You're not alone. Our local store is a baron land when it comes to TFs. A family member recently found me a Brainstorm from her local branch at the weekend as ours is useless!
Oh. My. Primus. Okay, you win the we-have-it-worse-than-you prize. About half that in my part of the world, and still kinda-pricey.
How often do you check? The turnover rate in both my branches is pretty high so it could be you've just got very unlucky
You will as soon as he finds Motormaster. He's got everyone else. Edit: I think he already got Motormaster? Now that i'm thinking back to his posts on social media.
Hey, I wonder if it was uneconomical to include RID Warrior Optimus Prime in a wave with Drift (like in the US) as well!
Well I can't find anything in my local stores I mean the tf pegs are empty and never filled so I am forced to shop online and a private seller who is fantastic
Righty, Masterforce.co.uk will have another delivery of wave 2 next week which is mostly accounted for but then there's another delivery of them at the end of the month. Because Hasbro have been bizarre recently I'm limiting the preorders we accept just in case. Hasbro are hard work at the moment. They offered a load of cases of Voyagers as a last chance because production was stopping, then as soon as they sold as much of it as they could, they.dumped the rest onto the UK market cheap. Combiner Wars got a simultaneous release in Europe which meant that us importers were fucked over. When wave 2 went up for order in the US, importers placed small orders in case it turned up at retail. However the retailers were struggling with drag strip pegwarming and.didn't order enough wave 2 to make it worthwhile. Leader Megatron in the Armada tooling was about as welcome as a fart in a lift so cases being split 50/50 between the two designs resulted in more conservative ordering. Then Hasbro revised the voyager assortments to 3 Ops and 1 Silverbolt per case which was insane considering op was redundant so far. Hasbro have cancelled lots of solid case releases like g1 ish deco.Megatron and legends bombshell. The next legends wave is 2 new characters, 1 old which was a good seller and 1 shit seller. The new deluxes don't even have pictures yet but Hasbro are touting them. The madness continues in the Star Wars line as Hasbro.announced 3 new figures then cancelled them within days only to re offer them a week later. Today Hasbro have scrapped all planned reissues of earlier waves and pretty much everything that isn't related to the new film. Hasbro is now so unpredictable that CW wave 1 sold x amount for me. Wave 2 has had sales of nearly 3 times that figure. Wave 3 (at retail again) has had similar sales to wave 1 and now wave 4's sales are 1/16th of wave 1 but hopefully will pick up once they have pictures of the product. Good huh?
It's sad to hear Dragstrip has messed up the wave 1 sales. Guys, I know a lot of people are not users of the scramble city aspect...but was buying a Dragstrip to plug on your superion for a few months such a bad thing? We knew the other Stunticons were coming. That said... If people have no plans to make Menasor, you wouldn't buy Dragstrip. You'd wait for Air Raid. And here is where everything is going belly up. Nobody knows what anybody wants. It's all guess work. Imagine the scene: rep a: 'hey what if people don't want Menasor? Maybe they only want Superion? If that happens they won't have need for Dragstrip. That will affect wave 1 sales' rep b: 'What do you mean, not want Menasor? If we hold Air Raid to ransom, they'll have to buy Dragstrip else they won't have a full combiner' Rep a 'But G1 collectors won't do that. Plus, this Optimus won't sell either. Traditionally, Optimus wasn't this type of combiner, collectors won't be interested' rep b 'Collectors? These are for kids! Optimus is candy to these buggers! And if parents see 4 planes on the shelves they'll get confused, and the kids will get bored playing with planes that all look the same!' Later that day: Rep b 'So, combiner wars, we'll make a sweet Ultra Magnus and a G1 style Megatron. We'll over price them at $55 each! Collectors will pay that!' Hasbro has no idea what CW is being marketed towards. They seem to think they can stretch over both markets, using business tricks to manipulate us. They mix Dragstrip and OP redundantly