get over how so many people still depend on finding things at retail. I gave that shit up years ago..

 

AOE's absurd ammount of cheap toys shelf-warmed so hard that most stores I found no longer carry transformers. OR look similar to what's posted here.

 

Really? My stores have bigger displays than that.


Okay, like a fourth bigger.

 

I prefer not to pay the higher price of online retailers nor do I care to have to keep up with when HTS or something has a sale or not. Plus it's easier to budget with in store stuff for me. I'm in no rush to get stuff first; the majority of the time I visit a store it's on the way anyway. It's also nicer to see figures in person before purchase.
I just can't get into depending on online stores for this stuff.

 

Plus it's fun to hunt down these figures. At least for me it is.

 

Distribution across the US is slow and spotty at best (to the frustration of most collectors and some children & their parents), and though that's mainly the fault of the big-box stores, Hasbro seems unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

Once upon a time, I too enjoyed hunting the various Walmarts & Targets in my area until my prey became nearly extinct. Now BBTS, HTS, Amazon, & EBAY are my occasional expensive alternative when gas-wasting, time-eating, cross-town searches prove useless.

Higher prices, cheaper/hollow plastic, less paint, and no new product on barren store shelves, yup there's a winning sales strategy, that has been going on for years now...  

 

I'm just saying that if you rely on hunting, you may NEVER find a certain figure. Especially at the end of a series, that last wave can be a bitch.

While gas prices currently aren't a factor, TIME is, for me, at least. The prices on BBTS and Amazon aren't much different from retail. My time is more valuable than anything, so preordering what I want and 99.9% guaranteeing I get the figures I want is so much less stressful. Definitely not fun to hunt for something that may not even be out there when you could be doing something more productive.

 

They've hit Rochester NY - one full set at Henrietta WalMart, took all four  

 

So every major TF site now has sightings for these:
Seibertron (Toys"R"Us in Raleigh, North Carolina)
TFormers (Target in Chicago, Illinois)
Allspark (Walmart in Henrietta/Rochester, New York)

 

Got this set yesterday at Target in Irvine, CA

They had 2 sets on the shelf - I bought 1