[Enigmatic]

After checking 12 different Walgreens a total of roughly 20 times over the last week, I finally got put out of my misery yesterday by finding three Mystiques at a store in Richmond, Virginia.

The only thing I feel relatively certain of in terms of the way Walgreens manages store supply is that from a restocking perspective they treat all Marvel Legends as a single product. I see no evidence of any attempt to make sure that characters get evenly distributed to stores, they just send out whatever figure the stock clerks randomly pick up when a store's supply of Legends goes below some number. So really the only way we get any variety at all is in whatever way Hasbro packs the figures into boxes. And when it's a Walgreens exclusive and there's only one figure in that box, then lots of that one character will all get sent out when a store's inventory of Legends becomes very low. That's why we see stores with 10+ Magiks or Medusas, because the warehouse just sent whatever was in a Legends Hasbro box. This makes me wonder if it's really in Walgreens' best interest to even have exclusives. If they made some effort to distribute them evenly to stores, then sure, they're a good idea, but as long as one store gets 10 and another gets none, it's a bad idea when your stock clerks are going to just randomly grab whichever figure they find when a store's overall Legends supply is low. This could be up to individual warehouse managers, and some make the effort to distribute the exclusives and some don't, not really sure. Certainly it isn't being done here in my metropolitan area, and plenty of people hunting for Walgreens exclusives have affirmed in this forum and others that it's the way it happens in their area, too.

One of the stores I went to several times was down to about 6 or 7 total Legends, and on one of the later trips I saw that store received two full boxes--the entire M'Baku wave and the entire Captain Marvel wave. Which was too much to fit in the three rows most Walgreens devote to Legends, so the clerk stuck the contents of both boxes onto an empty shelf across from the 6 or 7 remaining peg-warmers in the regular toy section.