Rebelsgate:  A Possible Answer

This could be titled Dude Where’s My Figures.  Unless you want to ignore your years of collecting experience, you know something is amiss with the action figure support for the recently launched Rebels series.  If Hasbro could be accused of one thing, it’s OVER supporting new media at launch.  When have they ever failed to bludgeon us with an onslaught of product for new Star Wars properties?  There is an issue here and single cases showing up at certain Toys R Us stores doesn’t mean the issue is resolved.

With that, an answer appears to have presented itself.  It even connects all the dots of why some Rebels product is getting out, but not even close to the volume we would expect.  A very well placed source suspects the reason lies external to Hasbro with the current west coast port slowdown as part of a labor dispute between the shipping lines and dockworkers.  Did you catch that?  A slow down.  How would you describe the glacial release of Rebels figures so far?  Would you call it slow?  This seems to tidy up all the disparate information on the subject and even answers why this seems to be an American problem.  Hasbro has repeatedly said the product has shipped, but does Hasbro literally drop the product off at Target like the milkman?  Of course not.  So how could the fact that Hasbro said the product shipped in any way serve as the final answer on the subject?  They don’t control the shipping process from cradle to grave and this labor issue could highlight that.  Those shipping crates have to come off the ships somehow, and it’s union dockworkers who perform that task.

Rebelsgate, which is not a term I can claim to have coined,  recently highlighted the ugliness of the internet where people trip over themselves to prove that they are more righter.  The victim of this internet rush to correct was simply passing on information to the readers so they could make their own conclusion and wasn’t drawing any conclusions themselves, yet they were refuted on claims they did not actually make with evidence that didn’t paint the full picture.  I don’t worry about a smear campaign myself because our traffic rankings are no threat to anyone.  We’re not going to ruffle feathers, but just to be safe we will offer the following disclaimers:

We are not saying that no Rebels product will be shipping or that it isn’t currently in stores.  We are not saying that Rebels product will be rare.  We are not saying that you should be paying $30 for an Inquisitor.  We are not ruling out that this situation could change overnight.  We are only saying you may require a little patience.

It seems for the time being that the roll out of Rebels product will be slow.  Of course the pipeline could burst open at any moment if the labor situation resolves itself.  From what I’m hearing, there will be Rebels product in stores in time to get them under the tree, but those hoping to get their Christmas shopping done early might be disappointed.

UPDATE:  We have 100% confirmation from a manufacturer (not Hasbro) that there is a perfect storm brewing with product leaving Asia.  There are issues on both ends of the shipping pipeline that is equating a delay of up to 4 weeks in the US.  This is our conclusion only, but we suspect the outbound delay is due to US bound shipments getting lower priority since there is a backlog with getting the containers unloaded once they reach US ports.