RAR wrote:Said lots of stuff
From what I hear, talking to many, many employee's and manager's from target and wal-mart about re-stocking figures, they seem to view all tf's as one brand, unlike lego which treats all it's line's and subline's as individual line's - so if they run out of, say, bionicle, they can call up and ask for an assortment of bionicle, and bam, a case of bionicle shows up - whereas when they run out of, say, cw figures, they don't do anything since all tf's are treated like a single entity, they won't ask for a restock until the total product is below ~50%. Which means that the shelfwarming easy-crap bricks and shampoo bottles, and any other crap people don't want actually are hurting the brand.
Further proof that target doesn't distinguish figures is that all deluxes, voyagers, and leader figures share product codes, so the site may say they have starscream at your location, when in actuality, it could be a bunch of armada megatrons - the store has a bunch of 'leader' figs, which then gets represented as them having every leader figure in stock.
So what this all boils down to is: hasbro has to iron out the kinks in their distribution pipeline. The distribution problems are unacceptable, unforgivable, and hurting business and the brand itself; I see no other major brand suffering from poor stock like transformers.