Hey! Don’t bring logic into this NECA discussion hahaha! I agree 100% with your statement! I love NECA but some of their decisions make me scratch my head….
Neca is not the only company that has this problem, same goes for Hasbro, Stromtroopers, Cobra troopers, vipers, and future troop choices should have a made to order option, look at that sheild trooper two pack, sold out within two hours, and some people need more then six. There are only two companies that I buy from that handle orders right, S7 and Hot Toys, maybe the Mythic Legion people as well.
Maybe I'm a bit naive here, but how much of NECA's retail sales even go to "normies" rather than collectors or scalpers? Wouldn't they be much better off just selling most of their collector product direct through their website, or partnered with online stores like BBTS, and maybe having a separate line for retail consisting mostly of evergreen characters that sold well in the past and thus can safely be produced in much larger quantities? The thing is, with collector-focused items like the Punk Frogs, you're really toeing a pretty thin line at retail between scalpable commodity and pegwarmer. There is a finite demand for these things, and when dealing with MOQs and such you're better off underproducing so that at least everything sells, rather than overshooting even slightly which will leave stores with a bunch of unsellable product, unless you really think that a random mom will decide on a whim that her son's friend, who is probably obsessed with Fortnite and Minecraft, would really want a couple of random frogs for his birthday.
A couple of random frogs for 50 bucks no less. The exclusivity to Walmart and Target must be working out for them, though.
Randy has said previously that we, as fans, really underestimate how many people impulse buy the tmnt packs at target who would have never bought them if they weren’t in store. My guess is 90%+ of the tmnt figures that NECA sells go through target, and less than 10% come from these preorders. That’s why NECA has refused to even consider cancelling the target contract and going to online only. Despite the negative press.
Not that I don't believe him, but I wonder how he gets those metrics? Hardcore collectors can barely find his stuff on the shelves, how many just random shoppers happen to even spot these to impulse buy? I completely believe that if they had more turtles on the shelf people would impulse buy them, though.
It's worked out great for the main characters but once you get to the Muds, Frogs and Gecko's as you've been reading and people like us has been finding these characters with no problem.
Good question! I see plenty of…what appear to be…normies looking at the a-list pop-cultural stuff like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Godzilla, Bob Ross, Gremlins, BTTF, etc. at Target. And, I could see their eyes being caught by the Turtles themselves. But no normie knows or cares who the hell the rock soldiers, triceratons, frogs, Mondo, Muckman, etc. even are…which might explain part of the reason they have been so relatively easy to come by…that and scalpers probably know they are going to be in lower demand by collectors as well.
I've seen everything at target except the foot soldier so far. Also, when I picked up chrome done, he was in the toy aisle and not the neca section.
I agree that many of them would balk at the price! When the turtle 2-packs were first released, I took one to a Target associate (older lady) to see if it would scan…she looked at the price on her handheld and said, “Jesus Christ!”.
Lmao! Yeah, I've gotten plenty of those looks when checking out after I've actually found something in store. I really want to give Randy the benefit of the doubt a lot of the time but there's just something that, from my own experience, doesn't seem to fit. I know there's a ton of people that will check out the Funko pops as they're always typically next to the NECA section and sure, I'm not discounting that there could be some normies that might do an impulse buy but it seems somewhat unlikely. What I do see is some of the NECA TMNT sitting random places in random aisles and I'm assuming that's from the normies picking up the product, scanning it, bulging eyeballs, then just dumping it wherever they are. I made a number of acquaintances even friends with some of the target employees from the consistency in which I've tried to hunt these things down and trying to be my most polite self. Pretty much everyone gives me the same information that immediately upon setting them out they're gone. Whether it be the scalping game is strong, the collector's game is strong, or the fact that they only received 3 of the items within a 1-4 month period, they all fly off the shelf.
Very true but my mom was the same way with everything lol. It's their life frame of reference you know? "LAWD! THE PLAYSTATION IS HOW MUCH!" "JESUS! JORDANS ARE THAT MUCH?!?!?!!" My mom grew up on the southside of Chicago so apparently everything was cheap there during the late 1940's and 1950's. I feel like if my mother was alive and she saw how much I spent on college tuition, should would have passed out immediately. lol! Hey! Miss you mom but you were cheap.... Maybe cheap isn't the right word... TIGHT is probably more accurate.
Even in that case though, wouldn't it be more profitable if they just sold the recognizable characters like the turtles themselves and maybe Shredder, Splinter, April, etc. at retail, and kept all the weird stuff as online exclusives? Random parents or gift givers, if they buy anything at all, are definitely going to prefer buying the actual turtles over the frogs, who most people would see as a cheesy TMNT knockoff anyway. If I'm not mistaken, this was kind of the problem the vintage line ran into at retail too, because at least from my personal experience the basic turtles were NEVER on the shelves by the time I got into the line and while it was cool to pick up a Chromedome or Fugitoid, that's not really what any kid was hoping to get, and Playmates' remedy was to just introduce a mountain of variants and gimmicks of the main four, but that's not really what kids wanted either.
Never seen B&R, Casey 2pack and April 2pack. I was shocked to see the disguised in the wild and I knew if I didn't get it I wouldn't see it again. (I was right)
Oh I was talking about the newer releases being mentioned. Basically everything since krang. I never saw the ones you posted either lol. I saw the disguised set twice.
