Emerje wrote:Why haven't they put the Target exclusives on Pulse yet? I would happily renew my membership if it got me a Worlds Collide set. I've been able to get almost all of the Target exclusives from Target.com, but every time the WC set goes up it sells out instantly. One time I had one in my cart and it sold out before I could complete checkout, this morning I was there 3 minutes after getting an email saying it was back in stock and it was already gone.
Emerje
I'm pretty sure target is the only retail partner that gives enough of a **** to not play ball about letting pulse skim of the top of preorders. Walmart straight up doesn't give a crap about advance orders, theirs or someone elses, so long as shelf stock comes in and sells, and so far every walmart exclusive has gone up on pulse either as a preorder or as a straight to in stock listing. Amazon has a big enough market share, and has shifted enough into a marketplace style business model that it's more of a 'you scratch my back, I scratch yours' situation in regards to buying hasbro's goodwill, and all their listings heve gone up accordingly. Walgreen's toy aisle is an opportunistic holiday side hustle, a half-hearted skimming off the top of the market itself, and thus doesn't particularly care about whether they lose a fraction of that to pulse.
But Target? Target is the one that has gotten a craw in its mouth about trying to fill the vacancy left by TRU's departure, snapping up all the exclusives that would have gone there. Thus far, the only target exclusives to get pulse listings, to the best of my recollection, are the collaboratives where target got the early bird preorders but everyone was allowed to stock when they came in, and the fan demand restock of the cobra island joe figures, after target had already gotten their sales in.
...Scratch that, I forgot the cobra island wave 2 figures went up on preorder at about the same time as the restock. New theory: This quarter has been screwy about pulse getting non-86 transformers preorders listed, instead letting things go straight to in stock, and so pulse's one-quarter time delay is going to go straight to in stock, and it just hasn't come in yet.
An important side note about the partner exclusive program: it appears that only exclusives for hasbro's in-house IPs are offered, presumably because the licensed IPs have special 3-way agreements between hasbro, retailers, and the licensors, and thus hasbro has less control over what goes where.