ATTENTION HASBRO:  You Need To Recall TVC Wave 1

Getting angry with Hasbro for distribution issues is like getting mad at the meteorologist when it rains (for the most part). Hasbro makes and delivers the figures. What the two remaining brick and mortar behemoths do with those shipments is out of Hasbro's control. Hasbro can't make Walmart and Target matriculate that stock through their internal distribution pipelines, nor can they ensure that the stock personnel put the appropriate product on the correct pegs in a timely manner. If you're angry that you can't find Vintage Collection figures at Target and Walmart, get angry at Target and Walmart. For the most part.

There is one area where Hasbro does have responsibility, and that is with case assortment selection. Traditional retail is already an uphill challenge with the "Death of Retail", the "Fall of the Mall", and "Retail Apocalypse.” Poor case assortments exacerbate that challenge. Fans were immediately nervous with the repack heavy TVC launch wave. Two figures in particular had no business being part of the launch wave in the United States. They are the Jyn Erso and Rey figures. Rey is a scene specific figure that had fully met collector demand via inclusion in three Walmart Black Series case assortments. Jyn was in two Black Series case assortments toward the end of the line, and the Black Series figure was literally sitting in most Walmart stores' clearance sections when the TVC version shipped. Now, you can say "hindsight is 20/20,” but these shots were easy to call. And we did:

These Figures DO NOT Need More Retail Sunlight (Rey and others)

I Have A Bad Feeling About This (Jyn)

Now perhaps the biggest peg warmer in the launch wave is NOT Hasbro's fault. We all applauded when the all new Snoke figure was announced at two per case. What we and Hasbro couldn't have known when that decision was made was that the events of The Last Jedi would make that figure largely undesirable. Still this has resulted in three figures from the launch wave that will likely never sell. You've heard me say several times that slow selling figures are not ideal, but can be overcome. Figures that will never sell grind the retail pipeline to a complete halt, and it will stay frozen until the figures are removed, heavily clearance, or destroyed via global thermonuclear war. For the latter, I think Matthew Broderick is busy. The 18 figures in the images below have been at this store for 7 months at the time of this post. The rollback price has not moved a single one. If nothing is done, these figures will be there in 7 more months and beyond. I don't know if Hasbro has an option to incentivize clearances at Target and Walmart, but as we all know, when this same issue plagued the first iteration of TVC, Hasbro sent local representatives to Target, Walmart and Toys R Us stores to collect the unsold product from 2010's first two TVC's waves. We need to have the same thing happen with 2018's unsold product.

There has not been a single report of anything beyond wave 3 hitting brick and mortar retail, and the only reason wave 3 hit was because Walmart's warehouses apparently operate on a LIFO basis. Those cases got out BEFORE Walmart stores became frozen with wave 1 product. The reports of Target stores getting anything beyond wave 1 are so sparse that they would qualify as "statistically irrelevant.” The biggest shame of all of this is that the recent Saelt-Marae and Klaatu figures are two of the best figures in the history of the 3.75" line, followed by an equally ground breaking Stormtrooper figure. I am supremely confident in the Vintage Collection's brick and mortar viability. I am equally confident that there is a large lapsed collector base waiting to come back into the hobby, but a lapsed collector is not going to seek out information on a hobby in which they no longer participate (i.e. they're not coming to fan sites). It would take getting this amazing product back in the stores. Speaking personally, I'm a lapsed Marvel collector, but I still take a peak at what's going on at the pegs (some neat stuff). Getting the new and incredible product into stores will pay huge dividends for Hasbro, but it's never going to happen with the current year-old road block of wave 1 product.

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