Shockwave7 wrote:Curious how some figures seem to bypass regular stores completely and wind up only findable in TJ Maxx or Ross. I remember you couldn't find Solar Storm Grapple anywhere for love or money, until I stumbled across FOUR of them in Ross.
How exactly does that work, anyway? I'm beginning to think I'll never find generations Arcee in stores, and that it's another of the figures (like Brainstorm) that for whatever reason just didn't make it onto regular store shelves....
Distribution. Company A, be it Walmart/Target/Meijer/whomever orders product from Hasbro, including the wave that had Brainstorm in it. This product goes to their primary distrbution and then trickles down like a water fountain. Oh, but the storefronts are not/can't take product right now, they have too much other stuff or no "capital" (I want to say that each department can "spend" so much on product at a time, their not actually buying from their own warehouse so much as balancing how much value of a product you bring in vs. send out. Even though the Generations pegs were empty, since the AOE deluxes were still sitting, the books were showing an excess of capital on shelves and the stores couldn't bring in MORE until that went away. Or I could be compelteley looney) to aquire from the warehousing, so stuff has to wait. This is why 90% of us didn't get Whirl or Roadbuster until SIX MONTHS+ after Hasbro released them. Sadly, Poor Brainstorm got to the distribution warehouses and discovered the stores were not taking product due to the AOE stuff on shelves. Some of it clogging (Grimlock), some of it the new stuff (Drift-Copter). I suspect the Fembots ran into the same issue. So he (and the girls) sat in a warehouse, racking up an actual debt because the company bought him from Hasbro, but could not sell him because the storefronts couldn't take him. He was soon being joined by more product, that also needed to get on shelves, So the warehouses cut their losses on "old stock", and sold the excess stock to a liquidator store that was interested to make room for "new" stock. Even though a lot of stores hadn't seen Either, or never saw more than a single case or two. In the olden days, this might've been KBToys taking him instead.
This happens a LOT to the ends of series, and is partly why the last wave or two are typically loaded down with repaints over new molds.
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