Today I had a job interview that was an hour from my house. What better way to deal with the distance than go to a bunch of stores I ordinarily wouldn't?
I went to 10 stores -- 4 Targets, 3 Wal-Marts, and 3 Toys R Us
Number of Transformers purchased: ZERO
Sightings:
Airachnid: 0
Vehicon: 0
Sergeant Kup: 0
Decepticon Rumble: 0
GDO Deluxes: 0
GDO Scouts: 1 (not interested in these)
Okay, so Vehicon was a long shot. But none of
any of them? More surprises:
Arcee: 0
Ratchet: 2
Knock Out: 4 (in two stores)
Dead End: 2 (in one store)
Voyager Dreadwing: 0
Hot Shot: 0
DVD Deluxe Wave: 4 stores
This is the wave that has reships Vehicon and may have Kup/Rumble. Stores are getting this wave, sort of. You can tell a store gets this wave thanks to the leftover Bumblebees, Wheeljacks, and Knockouts. It hit 2 of the Targets, 2 of the Wal-Marts, and no TRUs.
Other notes:
Of the 3 TRUs, only one had GDO and it was one lousy scout. That store had the peg for Deluxe GDO, but it was filled with Fall of Cybertron. Did they have them and they sold out? Are they due in any day? No idea. Don't really care anymore.
Speaking of FoC, it is way
way overstocked. Optimus and Jazz are everywhere, and stores are littered with Optimus. Not every store has Shockwave, but he's not hard to find. However, there's not going to be room for the Bruticus guys...
The other things that are way overstocked are Bumblebees, as you all know. 9 out of 10 stores had either
only him, him and Cliff, or him and a smattering of others. The tenth store didn't have any only because it was a Wal-Mart that had had enough and clearanced all the Revealers for $5. None left.
The DVD wave is ridiculous for including Bumblebee. This is the major evidence left that the store got the wave. That and Wheeljack. Guess what: people
still don't want them.
Toys R Us as a rule is disorganized. Half their inventory is DotM and this wave was released
one year ago. None had MP Thundercracker, not even a shelf tag. All of them only had PRiD Deluxe Bumblebee and that's it. TRU as a rule has their stuff all over the place in no discernable order. One of the stores had plenty of DotM Cyberverse Preview Optimus -- the one with the 3D glasses. Sheesh.
That's not to say the other stores are much better.
Not one store I went to today had a solid, contiguous TF section. It was either invaded on the sides by action figures or on the bottom by Bakugans or in two to three discrete sections.
This is embarrassing. It's clear that neither Hasbro nor the retailers give a shit anymore. I know they don't have a movie now, but really? Half-hearted doesn't even cover it. A major money-making toyline and it's worse than an outlet store.
Kre-O: Take everything I just said and multiply it. Kre-O sets are all over the place, not contiguous, and horribly laid out. Battleship and Transformers are intertwined, and interrupted by other stuff that isn't even Kre-O. There's no visual sense to any of it. I'd blame the retailers, but they manage to keep their Lego sets well ordered.
The new sets are kind of underwhelming and nobody in their right mind is going to spend 99.99 on Kre-O Devastator, especially when most of the stores still had one or more of the original Kre-O sets at a deeply discounted price, trying to get rid of it.
Contrast this with one aisle over: welcome to Lego, where everything is orderly and in quantity.
The only downside with Lego is that stores don't carry every item in a line. Target doesn't have the Star Wars Landspeeder. Wal-Mart doesn't have one of the Avengers sets. Neither have the Batman Fun House.
But between Target, Wal-Mart, and TRU, they all have everything in the line, including all the ones I named above. Every store I went to today was well organized, well stocked, and (shocker) had recent items that people wanted to buy.
Failing that, I could go home and order anything in their catalog from their website. This company actually makes it a point to stock hard to find items
so you can buy them. Without having to buy Bumblebees too.
So, I'm done. I've made rumblings before about ordering online and what have you, but I'm officially
done with going to stores. I did not expect to come home with everything I hoped for today, but I did expect
something and I also expected to see some of the other things that I have seen only one time and should be seeing regularly now. It is disturbing that I didn't run into a single Airachnid or Dreadwing.
It's clear to me that Hasbro is just encouraging this and
ing with us. PRiD has been with us since February and Hasbro is still shortpacking and creating scalper-bait in every wave. What the hell is this DVD wave? One each of Kup, Vehicon, and Rumble while still shipping pegwarmers like Bumblebee and Wheeljack? I feel like they're flipping me the bird. By including Rumble and Kup (who is, what, not in any other wave? Brilliant!) they're making the problem
worse, not better. This wave is your one stop scalper shop. Shipping two each of Vehicon, Airachnid, Kup, and Rumble? No, that would make too much sense.
I don't know what they're doing anymore except pissing everyone off. If it's not about the collectors, why do they seem to be doing their damnedest to create artificial "demand" with impossible to find regular characters, exclusives that are notoriously difficult to obtain, and items that can only be found on eBay? I don't know how this benefits them, much less anyone but scalpers. Yet it continues. It worsens.
So, I ordered Vehicon, Kup, and Rumble off eBay. It's galling to me, but now they're taken care of -- I don't have to bother any more with what's going to be re-released in which wave
maybe if I ever see it as they dribble out one at a time and get snapped up by scalpers. Today showed me that trying to find these things in stores is little more than gambling -- you put in money and time and what you get out is entirely dependent on luck and timing, and more often than not you'll end up with nothing.
And yeah, I may now be adding to the problem, but I didn't create it and I have no control over it. Even if I could go to 10+ stores a day, today shows me that wouldn't necessarily help. It's a total crapshoot, and I no longer want to play.
I can also stop checking HasbroToyShop, which can't keep things in stock and hasn't had Vehicon. Right now, they have Airachnid and Kup (but no Rumble or, of course, Vehicon). Making an in-demand item available to hungry customers? No, that would make too much sense.
By the end of today I was exhausted and drained. I didn't waste much gas since I had to make the trip anyway, but I pissed away time and energy. And remember -- these are stores outside my area. I have still been going to the ones in my area, and the results are pretty similar. A whole lotta Bumblebees and little else.
From now on, I'll check the toy department if I happen to be in a store, but I'm done with inventing reasons to drop by and I'm done with checking in for the heck of it. If I want it, I'll order it. The extra cost is justified by no gas, no tax, and no bullshit. I have better things to do with my time than a fruitless and pointless waste of time.
This also means I'll be buying less, because there are always those marginal ones that I might or might not buy. If I ever run into them, great. If not, no loss. The GDO are a perfect example. I only really wanted Wheelie for shits and giggles, but since I already have the mold, I can tell TRU to go
themselves.
I'll be putting leftover money and energy into Lego. They're not my 'thing', like Transformers, but at least the company doesn't go out of their way to make it difficult to obtain their product. I'm tired of throwing money at Hasbro, a company that makes an awesome product but seems hellbent on making purchasing it into a tedious and annoying chore that saps the joy right out of it. I'm going to be sending part of what used to be their money to a company that wants me as a customer.
