Why Target Exclusive Preorders Stress Me Out

Yesterday's Target preorder was rocky for a couple of reasons. First, and most worrisome to me, was the fact that both the Koska Reeves and Migs Mayfeld figures sold out in around twelve minutes:



Second was that the Axe Woves preorder link did not go live at the 1PM ET time as advertised. That stinks out loud. Fortunately, Hasbro flagged these issues with the vendor, and it seems to have allowed most collectors to place their orders after corrective action was taken. In fact, at the time of this writing (9PM ET on 2/14), Koska Reeves is still available. Not too shabby.

The purpose of this article is not to address the snafus from yesterday. Again, hopefully that was ultimately no harm / no foul for most of you. I just want to talk about why the Target preorders are stressful for me and a number of other collectors, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the preorder itself. It's because the preorder window is our only realistic shot at acquiring Target exclusives. The fact that these items are intended to also show up in stores offers no back stop for many of us. If you live within close proximity to a high volume Target, you're lucky. That's not the case for many of us.

My closest Target is a medium sized store and it's roughly 22 minutes from my house. All totaled, it's roughly an hour commitment if I want to go make a random check of that store. That's a lot of time to burn on a crap shoot. Why is it a crap shoot?

Target's store inventory can't be easily checked online

Target's store inventory can't be checked in store anymore

Target has removed all self-service tools that facilitate acquiring their exclusives in-store. You have to rely on an employee with a PDA to perform the check for you. While many are cheerfully helpful, some are not forthcoming (especially the closer you get to the toy department). That's why I'm only part joking when I refer to these as Target employee exclusives. Without being able to easily check store inventory, it becomes an exercise in pure luck, and I don't personally have the time for that.

In no way am I advocating for Target exclusives to end. That would be terrible. All off the 2022 main line slots are used up. So if Koska, Axe and Migs weren't Target exclusives, they wouldn't be coming in 2022 at all. They would have to try to crack the 2023 lineup, when they are competing with newer media and losing recency relevance. And so on and so on, until the prospects dwindle to nill (pleased to meet you Dryden Vos).

What I am advocating for, and have been for a while, is for Hasbro to provide us with some sort of back-up option for these big box exclusives. Either holding back on a portion of the production run to be available on Hasbro Pulse after the retailer sells their allotment, or by making them available to Fan Channel outlets after the exclusive retailer has moved on. We don't need to end store exclusives. We just need to end the prospect of collectors completely missing out on store exclusives. The latter has a tendency to turn active collectors into lapsed collectors.

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