Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne takes a look at the claims that there is a glut of Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration in the market.
If there is a huge supply of Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration boxes and Elite Trainer Boxes floating around out there, we sure haven’t seen it (see “Meltdown on Discord“). I have no doubt the glut is happening, but I also figure The Pokemon Company is directing most of the product to mass market stores. We’ve had customers regale us with tales of standing in line at Target at 7 a.m., waiting until the store opened to grab as many Pokémon TCG: 30th Celebration ETBs as they can.
Another customer told us how she and her family waited in a line a block long at the local Sam’s Club to get ETBs. Even with the staff at Sam’s Club limiting purchasers to two ETBs each, they ran out about five people in line before my customer could purchase any. Meanwhile hobby game stores are getting so heavily allocated that one distributor got the store one ETB; not one case of ETBs, only a single one ETB (along with single units of a couple of other 30th Celebration items). Meanwhile, Sam’s Club gets enough ETBs to offer two of them to each person in a line stretching a block long.
Now, The Pokemon Company has a great promotional program for its OP stores: prize packs, stickers, activity sheets, promotional cards, etc. For that matter, Wizards of the Coast does a great job with its promotional materials as well. The problem is, of course, that stores cannot sell prize packs, stickers, activity sheets, promotional cards, etc.
OP programs originated as an engine by which the companies encouraged people to play and compete with their card sets, thus encouraging them to buy more to make their decks better in order to compete. However, it’s hard to justify running an energetic OP program when stores cannot get enough product to perform their basic function, selling said product. Most of my distributors have moved to an allocation model for Pokémon. The model generally works like this: here is what you can get, sorry it is not the amount you preordered but if you do not want it, we will send it along to the next store, which will likely happily accept it.
Switching gears, distribution problems with WotC and Magic have just gotten worse, as I noted last week (see “Shipping Times Fractured“). Unlike with The Hobbit set, I didn’t read of any stores not getting Play Boosters for Reality Fracture prizes in time for the prerelease. However, the delivery window for prerelease kits was the shortest I can remember. Typically, kits arrived one to three days before prerelease Friday. With Reality Fracture, our prerelease kits did not arrive from UPS until about 1 p.m. on Friday. I’ve read about stores whose kits were delivered 10 minutes before the store had scheduled the start of their first prerelease. Based on UPS tracking, I was unsure as to whether our kits would arrive on time for our pre-release weekend.
I hope Hasbro and WotC are taking a hard look at their supply chain problems and that the oversupply of Pokémon 30th Celebration product makes it to hobby game stores, which based on the calls we have had at the store and comments online, could certainly sell them.
Comments? Extra Pokémon 30th Celebration product? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
Disclosure: Scott Thorne currently is a shareholder of both Hasbro and Nintendo, which is part owner of The Pokemon Company.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
