[Crazy Jetty]

Again, it has absolutely nothing to do with the toy companies. They make the toys. Once they sell them to the retailers, it's completely beyond their control.

To quote myself from this post, and coming from someone who worked for Walmart for several years, the problems are all on the retailer's side.

Quote:

I worked for Walmart. And I've said what the problem is, a million times on this board, and so have others. I'll explain it again (And I'm not intenting to sound snippy, that's not my intended tone and I appologize if it reads that way. I don't mean it to)

The problem is on the store level. It's the system virtually *all* the box retailers use to order items. It's literally called POS (Not making that up. And it *is* a p.o.s. system).
For Walmart and Target, virtually all ordering is done by the computer, which monitors what goes across the checkouts. Let's use Transformers for our main example:
A case in the first wave of Transformers Prime was made up of 3 Bumblebees, 2 Cliffjumpers, 2 Wheeljacks, and 1 Soundwave.
Each one of those has an individual UPC number, and on the reciept may even acknowledge the ndividual character, as it may read out "Tsfmr Bumble," or "Trns Sound" on the receipt.
What POS does, is it keeps track of how many items a store has in stock, and how many it has on the floor (meaning in the backroom, and on the shelf)
Once an item reaches below a preset amount, then the system automatically orders a preset amount of cases from their warehouse. And it does not acknowledge or understand the differences between Bumblebee or Soundwave.
So in this situation, Soundwave is a rare and popular character. Needed by kids and collectors alike. They can stock four cases to the shelf, and end up with 12 Bumblebees, 8 Cliffjumpers, 8 Wheeljacks, and only 4 Soundwaves.
Naturally, Soundwave is gonna sell out really fast. Even if not many people want him, but more people want Bumblebee. Those looking for Soundwave are still gonna come up short.
Now like I said, POS doesn't individualize, and see they're out of Soundwaves, and low on Wheeljacks, but still has 10 bumblebees on the shelf but no soundwaves. All it sees is they have 20 deluxe transformers on the shelf (where you or I see 10 'Bees, 7, Cliffs, and 3 'jacks), and a full case in the backstock, and doesn't order any more until the total stock reaches five or six deluxes.
While I can't speak for Barbi or simular girls toys, this effects every actionfigure, across every brand, across every toy company. It's been the downfall of many many lines. Even popular ones.
This is what effects distribution so badly, and this is something that Mattel, nor Hasbro has absolutely *any* say over.
It killed Transformers Alternators, and has been the single worst enemy to DCUC, and Infinite Heroes. Seen how badly it hurts transformers and Marvel Universe, too.

The only thing they can do is try to cheat it with case assortments. And even if they dropped the case assortments down as evenly as they can, to 1 figure per case, per wave, and even that still wouldn't do much.
On top of that, speaking from personal experience, it sometimes takes an act of god for an employee who is aware of a propblem to be *allowed* to do anything about it (Like clearance out figures that are gumming things up).
Hell, Walmart even uses POS on fresh areas like Produce. We threw away more good produce because POS kept screwing up our stock and shipping us stuff faster than we could sell it. We'd end up sitting on literally thirty 80 lbs cases of carrots, when we could only sell through maybe a case a day, with more coming in every night.
So it mucks up everything. Not just toys.

That is the true source of the problem. Bad case assortments, and bad character selections will only feed this. But it's the POS which dictates distributions. Because it see's the shelf full of something, it will continually skip ordering cases from the warehouse, which is why you can sometimes see one store skip two, or three waves, while another store the next town over may get them.

I hope that helps. (If I were wise, I'd save this post somewhere so I could just copy/paste it in the future.)