into wave 1 thinking it'll win the kids, unaware that they are affecting sales to collectors. On the flip side, masterpiece and 3P sales have told them adult collectors have dispensable income and no idea of worth and gobble up anything at anyprice, so price Magnus and Megatron at $50 each! No parent or child can pay that! Neither can some of us collectors!! I WANT Magnus and Megatron...but that's straight up £100! I can't do that! Then, 2 Megatrons, in the same wave? In the same case? How is that going to fly off shelves at the same time?!I was already invested in getting the ACTUAL combiners from this line!! Each combiner is 90-100 bucks to complete as is! This line will not sell well, because it has no idea who it is aimed at! If it's aimed at collectors, release the teams properly, either in complete waves or go the Takara route and do gift sets. And drop stupid repaints like Optimus and Optimus Maximus! If it's aimed at kids, mix the waves well, SELL THE GODDAMN WAVES, advertise the gimmick better and LOWER THE GODDAMN PRICES! THEN we have Takara blowing it all out the water-Collectors will flock to Takara with the real G1 teams...sales of Wave 3 will now be hindered because everybody will buy Defensor from TT because they want a real Groove! I've given up waiting on wave 3. I just pre-orederd TT's Defensor. So after complaining I can't find wave 2 at retail, I'll now blissfully ignore shelves full of wave 3! Hasbro don't know what fans want, and at times fans don't know what they want! Everybody hypothesizes on what they want, then when it hits shelves people don't buy it. Some of us can't afford it, some of us can't find it, and others refuse to plug helicopters and Racing cars onto their combiners as if the polar opposite energy is going to kill them! Again, then there is the legitimate aspect of those who genuinely have no interest in building Menasor. Either way, Dragstrip hangs on shelves and convinces retailers they won't shift wave 2 because wave 1 is still essentially not selling... What a freakin' mess!! (sorry for the long post/rant!)
And who's to blame for marooning Dragstrip with three Aerialbots? Hasbro. Double dog derpy to do it in a market that's notorious for skipping entire waves too. That's entirely on Hasbro. Now, leader Jetfire being clearanced down to $35? That's our fault and exactly why we can't have nice things. All of that moaning about Classics Jetfire being too small...was it just an act?
It's an idiot move when they know their track record is to skip waves, yes. But on the flip side, what you say about Gen. Jetfire can be applied to Dragstrip also; Collectors moan constantly about the AOE crap etc, how many times do we see posts telling Hasbro to make combiners, how many people cry out for G1 characters...and yet here we are; G1 combiner characters sitting un-sold on pegs. We get given 'what we say we want' then make up reasons why it's not good enough :/ I'm not denying Hasbro is at fault. I blame Hasbro for Gen Jetfire purely on price. I realise I may be in a minority, but these 'leader class' figures are not worth £50. Not when 2-3 are coming out all at once. I don't say this out of entitlement, or hate for corporate bigwigs. It's a truth; no matter how big a fan I am, I can't buy what I can't afford. It's a real factor to be considered when selling something. Nobody can deny the business of making waves more exciting by mixing cars and planes and replacing the 'real' characters has backfired-but it's also sad that we finally have good, G1, combiners sitting at retail for retail prices and they are still being met with various forms of derision :/ Lack of any real communication between retailer and consumer is of no help, and the internet and it's ability to give us choices has changed how these things sell on a fundamental level. If Hasbro had researched more, listened to voices, they may have known swapping Groove out for Rook was a bad idea, because they would loose to TT. They may have known Dragstrip wouldn't sell, and people wanted Air Raid AND Slingshot. A big part of this problem is people making product don't ask the right questions, and consumers give less than trustworthy answers... Couple that with dumbass distribution and the fun really begins. Why was Gen. Jetfire not good enough for the masses? Who knows...
