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Quote:

Originally Posted by Benn Roe

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.

Yes. The numbers on these were etched in contract stone long ago, with Hasbro and Target knowing exactly how much they stand to make from the deal before the first CAD image was sent to a 3D printer. Target CAN order more, and usually they do at least one or two more batches. Walmart usually doesn't. Very few toys are made to reflect orders(mostly crowdsourced tiny lines and a few Super7 lines). As Ben said, no matter whether you order from BBTS, Hasbro, EE, etc, they all negotiated their first order 6 to 9 months ahead, and their preorders are a percentage of that (with some being held back for exchanges). Once all the first orders are placed, the distributor will look at the numbers and offer what's left, so they sell out as well. If the retailers put enough pressure on the distributor, the distributor might contact the manufacturer to make more, but usually it has to be tremendous demand, in order to maintain the MSRP.

Many toys could be "printing money" if sold on an "as needed" basis, but usually most stores look at it as "We'll be making $10 on a $30 toy, times X number of cases of 12. Ok. That was profitable. Let's order the next wave, rather than restock and risk getting stuck with items we have to clearance."