07/31/2020
I'm as frustrated with the Preorder/Street Date mess as everyone else but after years of working at companies that are suppliers to Walmart, Target and other Big Box companies, let me see if I can tell you guys why ELIMINATING EXCLUSIVES WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
Suppliers fight like dogs to get in with the big box stores, including Hasbro. 90+% of their income comes from keeping the Big Boys happy. When they order product from a supplier, they pay for it when it hits their Distribution Channel, not after people start purchasing it. So they don't have to wait on sales at store level to get paid.
Now, to make sure a toy line is successful, it HAS to get in to one, if not all, of these mass market retailers. When one of them comes to you and says,"We will carry your line but only if you will give us a couple of exclusives on top of the regular figures", you do it. You know why? Because if you don't, they won't carry the rest or they will do a much smaller order of the others. The name of the game is quantity, otherwise the cost of producing goes up. So it's either make what THEY WANT or you don't get the sale. Walmart has nearly 4000 stores in the US alone and Target has nearly 2000 so that's a lot of merchandise you forfeit if you don't cater to their wishes. They will NEVER stop the exclusives if they are asked. If they didn't keep the big boys happy and those orders topped, IF you got your figures, they would cost what imports cost in the $50 each range. This is why figures like Mythic Legions, MOTUC and Articulated Icons cost so much. VERY short runs and no major retail support to bump up the quantities.
Why was it so hard to get Pre-orders for them? Because, unlike Amazon or Pulse exclusives, Walmart and Target have to figure out what percentage of their purchase are they allocating to brick-n-mortar stores and how many are they allocating online. Usually, they allocate around 15-20% of their purchased inventory to online and the rest is allocated to physical distribution. The problem is, bots. They need to figure out a way to prevent bots from scalping the online stock. If they can't do that, they need to stop the pre-orders for online altogether.
Why a street date? Usually because they want to do a promotion that will be in an ad to launch it. By Law, if you run an ad, the product has to be on the shelf the first day of that ad. If it's not, you can get fined. To insure they have the product on the shelf for the ad, they put a street date on it to prevent it from selling out BEFORE the ad. Ads are scheduled as far out as 6 to 8 months before it's supposed to sell. They have to plan them out by insuring new product will be there in time to photography (or get photography from the manufacturer), layout the ads, and send the ads to all the vendors in the ads to make sure they are happy with how their product is represented. To get featured in an ad, companies like Hasbro actually give promotional discounts, essentially buy the space in the ad. All parties involved need to make sure the product is there when they run the ads.
The Sales pages are printed about a month before they are put in papers and online so they have to know about 6 weeks before they are put in the paper if they need to be pulled. Once it's printed, they are committed unless there's some extenuating circumstances. Putting it on the shelf early and selling it out before the ad is a BIG no-no.
So, unless you want to ONLY get them online and pay $50 each , or more, IF they decide to make them, then you will have to deal with Big Box stores getting what they want, or you won't get what you want. We don know Hasbro is listening because changes have already been made in a lot of things and so hopefully they will be able to be more careful with how they do exclusives. Hopefully Big Box retailers will figure out an anti-bot app for their collectible exclusives and maybe allot a little more inventory or stop pre-orders and just go live with them at the same time they are in stores. Hasbro is NOT going to stop selling them to them though so just get that out of your head.