To be fair there's a couple of issues you've identified that are beyond Hasbro's control: 1. The UK is still an overpriced economy 2. Hasbro can't run a business that frequently has to consider exchange rates. Jetfire is available for $50 in some places, for example. I think the whole of wave 2 not coming to UK or EU is a crap move. You can't build sales momentum by not releasing more products.
Other signs of Hasbro being weirder than usual these days: - New RID Legion and Warrior figures already out in Asia (stocked by multiple online retailers), solicited to US-based online retailers with an "August/September" ETA. No official images yet even though we've already seen them from Asia. - New RID One-Step Changers in stock not only at Asian retailers, but at US-based online retailers too. No official images yet. - The only reason we've seen Legends Rodimus and Skywarp (before their recent release in Singapore) is because they were accidentally leaked via the Hasbro website back in January, even before the Groove/Viper/Warpath wave was officially revealed. I say "accidentally" because Hasbro took down the listings from their website again. Were it not for the leak, those would be just as "mysterious" as the Deluxes. All this weird lack of details makes it seem like someone new is in charge of certain departments at Hasbro who think they can artificially control the flow of information in the internet age. Meanwhile, the cancellations and re-solicitations sound like someone new is in charge of the logistics department too, trying out some stuff just for the sake of "change" and then panicking when things don't work out exactly as projected.
As far as I know Jetfire was sold in a case by himself, and at a time when his only competition was AOE Leaders. I honestly can't say this decision has affected me much---I used to live in a country that got the scraps from the scraps UK received, so ordering online from abroad was hard-wired into my collector consciousness for the past 10 years. I think the Jetfire situation just goes to show that we are not as big or hot a market as we think we are [as collectors, not just in the UK]. If anything, we cannot be trusted on as a stable market for various reasons-- --We frequently hold back on items when they are not G1/MP enough or when a 3rd party figure is around the corner --We are unpredictable when it comes to spending habits. People don't want to pay [example] 45 pounds for a leader class figure, but they will gladly pay 45 pounds for the deluxe sized MMC Arcee. And lastly, but more importantly, the wave system by hasbro, coupled with their later "premium" repaints, or takara's later releases, pretty much guarantees failure. All the folk who bought the AoE autobot/dinobot figures from the first waves? They were "punished" by hasbro's release of the premium sets, movie-coloured dinobots and premium ldr prime just 5-6 months down the road, with their reveals coming only a month or two after the release of the first waves.
The UK didn't get Leader Jetfire so his fate isn't our "fault" and probably sounds like more of a victim of something US buyers can get away with but we rarely do over here "it's too expensive so I'll get it on clearance" How many times has that been said on here? Uncountable. Wave fuckups also result from the fact that One-size definitely doesn't fit all when it comes to different national markets. The U.S. Had almost no chance of not getting Wave 2 (despite the disparities of distribution) but Europe doesn't have a lock on every planned Wave and hasn't done in the UK since the days of Woolworths. Therefore splitting teams up only means that the U.S. Has to wait to complete a Combiner, elsewhere it might mean not completing the set at all. This either hasn't dawned on Hasbro yet, or they really just don't care and won't adjust cases/production for markets outside the U.S. Isn't it great to be important.
Too many words for me to read everything but you can't give exchange rates as an excuse for Hasbro. Exchange rates aren't easy but as an international company Hasbro can't be given a pass if if screws up the handling of that.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. Fluctuations can't be monitered all the time, but slapping a'50' on every leaders is stupid. '50' in the U.S isn't '50' in the U.K etc. regardless of changing rates. It's either stone lazy or a blatant rip-off. I gave up paying 3rd party prices, regardless of how little a production run it has it's too much. The whole thing got too snobby very quickly IMO. As for people being burned by premium or platinum releases-this is exactly my point about the internet--Hasbro appears to be VERY IGNORANT of how the market has changed due to the internet age. 'Exclusives' are hardly that anymore. I have ZERO reason to acknowledge wave 3 now-I can and have ordered Takara's. I want Groove.
