[quote name='folkmojo']As recently as January Activision is on record as saying that they will try to meet the demand for Skylanders. This makes sense because every time a shopper goes to the store and gets greeted with an empty shelf they lose money.[/QUOTE]
I worked in the toys industry for a long time. Usually the bottleneck in production was the injection molding tooling required to make the toys. There is a certain cycle time that dictates a maximum number of toys you can make a day. Basically you have to shoot in hot plastic, wait for it to cool and then remove it. It usually takes 30-60 a cycle.
It can take six month from the time you approve additional capacity to the time product shows up in stores. You have to cut a PO for new tooling, wait in line for the tooling to be manufactured (which can take months), ship the tooling to the manufacturing facility, test the new tooling and slowly ramp up production. Then you still have to ship the product across the ocean and also ship to stores once it hits the US. This time of year you also have to wait for the two week shut down for Chinese New Year which also creates a backlog when things come back online.
Most hot toys would start out hot in September and you'd cut a PO for new tooling then and hope it was online before Chinese NY in February. Shift that timeline to December when Skylanders started to run out and realistically April is the earliest you would possibly see product coming from additional capacity.
I have no idea if that is the case here, but 95% of the time in my experience when there was a prolonged shortage it was tooling capacity related. There are other things can be done in the meantime to expedite product coming in and squeeze out every bit of capacity, but it doesn't dramatically change things. You can be busting your ass on the production side to get everything in as quickly as possible and there is little difference from a consumer standpoint in stores.