The Problem With Toxic Stock

This community has a problem crying "peg warmer". If a figure doesn't sell in the first 48 hours of residency at brick and mortar, the phrase gets thrown out. The problem is that after such a short window, it conflates slow sellers with non-sellers (i.e. true peg warmers). I've often said that slow sellers are never a problem. Main characters, for which I constantly advocate, can sometimes be slow sellers, but they will eventually sell. It may take days, weeks or months, but they will work themselves through the pipeline. Casual fans recognize those characters and will make the occasional impulse purchase. Other figures will never sell at seemingly any price. One such TVC figures has been at Ollie's for so long that the store chain now claims it as a dependent. Such figures are nightmare fuel for the health of any line.

The above pic is from my local Walmart. The holidays shopping season was very helpful to its inventory of TVC. They were reduced down to one figure each of Vel Sartha, Boba Fett (Nomad), and Moff Jerjerrod. Sometime in early January, Jerjerrod found a new home. Then, something unfortunate happened. This store got a fresh case of the Fennec Shand wave, which many have also reported seeing in their locales. The Yoda, the 501st, both Death Watch Mandalorians, one of the Fennecs and one of the Ahsokas sold. The left over Fennec and Ahsoka are starting to impersonate Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining:


Some time in April, the Nomad Boba Fett managed to achieve escape velocity. The store is now down to one each of Vel, Fennec, and Ashoka, and I'm convinced these figures will never sell. That Vel is from the original shipment of the Andor case in early 2023. If it hasn't sold in over a year, it never will. Both the Fennec and Ahsoka can be had for significant discount on Amazon. No one is going to pop $17 for those. Furthermore, all three lack name recognition to those casual fans I mentioned earlier. Savvy fans know of cheaper options and less sophisticated shoppers don't know who those characters are. They are here for the long haul.

Even though this is a relatively low stock level for this store, it's apparently not low enough to trigger a reorder. Other stores in the greater area received the Mandalorian season three wave. This store did not. This is a high volume store. Even though I don't live in a densely populated area, I'm located in New Hampshire near the Massachusetts border. We don't have sales tax here, which is glorious, and also pulls in a lot of Massachusetts shoppers, thus making it a higher volume store. But what will Walmart's sales and inventory analysis show? Will it show that an old case assortment made it into the store? Nope. Will it say that the lone Vel is no big deal because back in early 2003, this store got five cases of that Andor wave, and the other 39 figures breezed through? Nope. It will say that in five months this store only sold 8 TVC figures.

This is why non-selling figures are so dangerous. They grind the inventory pipeline to a halt. The existing stock won't sell, while at the same time the establishment stops ordering product that will sell. The sales rate goes to near zero further instructing inventory systems to order less product. It becomes a self feeding mechanism, and like a zip tie, it only goes in one direction. The noose just tightens and tightens. We saw this scenario play out with the Episode I figures in 2012. We saw this scenario play out with the 2018 launch wave. Both of those were on a bigger scale, but this is why I always encourage considering brick and mortar viability when the community makes pushes for certain figures.

It's also why I don't get too upset anymore when we don't get figures timed with the media. TVC doesn't have the peg-warming tolerance that the presumably higher profit TBS line does. If the media flops, or a given character fails to connect with fans, the resulting poor TVC sales could be a disaster. A little bit of a "wait and see" approach may be safer, but I admit it also runs the risk of missing the retail viability window for certain characters. It feels like damned if you do and damned if you don't with TVC.

I know this is only one store, but again, due to its volume, it might carry more weight with Walmart's sales and inventory analysis. Also, one more thing to address, some may sense a contradiction because you consider Ahsoka to be a "main". She is not (not yet, anyway). When she appears is a popular and well received movie, then she'll make the jump to that status. Cartoons and streaming shows don't have the pull I think we sometimes think they do just because everyone we talk to online has seen them.

---

comments powered by Disqus