[Boy Blunder]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain Nash

Disclaimer: I absolutely love the fact we are getting so many waves this year and kind of hope it continues. 7 waves is spectacular.

Main comment: I see a problem with having 7 waves retail wise because there simply isn't enough shelf space or turnover for retailers to order the product. You have waves like Red Onslaught and Absorbing Man eating up the shelf space when the next wave comes out, it creates an issue of retailers not seeing the need for new product. And I can't imagine that Hasbro produced less of some waves than others (unless they are retailer exclusives of course), so that tells me that some waves are sitting in the warehouse waiting for openings on stock.

Unfortunately then along comes the next quarter/trimester ads and the retailers order up the new product. Or the X-Men wave was heavily promoted one. So the Giant Man wave gets overlooked in favor of the new waves, and we have X-Men, Red Onslaught and Absorbing Man on the shelves.

Now we are on to the third trimester/last quarter, and the Dr. Strange wave is the last wave of the year. Maybe retailers will order what they consider to be "backstock" waves If the shelves get empty enough. But I'm kind of thinking that we will continue to see mostly Absorbing Man, Red Onslaught (because they have yet to sell out really), X-Men and Dr. Strange waves, with smatterings of the other three.

And then maybe next year or late this year if the shelves are empty enough we will see the stock on those three waves arrive, as we are already seeing a little of with the Giant Man wave. Timed right about time the next Spider-Man, GOTG and X-Men waves hit retail (Jan-April I assume). The question really is how are those going to get stocked and will any get shafted.

It's too many waves retail wise but a great amount if you're not ordering online. It almost makes it worthwhile to just order everything in cases (though I just can't do it with the Dr. Strange bloat.) Something to consider for next year for sure.

To add: Maybe 7 waves is just too ambitious and they should cut it back to 5-6 at most. Released every two months or something, so that there is time for turnover. I dunno. Online buyers lose out that way, but 6 waves would still be a lot.

Not to mention that a lot of places still have older items clogging the shelves. Many of the local Targets around here are still drowning in Allfather-wave and Rhino-wave figures, Walmarts have still got a goodly amount of Hulkbuster-wave figures and the Thanos-wave Hellcat/Spider-Woman figures, and the only reason the TRUs are getting new stock is because that awesome sale they just had helped clear out the old stuff.

I love seeing all these waves, and I want more, but there's clearly a need to address the "linger" problem with these past few waves. And it can't be narrowed down to 'oh, X characters don't sell, or Y characters sell too well, or Z case ratio bogs down the pegs,' because none of those actually stay consistent. We've seen double-packing of characters, double-packing of BAF parts, and 8-unique-figures-with-no-parts-doubling waves, and they all seem to just chill on the shelf regardless.

I'd love to just order cases online, but 1) My wife and I love the thrill of the hunt, and 2) we're not always in a position to drop $160+ on toys in one shot, especially if it's a preorder situation (things will undoubtedly come up that require we use the money set aside). Hell, we had to keep the money for the X-Men wave in my Paypal account so we wouldn't accidentally spend it, and we still had to dip into it for a couple sudden expenses that came up (again, thank you TRU for having that sale and having the whole wave).

In the end, I know I'm gonna have to go for a mix of online ordering + hunting to get what I want to add to the collection, but the pegwarming makes it harder to anticipate which way I'll have to go for which figures.

So yeah, I think knocking the wave count per year down to 5-6 is a great idea. Maybe find a way to make every case a set of eight different figures, because even at five waves a year, that's 45 new ML (counting BAFs), and that's not even getting into store/convention exclusives.