We're 5 non-movie mainlines into the dumb retailers ordering a metric shit ton of wave 1 and basically sitting on them until wave 4 or 5 trickles in. Why doesn't Hasbro evenly pack wave 1 and maybe 2 with 8 separate toys and then use wave 3-5 to do their stupid case ratios with 7 Bumblebees and a 2nd run of somebody popular from wave 1 or 2? That way they'd overorder the cases with the most variety that usually end up unnecessarily scarce and underorder the stuff that would've clogged everything up if they'd done it the other way around.
Give this man a cookie! Seriously, I don't know why they are not learning from these fiascos of the last few years. This scenario seems logical to me, but maybe there is a legit reason why they don't want to do it this way. Can't imagine what that is, though.
Because some characters sell better than others and so the only way it's viable for Hasbro to make the less popular characters is to sell them to retailers in larger quantities. Now the retailers don't want shitloads of peg warmers, but to get the figures they do need they have no choice to buy a large number of cases. I would go into the maths of it, but I've posted it before and don't have time to do so again right now.
I'd just love the know why stores feel its necessary to overorder the shit out of the first wave, because there has never been a situation where they've needed that much product and it always comes back to bite them in the ass. You guys think TF Prime Wave 1 was bad? You should have seen the amount of Wave 1 stores ordered of Star Wars Vintage 2012, the Phantom Menace wave. Many people are STILL only finding that wave on shelves while the line is on Wave 4. Stores wanted the wave system so they had a rotating selection of new product on a regular basis, but they overorder Wave 1 so much that they just sit on that for six months, defeating the purpose.
At least the Star Wars cases have a good variety of characters. The Transformers cases seem to only have 3 or 4 different characters. Then 2 or 3 of those shelfwarm and we miss the new ones because they repack the same shelfwarming characters. I used to love hunting for figures but I have given up and gotten the last few releases on the internet. The extra money spent doing it that way saves me time and fuel. Seeing Bumblebee everywhere kills half the fun of this hobby.
Stores have never wanted the wave system, every single retailer would prefer a solid case of each figure so you can avoid the crap characters and buy in the popular ones. As I said before, that means that certain characters would never sell though and wouldn't be feasible for Hasbro to manufacture.
I call shenanigans here. We've been told over and over that the wave system was implemented at the behest of Walmart. There were assortments long before there were waves. Neither is an inherently bad concept but they seem to be combined in the worst possible way. Yeah, wave 1 usually hits early in the year and then, with the exception of Prime Bumblebee, the characters in it and on the show are long gone by the time Christmas rolls around. It's never made sense to me, especially in the years where the show aired for months without toys like Animated did.
he never sold because he never made it to brick n mortar retail, mainly due to the over abundance of.....Silverbolt and Geckobot i think? who were the scout class shelfwarmers of beast machines?
Wasn't this the situation with the first movie line? I seem to recall barren pegs for months, all throughout the fall of 2007. I thought that was the event that really kicked the wave 1 overordering madness into high gear.
I won't call you a liar , but rather misinformered. Explain to me how a store would determine if a character is going to sell or not. Who at Target, Walmart, or Kmart has the capacity to predict that one character is crap while the other is an ace? Transformers is a kids toy, first and foremost, and they pack wave 1 cases the way they do is to get their popular characters out first. Stores order so much because Hasbro pays them a certain amount of money for a certain amount of space in each store and those store have to fill that space. So to break it down, Prime line. Hasbro pays Target for say 4 pegs of deluxes and 4 pegs of cyberverse, and space on a shelf for voyagers. First case has 8 bots for deluxes. Each peg holds 6 deluxes. That's 3 cases. So you get 9 Bumblebees, 6 Cliffjumpers, 6 Wheeljacks and 3 Soundwaves. Soundwave and Wheeljack sell out. You can buy another case. Now you have 12 Bumblebees, 8 Cliffjumpers, 2 Wheeljacks and 1 Soundwave. See how this goes. Bumblebee may be a popular character but the market has been satyrated with him for 5 years now. Couple that with the fact that the Prime show is on Hub network, which most cable and satellite companies make you pay extra for and now you suddenly have a shelf warmer. The collectors got the first edition version so they're not buying. I'm not saying this is 100% accurate for everywhere, but even in the later revisions on cases, Bumblebee is still being 2 packed per 8, while your newer bots...Kup and Rumble get 1 each. Hasbro would never allow stores to only order a case of 1 character because its not beneficial to either party as evidence of the Bumblebee syndrome. They pay for their shelf space and in turn can stock it with whatever they want. Once the store orders that initial batch though they can back off the revisions and wait for later releases so they are not backlogged with a bunch of stuff they can't sell.
