What the slag is up with Toys 'R' Us?

[Tonestar]

Originally Posted by Crobot91

Picked up the FOC legends cassettes, Soundwave, and Sounblaster at TRU today. The same location also had Bruticus which I don't believe has ever showed up in TRU yet (only Walmart).

So it looks like we will start seeing new stuff in all the stores in the next week or so. Hopefully, FOC deluxe wave 3 and YOTS Omega Supreme show up too.

Which TRU did you get the cassettes/data tapes from and how much were they if you please ?

[Team Jetfire]

Originally Posted by chovner

IF I WENT TO TIM HORTON'S TWICE AND EACH TIME THEY WERE OUT OF SOUR CREAM GLAZED I'D LOSE MY SHIT!!!

"Sorry sir we don't have sour cream glazed donuts today"
" ... excuse me what?"
"Yes we probably won't have any for 2 months, maybe more"
"..."
"Sir"
"... I did come to Tim Horton's right? I didn't accidentally walk into a whore house did I?"
"ummm no sir"
"THEN WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME I CAN'T GET A SOUR CREAM GLAZED DONUT WITH YOUR WHORE MOUTH YOU DIRTY PIRATE HOOKER "
"SIR!!!"
"I'm sorry.... I don't know where that came from"

Thank-you, that made my day.

[Scrapper6]

Originally Posted by wedge1021

Walmart also missed many of those waves, it's not just TRU. And from what I have come to understand as I keep learning more about the toy collecting hobby, it's actually Hasbro Canada that missed those waves - they were not brought in to Canada, and therefore no option was given for the Canadian retailers to order them. And as far as HasCan is concerned, it's a good thing they didn't offer later waves, because the short-sighted retailers over-ordered on wave 1 of everything. So they would have had all the new stuff sitting in warehouses rotting somewhere. At least, that is how it has gone with the missing Star Wars waves of years past - maybe Transformers is different (I've only been collecting TFs for a year, but SW for several).

Not every wave gets printed on Canadian cardbacks. Retailers have the ability to bring non-Canadian waves into the country via their US counterparts, but they rarely need to do that since there's enough regular supply here, and less demand than in the US. Some people have mentioned that they hope to see Prime waves 3+ show up at Winners or some store like that. This would be great, but I don't think it's happening. Those waves don't exist at HasCan. And I think if HasCan did have some or all of them, they'd have shown up at Winners already, what with the switch to Beast Hunters, the 2012 Prime line is discontinued, so they'd want to clear them out ASAP.

Again, this is all based on what I've learned over years of Star Wars collecting. I'm new to Transformers, so maybe it's different, but being the same company, I'm guessing it's pretty close. Most of you already know how all this works, but sometimes we forget (myself included). As many have noted, hopefully Target brings some better competition to the marketplace. At the very least, it will be one more retailer with ties to the US that may help us to get a few more waves in that we may not have otherwise!

Hasbro Canada? Really? What are we Hasbro UK all of a sudden, Hasbro Canada hasn't flopped this badly on getting product out there since the days of Beast Machines and we all know why Beast Machines didn't do so hot at retail. The show didn't meet with expectations, many of the toys failed to hit the real focal point of the kids interest and lest we forget, a lot of the Maximals were plain fugly. (And I liked the Maximal designs from Beast Machines.)

If Hasbro Canada is really at fault here, I have to ask, how was it possible that Wal-Mart managed to get, not only cases of Star Wars figures that TRU never stocked, but also managed to wow us at the holiday season with the ONLY AVAILABLE ONLINE FINAL WAVE OF THE VINTAGE COLLECTION! (Which we've still got some of hanging around at certain Wal-Marts, mostly the dudes like Orrimarko and such that weren't big in-demand figures outside of certain fans.)

Seriously, while Wal-Mart completely missed the mark with Hasbro's Transformers brand, they still ordered cases from their other brand name figures, hell they were stocking many things that TRU just wouldn't or didn't give a damn about, according to how things worked.

The only reason why Wal-Mart didn't get the later stuff of Prime Deluxes is probably more to do with the utter fiasco that was DotM and the overstock of products from that toyline deluxe wise that the corporate heads decided not to take such a big chance and only ordered limited quantities of Prime. (I mean hell, when December rolled around again Wal-Mart still had DotM cases brought out at 5$ a pop for the Deluxe size class.)

Seriously, if DotM hadn't been such a pathetic line than Prime wouldn't have suffered as badly as it did the past year. I highly suspect that Wal-Marts only ordered as much Prime material as they needed and left the rest for other retailers. And TRU completely ignored it because they had FE and DotM clogging their shelves as well. Hasbro Canada clearly intended for a lot of Prime product to show up, I'm fairly certain of that, no toy company who has consecutively offered large numbers of product to the buying public just suddenly chooses to say fuck it and not try to sell said product to the retailers.

