Okay, long-ass post incoming. I don't profess to have all the answers, but I do have a a lot of logistics and wholesale/retail distribution experience. I may be able to provide everyone with some insight.
It's not a matter of laziness-- unless your definition of laziness is the marketplace not catering to you, even though you have money to invest. In the grand scheme of things, brand-driven hobbyists are a grain of sand on a beach.
Jones, who theorized about the random nature of stock fulfillment, is probably closest to the mark, and you could also fill in some blanks with Woundwave's excellent post. I can't give you a fly-on-the-wall look at how retailers decide what *Transformers* they want to stock, but typically a retailer is ordering stock months (or more) in advance of shipments leaving manufacturers.
Basically consider the time frame from reveals at Toyfair to retail availability. They see samples, protos, images, etc and base their orders on what they think they can sell to their market, within a certain period of time. Retailers would be shown the products available for a designated period or season (like the Lego example provided), and they either commit to a certain number and not re-stock, and/or have the ability/choice to replenish.
Someone had suggested that an entire year's assortment should be made available simultaneously, as it was done in the 80s. In all the goods I've seen move from one side of the planet to the other, I have never seen a distribution model like that for a product with such varied assortments. There's just too many different products and lines competing for shelf space nowadays, and no retailer would want to order everything at once. They're not going to risk being stuck with too much if it doesn't sell, and expecting them to know/care what characters will and won't sell on an individual basis so they can make their initial assortment purchase is simply ridiculous. Simplified case assortments make a buyer's job easier, so don't expect that to go away any time soon.
Also, an entire assortment takes up a lot of something people don't often consider: Space. And space, like time, is money ("Space-time is money" is a phrase I've used in the business actually, to little appreciation :P). It just makes the most financial sense to do it in waves/seasons/delivery collections. Fashion works the same way, for another example.
Replenishment in the case of Transformers is very much tied to the "wave" system new stock is released through. When a replenishment is ordered, whatever wave is currently making its way through the supply chain is what will ship to the store.
So, in essence, the poster who thinks "they" don't consider there to be any difference in product between one wave or the next is correct. And that's to a retailer's convenience and advantage.
And yes, there's a chance that one point in the supply chain may have an assortment of waves available to arbitrarily ship from. But more often than not, most of the stock on hand would be the most-recent wave to make it to that distribution centre, which replenishes by the pallet-load instead of by the case.
According to the inventory system though, it's all the same-- 1 box o' deluxe shape-shiftin' robits to replenish the one that already sold. Whichever is the cheapest and fastest one to pick is the one that ships.
So why do so many areas seem to be oversaturated with a certain wave while missing out on 2-3 of the following waves? Because shelf-warming likely dictates the timing of the replenishment. I know Walmart's system is programmed to auto-replenish certain products when inventory falls to a certain threshold. So if Walmart Location X took 4 months to sell all 16 of the CW Offroads they ordered (and by "ordered" I mean "ended up with"), the next stock they order will come from the wave currently available through their supply chain, not necessarily the next
chronological wave.
Which leads us to "why does the USA have consistent stock rotation while Motormaster's face turns pink from rotting under TRU's fluorescent lights in Canada"? Simple: the faster products sell, the faster they're replaced.
As others have said, Canada is a gigantic land mass inhabited by less people than the population of California alone. ALL wholesale fulfillment, in order to afford to stay in business, treats Canada like the satellite market
that it is. The truth is painful for some, but it's the truth. It's just Capitalism at work. Don't like it? Good, you shouldn't, it doesn't like you either.
And contrary to popular belief, it doesn't care about your money either. At least not on the individual scale. Industry serves
markets, not
people. And you know what kind of market Canada is?
A pain in the arse. We have a border to cross, bi-lingual packaging requirements, an active climate, and most of our major population centres (IE- markets) are separated by
several days of expensive road travel.
This means there are added costs, both financially and logistically, to distribute goods here. This has an effect on what becomes available to the market through foreign businesses. The financial aspect and effects should be easy enough to assume, but what I see a lot of people assume incorrectly is that Canada and the US share the same Transformers supply chain. In fact, on the technical level, it's probably not entirely accurate to consider TRU USA and TRU Canada the same company.
With Transformers, Canada gets its own overall assortment of stock that has been custom-produced for this market by Hasbro's suppliers, and this stock is shipped from the manufacturer to Canadian distribution centres. The distribution centres would then be the hubs from which all individual store orders (and replenishments) are processed from. Some distribution is further complicated/randomized by factoring in major retailers'
own supply chain networks in addition to Hasbro's.
The United States does not factor in this arrangement in any way, because it would be a huge waste of time and money to ship the custom goods to a market they're not meant to be available to. Thus, both markets will have their own timelines based on sell-through. The most they'll ever be parallel would be close to the overall starting point of the toyline. IE, Wave 1-- which we do indeed never tend to miss here. Back in the TFA days, we even got stuff before everyone else! Hell, I think I even had one of the first Universe Prowls available in the western world, and it was in bi-lingual packaging with Sunstreaker's art.
So, the longer it takes your store to sell out of Poor Ol' Pinky-Face Motormaster, the higher the chance you're not going to see Onslaught or Scattorshot (which is a fact that will probably drive up the anxiety some of you already have about this).
Eventually distributors may receive latter-wave material that they won't be able to move to major retailers, because they're not replenishing. This is the stuff you're going to see showing up at places like Winners and London Drugs, likely sold at a wholesale discount (because such stores are even less interested in taking risks on novelty products than businesses that operate in that market directly)-- in order to create more space at the distribution centres, because space is money.
But the supply chain feigns no obligation to understand the difference between any of these characters/assortments, it only knows SKUs and distribution cycles. And fortunately for Hasbro and its retailers, two thirds of the market does just fine with the most affordable fulfillment they're provided with. Mom or Dad go to TRU to buy a Transformer for their child, and there usually tends to be a fair amount in stock. Which ones? Doesn't matter. As long as they sell. And that's the bottom line for retailers.
Now, You may say "but Hasbro can afford to satisfy 100% of the market!", and you might be right. But that thinking is based on your needs as an individual, and individuals are irrelevant in a big enough market. What a business can afford to do has nothing to do with what they're interested in doing. And it's not necessarily making the MOST money possible (as most people believe), so much as making the most money possible FAST, and somewhere in between there's almost always a compromise-- at the cost of the smaller segments of the market.
As for e-commerce-- most of the same constraints and logistics apply. Square footage vs. sell-through. Might even be worse because major e-commerce orders are fulfilled out of distribution centres, which tolerate stuff lingering beyond its shipping season far less than actual stores do. They might not replenish at all if what they stocked under-performs in the slightest.
Outraged as any of us get that we can't have the particular robot we want as individuals, there are just not enough of us together to be worth catering to. Capitalism, baby!
So, TL;DR: It's not really a matter of "slow" stores vs impatient collectors. Basically, your market is not driving replenishment well enough to satisfy your sense of entitlement to new assortments, which is worsened by access to information about conditions/available assortments in other markets. And I know people hate that E-word, but it simply is what it is.
Again, I'm not an expert in Hasbro distribution. I'm just painting everyone a picture about retail distribution in general, using Transformers as the colour palette.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Woundave
I figure Chinese new year must be a factor too - if most stuff we buy (hasbro or third party) is manufactured in that part of the world the shut down for new years interrupts the supply chain in January.
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It absolutely does. Complete shutdown. Such a contrast to our biggest holiday season-- not only do we not shut our businesses down, we make our workforce work
harder.
