[Benn Roe]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain Nash

you hit the nail right on the head on these. If it's an "in stock now" and not a preorder I can understand running out of current stock. A preorder should definitely be used to determine how much of a production run they need to do. For large retailers like Target, Walmart and Walgreens there really should not be situations where they have preorders up for mere minutes before their preorder limit sells out. It's beyond frustrating.

I wrote a long, long post explaining this over on MarvelousNews if you want to read it, but the reality is that preorders would need to be cut off probably six months before release for this to be true. There's not an infinite amount of stock available, making more takes significant time, and history has shown that opening preorders up that far in advance normally decreases overall sales. As a retailer, my Legends preorders are locked in with my distributors way before I'm allowed to start taking preorders from customers (or even mention the product to them). As for Target and Walmart, they don't want you to buy Legends from them. They just want you to want to buy Legends from them, but end up buying batteries or sandwich bags or something instead. They have every incentive in the world to make their exclusives feel scarce by opening up preorders that sell out in 10 seconds and then slowly leaking out their remaining stock to keep you coming in to their stores over and over again. Once you make your purchase, they've lost the game. As a practitioner of "ethical" capitalism (a fraught term, I'll concede), I hate everything about Hasbro's distribution model, but the reality is that the model was very carefully constructed to make the line appealing to collectors without sacrificing profitability, and everything's connected. Artificial scarcity is the price we pay for the continued representation of relatively obscure characters and $20 MSRPs.