As for Hasbro being caught off guard w/pants down? BS. Hasbro did plenty of research as did the film community on the merchadising and the brand appeal that TF still holds. If the thought this film would not do well, I doubt we'd even see the damn film even being made and with so many fracking toys too boot! The did advance screenings on general test audiences, so they have a damn good idea on what the average viewer/consumer wants.

 

Bottomline Hasbro fracked themselves and the casual fan by failing to properly stock the key popular characters from the film. Is it really any surprise BB is so hard to find both the 74 and Concept version? Come on, the buck has to stop somewhere, scalpers can only play so much of a role, the larger issue is the insufficient quantity produced and released by Hasbro.

While Hasbro may have had an idea of what the consumer or "end user" wants, the problem lies in the disconnect in that they don't sell directly to the end user. Hasbro's principal customers are the big box stores, which undoubtedly base their ordering patterns on how well they think the movie toys will perform using sales of past Transformers and other movie lines as a benchmark. Considering that neither Cybertron/Classics, nor any of the past few movie toylines based on big "summer blockbusters" performed well at all, I'm betting that the big box stores assumed the Transformers movie toys would end up being a flop. And Hasbro isn't going to grossly overproduce excess stock if the demand for the initial orders wasn't what they hoped - plus, storage is also an issue, especially as it now looks like what warehousing capacity they did have was being used to store unordered Cybertron and Classics toys :tflaugh .

Over time, there won't be any problem getting most of these figures. Some of the excluses, maybe not, but most won't be an issue. The reason most toys are hard to find is that the demand doesn't warrent over production. In this case the demand easily outpaces the risk of some over production. The math is pretty simple and X-mass hasn't even started yet. Expect tons of these toys for xmass when 70-80% of toys are sold.

 

Pasquale

Yeah, they're undoubtedly going to ramp up production for the holidays - although, in the back of my mind, I wonder, "Have they missed the boat?" Kids are fickle and their attention span is a lot shorter these days...

Yeah, I sort of wonder if a lot of kids who would have bought the toys now might not have moved on to other things by the time Christmas rolls around.

well im sure atleast half of the kids who are into it now will still be buying them when Christmas time comes. Im sure alot will be on the shelves come late November for after Thanksgiving shopping...because in my opinion; the day after Thanksgiving is the busiest shopping day of the year.

I can only HOPE that kids loose interest so the average fan doesn't get horribly screwed by scalpers like they've been since the end of the Alts, reissued Hasbro G1 bookstyles and the movie lines.

The shelves aren't bare exactly. They are currently full of rejected Cybertron figs and DVD Primes. Better than nothing I suppose.

Why even stash? Just buy the thing outright, unless the company prohibits you from buying while on shift.

 

As for Hasbro being caught off guard w/pants down? BS. Hasbro did plenty of research as did the film community on the merchadising and the brand appeal that TF still holds. If the thought this film would not do well, I doubt we'd even see the damn film even being made and with so many fracking toys too boot! The did advance screenings on general test audiences, so they have a damn good idea on what the average viewer/consumer wants.

 

Bottomline Hasbro fracked themselves and the casual fan by failing to properly stock the key popular characters from the film. Is it really any surprise BB is so hard to find both the 74 and Concept version? Come on, the buck has to stop somewhere, scalpers can only play so much of a role, the larger issue is the insufficient quantity produced and released by Hasbro.

 

 

Well here's the thing. Hasbro, produces enough to fill all the initial orders and then probably what they estimate will be needed to fill any re-orders. They probably did produce more than normal too but they ended up selling A LOT faster than anyone could have predicted.

 

Market research doesn't always get it right.

 

I think all across the board everything was A LOT bigger than anyone really thought it was gonna be. Keep in mind, these aren't fans we're talking about here, it's businessmen and women. They're only worried about $$$. So you can bet if they were going to error...it was gonna be on the side of caution.

 

Of course it could always be something having to do with all the toy re-calls from toys produced in China as well. We don't know. Hasbro might have just been going through and making sure that none of their factories would get caught up in this and that delayed things a bit...who knows.

By some miracle, the new toys made it across the country to the Target store at Abington, PA, and I didn't even have to ask anyone to pull them out of the back. It looks like they just got two cases: one Leader case and one Deluxe case. They had two Leader Brawls, one Payload, one Dropkick, one Longarm, one Final Battle Jazz, and one Concept BB (!). I snagged 'em all except for Jazz and one Brawl. I never have that kind of luck!

 

If anyone around here is from the Philly area, that spare Leader Brawl might still be there...

I talked to a Hasbro Rep at Wal Mart yesterday when i was looking for the new voyagers, She told me what alot of people know, that there behind schedule and the wal marts are still gonna get older stuff in, along with a few of the new stuff.