>>11372406Anon, what sells well or poorly filters up that chain. If retailers sell out on a lot of $29.99 CEs or some of Hasbro's 34.99 deluxes, they are going have the option to reorder and contrary to what you believe, some stores do.
I know this because McFarlane had extra Hugo Strange figures that did not sell out all the production run. Originally he was a Platinum. If there were a normal amount of reorders you would've never seen him individually online except at runfair.
I bought one months after he was originally solicited and available. Suddenly a few months later I noticed he was in stock for regular 22.99 at places like EE (and still is) and I believe BBTS (which he isn't listed anymore). EE almost never sells Platinums individually and BBTS normally sells them marked up for 40.
That points to the fact that not enough reordering happened, and so McFarlane had to offload extra stock. Sometimes this extra stock will end up at his own storefront too. Point is, stuff not selling out at full price hurts McFarlane/other manufacturers (through having to waste warehouse space stocking them at their own company stores, or finding some other retailer to sell them off to if they can).
You can also see this happen with gold label "store exclusives" that don't do well. Todd designed Wonder Woman repaint was one. It was originally Walmart exclusive, but then many months later BBTS got it in stock and a few other places too, because Walmart did not reorder enough. And that example was years ago, ~2022ish.
I don't fully believe that people are buying less of every line. Only some lines and certain types of characters, namely C/D listers. So for example, I would accept C/D listers of DCMV are selling worse from what I can tell, namely C/D gold labels like Fire or Metallo (especially if theyre inaccurate/poorly done). But other figures do not sell less. Evergreens like Spiderman, so much so that Hasbro has the confidence to make a $50 version of him.
