In the last couple of years I started buying Transformers toys again, but I never imagined that it would be so goddamned difficult. I mean it's 2018, so all you have to do is go to Amazon, right? Right? Well no, because Hasbro has an asinine distribution system that's stuck in the brick-and-mortar days. Except the brick-and-mortar doesn't really give a shit anymore. Thus, it ends up that most of their reimagined original Transformers toys end up either being shunted to discount stores or bought out by EBay or Amazon Marketplace buyers.
Up until last January it was actually kind of fun. Sort of a scavenger hunt as some stores were still selling old Combiner Wars toys from like 2015. Last year when I went on vacation to Petoskey it was a fun diversion to go to the various Wal-Marts, KMarts, Meijers, and whatnot just to see what stores had. I got a couple of Titans Return toys I hardly ever saw in Detroit and a Combiner Wars Silverbolt that was fairly old by that point.
Around January, though, pretty much every store ditched the Titans Return toys (and any older ones) in favor of the new Power of the Primes series. The first wave of which: Jazz, Slug, Swoop, and Dreadwind are pretty much everywhere now. Some stores have the larger Starscream and Grimlock too. Some.
Now the asinine part is that there was in theory another series out since then and yet you can't find those hardly anywhere. I found Snarl at a Meijer, Rippernsapper and Blackwing (whose wings are purple BTW) at Wal-Mart, and the larger Elita-1 and Hun-Grrr hidden on a top shelf of another Wal-Mart. But I could not find Moonracer or Sludge anywhere. The latter really annoyed me because I had 4 of the 5 pieces of "Volcanicus" the giant robot you can form with the five main Dinobots, something fans have wanted to do since the Dinobots first appeared around 1985. Yet no matter where I looked, no one had him! (I finally did see him and Moonracer in a store--last Monday, months after they were supposed to be out.)
Finally I just gave up. EBay had a Sludge and Moonracer for a fairly reasonable price and I had a 15% coupon so I just used that and said fuck it. I mean if Hasbro doesn't want my money then fuck them, let some skeevy online seller have it.
As someone with a fucking business degree, this makes no fucking sense to me. Why make your product unavailable to consumers? That's what Hasbro ends up doing because they apparently don't distribute most of their toys through Amazon, only the world's largest online retailer and perhaps largest retailer in general. I did get my Grimlock from them but that was only a brief window when they had it. The movie-based toys they do a little better on, but the rest of the Transformers line is pretty much only available through third-party Marketplace sellers, who of course mark the prices up, often two or three times what retail would be.
Many of the Titans Return line I saw once--if at all--in stores. It was basically if you didn't pounce on them right away, you'd never see them again. There were some that would rot the shelves until being marked for clearance, but so many were almost as rare as Bigfoot.
Now since in theory Hasbro distributes to brick-and-mortar stores they might have some online, right? Or at least let you reserve them online like you can do for fucking boxes of cereal? Nah. Wal-Mart just says "in store only" and Target is entirely useless; according to their site the store near me in Novi has every toy from 2014 on in stock...somewhere. Of course they won't let you reserve it online and I'm sure if you ask an employee they'd just give you a blank stare.
To make it all worse, Toys R Us went out of business this year. So now there are no big toy store chains left. Yet even last year Hasbro was still marketing a number of Transformers (and other toys) as "Exclusive" to Toys R Us. Now those are being liquidated at rock-bottom prices.
Other Transformers toys have ended up on discount store shelves like Five Below and Ollie's. I never saw the giant Trypticon toy at Wal-Mart, Target, or Toys R Us but when I walked into Ollie's before Memorial Day they had 12 fucking cases of them by the entrance! Instead of selling those for $100 or so on, say, Amazon, Hasbro wound up liquidating them for $50 at Ollie's. Who the hell is running that place?
It simply makes no sense to me. My marketing teacher in college said one of the most important rules of marketing is that your product has to be available to buy. You can have awesome commercials and presence online and all that, but if people can't find the fucking product, what good is any of it? That's Hasbro's problem. Their hidebound policies have made most of their products unavailable.
It's real simple to figure out: their bread-and-butter (toy stores) are gone. Brick-and-mortar stores will give you like four pegs at most for Legends and Deluxe class and only a bit of shelf space for larger Voyager and Leader class. As for Titans like Trypticon and Fortress Maximus? Yeah, right. And you're lucky if these brick-and-mortar stores bother restocking more than three times a year. So, hello, you've got to get your shit online. Not through EBay. Not through Marketplace. Not through "Joe's Toy Box" or some other rinky-dink website. Through your own website, through Amazon, and it'd be great if Wal-Mart, Target, etc could get their shit together too.
It's not just Transformers. Some of their Star Wars toys have the same problem. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with My Little Pony or some of their girl toy lines. And it's not probably just Hasbro. I collect some of the superhero toys, many of which are unavailable in brick-and-mortar stores and erratically priced online. Most of those I think are Mattel, so it's probably unfair to single Hasbro out. But it's still pretty fucking asinine.
I heard yesterday Mattel is cutting 2,000 jobs--mostly white collar, I think--because of a drop in sales. They attributed it to the closure of Toys R Us. Which shows how much they're still relying on the brick-and-mortar. I guess in a way it makes sense as kids aren't on the Internet quite as much as adults and they don't have credit cards to buy stuff either. At least not usually.
If getting answers from Amazon weren't like talking to the Sphinx or the fucking Oracle of Delphi, maybe I'd ask them what the deal is. Why aren't they carrying more of the Transformers and so on? Is it their fault or just Hasbro's? I blame Hasbro, but maybe it's not. Maybe John Oliver or someone can do a piece on it. It just pisses me off because it's so illogical.
No comments:
Post a Comment