Got some new info related to distribution, etc., from a Wizards of the Coast rep. When explaining why there's only going to be ONE WAVE of new Heroscape products this year, he said:



Now GI Joe is probably a somewhat larger brand than Heroscape, and will definitely be getting a bigger push into next year, but I think this helps point to some of the difficulties.

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Yup, Joe likely took a a back seat to IJ, Iron Man and Star Wars, though not necessarily in that order.

Surely this isn't something that came out of left field for them tho, right? The oil crunch has been ratcheting up slowly but surely for a few years now. It's not like there was suddenly 1/2 the oil in the world when everyone woke up last Tuesday. Seems to me that they would have known this would've meant that nothing's gonna improve for Joe distribution at last year's Con when they said they'd have everything sorted come this past January at the latest. Here it is the next Con and people still can't find the Joes they want.

What with TF II coming out plus whatever Marvel movies that're due next summer, I'm not seeing any reason to believe Joe's suddenly gonna become the A-#1 Hasbro property to get all the love from them.

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But...didn't they have three less months this year to get stuff set for the Con? :snicker:

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From what I recall reading a while ago (somewhere) is that hasbro had several long term futures deals which kept the price of the raw materials relatively low, but the deals were due to expire sometime around now, (2007-2009).

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I know Hasbro has stated in the SW Q&A's that they are using a new factory for the Indy stuff (which was their excuse for the poor QC on some figures) so Indy isn't bumping Joe on that production line if I'm reading that correctly.

I think the problem is that there is just too much stuff coming out at once. Joe 25th, Batman, Hulk, Indy, Speed Racer, plus the continuing barrage of Power Rangers, wrestling figures, Star Wars and Transformers all competing for the same shelf space and production slots. And there are only so many sweatshops in Asia to crank this stuff out.

But I don't think we'll ever know the entire true story of distribution issues unless someone here gets a job at Hasbro and has loose lips.

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Yeah, oil's up double this time last year, so it was both expected and unexpected for folks, you know? There's expectations and there's hoping for the best.

While this isn't that surprising, what does surprise me is while there are numerous figures I've never seen in stores, I've bought seven Vipers in the last week or two, and left many more on the pegs. Distribution isn't completely down; it's really spotty.

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Its called Force Majeure... Its a term used in business contracts that allows businesses to get out of binding contracts due to serious changes in market conditions. As my wife works in a petroleum based business and they have had and had to break contracts because of the continued increases in petroleum.