The retailers just clearly were a lot more cautious and pessimistic this time around because they got royally burned with DotM. Even the FoC Generations weren't ordered in large quantities, hell you were lucky if you got all five members to complete Bruticus, even just one would have been great to find, but after the initial cases were all gone from Wal-Mart nobody else had'em, so you were out of luck.

You can't say Hasbro Canada is to blame, we've seen testshots of figures in Multilingual packaging from the other waves, have we not? Correct me if I'm wrong. All of the last wave of Vintage Star Wars were only on Multilingual card backs I think.

The Retailers burned themselves this time by thinking they were putting one over on Hasbro for sticking them with that damn DotM Shelfwarming Chokefest, when in reality all they managed to do was fuck themselves over by trying to be too clever and avoiding the ordering of stuff they didn't want to get stuck with again.

At least that's how I percieve what happened to our Transformers Brand this past year, I could be wrong and it could be a combination of both factors, HC and Retailers, who can say. Personally I bloodywell doubt that Hasbro Canada would just ignore over two thirds of the available product in the Prime toyline, especially when they had been marketing it like mad on a global level from day one.

[down_shift]

Originally Posted by Team Jetfire

Thank-you, that made my day.

Ha ha ha ha totally.

[Shockwave 75]

I think one way to fix what happened with the DOTM line is that when the next movie rolls around the accompanying toy line SHOULD NOT BE THE MAIN LINE!

Movies, even popular ones, have such a short "shelf life" that their toy lines should too.
I say just put out a very basic assortment of the movie characters and that's it. Nothing fancy, no Mech Tech gimmicks, no 27 different versions of Bee and Prime, just a sold, well made line of the central characters.

I realized that many of you will say that most of the best movie era toys were the non-movie characters, and you're right. But they are also many of the shelf warmers.
Kids want the movie guys, and only get the "no names" when the figure they really want isn't there but they don't want to leave empty handed. I know many collectors do this too.

The big failing of the DOTM line was that is was the exact same characters looking exactly the same as they had for the last 4 years, only now with a new hat!

[chans formers]

It's now the middle of february and pegs have been empty since sometime in december! No restock for the holidays season, no stock for Boxing Day, no Beast Hunter stock, nothing. In fact I'm pretty sure the LAST time new stock came into the store was when FOC wave 1 came out.

Wal-Marts have smaller Transformers section usually and they got plenty of new stock.

Is it a problem with Hasbro? Problem with Toys 'R' Us themselves? Are the rest of the products available at TRU getting restocked? It can't be the january inventory, it's FEBRUARY!

I bet the pegs are getting dusty!

I guess it looks worse for us in Quebec since we didn't get any GDOs or Masterpiece () but that just doesn't feel like a normal situation.



the o/p was just wonder what the problem was,why is every other brick and mortar store keeping updated with new releases,not just tf's,while a store that's actually dedicated to just toys(and baby stuff) is more than half a year behind?


also,for those wondering,the issue/blame doesn't fall onto hasbro.
they offer the toys to retailers but it's up to the actual retailer to pick up the assortments/buy stock from hasbro.

@chovner,lmfao,you made my day also

[The Great Scrotum]

If you have not been following the news, there has been somewhat of a global financial crawl. If you are trying to find things at brick and mortar, I would suggest knowing when truck days are and getting fairly friendly with shelf stock personnel. Perhaps this shouldn't be mentioned in a room full of rabid toy fans, but there are fewer people that have the means to drive to a store, take several minutes to browse the entire store (from a business standpoint, moving more than one type of item and getting as much money by courting the guests on that visit is the goal), and spend even more time at the checkout line - not to mention have the expendable income to purchase a toy. Brass tacks: supply is low because universal (past the fandom) demand is low -> production is lower, optimum placement to yield profit: warehouses; distribution online outlets. If you love the hunt, pickins are slim. Of course, its just one manchild's opinion.

[thaneofcremona]

TRU in Ottawa has got to be one sorriest sights I have ever seen. Went in today and not even joking all they had in was 15-20 DOTM voyager Sentinel Primes ,about 5 bot shots 3 packs and a single GDO CliffJumper. the whole store had 1 deluxe figure and Well I was shocked it was not Bumblebee but still only 1 in the whole store? I for one cannot wait for target to be opening soon hopefully will have somewhere to go to see some selection.

[Batman]

It's always like this at Toysrus after Christmas. People don't spend as much money during this time of year. Come March we will probably see a lot of stuff restocked.

While the Transformers section is crap right now, most of the other sections are pretty well stocked. Lego, Skylanders, Hot Wheels, Marvel, and GiJoe are all full at the TRU by my place.

[Knockout]

Originally Posted by ryceball89

Whoops, I should've said the one in Amherst and Williamsville.

Oh okay. Because I was going to say HUH WHERE? For a moment there. I feel really bad for people who have to go all the way out there from Toronto now that the Niagara Falls location is closed. Then again, that seems to be a common thing with TRU's. Their so scarce.