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As you may recall, a couple months ago I did an article
here on the Pin Pal Burns (PPB) fiasco with Wizard Entertainment Group (WEG),
the owners of Toyfare magazine, and Wizard World.com stores. Folks at that time were pretty upset, and rightly so, with the
business practices surrounding the distribution and handling of that
exclusive.
The next two exclusives, a repainted Comic Book Guy and
Boxing Homer, went as smoothly as can be expected with such a limited number
of figures. Many folks didn’t
get theirs, but there wasn’t quite as much fury over the overall handling
of the situation. But it seems
that didn’t last.
This latest exclusive is Pin Pal Moe. Several weeks in advance to the magazine sale and on-line sale of the
figure, they put him on their website (wizardworld.com) for order, but only
in 'bundles'. This isn't the first time they did this, as you could order
Pin Pal Burns with a magazine subscription for example. But this time they took it to dizzying heights. Not only could you get a PPB with a subscription or Wizard World
Convention ticket, but you could get one if you also bought any one of about
two dozen shelf warming exclusives that WEG hadn't been unable to unload for
months. None of these actually
had anything to do with the Simpsons of course, so for most collectors it
was a form of extortion - sure, we'll give you a PPM, but you have to also
buy something totally useless to you to get it.
Bundling items like this is frowned upon in the retail
world. Whether it's officially
illegal or not is open to interpretation, and no one is willing to fund a
lawsuit just to find out. But
there have been times when it's been tried in the past, particularly with
Beanie Babies. Many small
retailers tried to force people to buy common beanies in order to buy the
hard to find ones. Ty abhorred
this practice, and they threatened to end their relationship with stores
they found engaged in this practice. It’s
possible Playmates will follow the example set by Ty.
One way to insure that you get around any sort of
impropriety with bundles is to ensure that people have an opportunity to buy
the item individually as well. The
key to understanding why bundling is different than other, more common
practices is in how it's presented. It's
quite all right and a common practice to say "Buy A for $50, and I'll
give you B free!" Giving
someone something for buying something else is fine - making him or her pay
for an item on top of another is where the problem comes in.
Therefore, if they make sure that the bundle wasn't
your ONLY option, they would be fine, even if they did alienate their
customers. And so not only were
PPM's offered through the magazine, as always, but they were to go on sale
individually, on-line, at a preset time and place. Everyone would get a chance.
Except WEG only allocated about 500 units for
individual sale on-line. Considering
that approximately 2000-3000 of the previous exclusives (CBG, Boxing Homer)
had been sold on-line, it was quite a step down. Not too surprisingly, the PPM figures were sold out in minutes, even
with a supposed one per household order limit. I’ve talked with Stephen Shamus about the situation at WEG, and it
seems that the overall allocation of figures that were given to Wizard
World.com were way down this time. It’s
not surprising, considering all the flack WEG has gotten over the WOS
exclusives. I’m sure they
wanted to keep as many as possible for magazine subscriptions, but by
shorting the on-line sales even further they must have realized that a train
wreck was coming. Perhaps
dropping the Wizard World sales all together might have been a smarter idea.
Obviously collectors were up in arms, but WEG was still
well within their normal operating procedures. While it might be appropriate to chastise them for their lack of
customer satisfaction, they hadn't done anything nearly as questionable as
the entire PPB fiasco.
But they didn’t leave well enough alone. Instead of pulling the bundles of products with PPM down before the
singles went on sale, they stayed up for several hours after. Clearly they weren't out of PPM, just out of the ones they wanted to
sell individually. By only
selling 500 singles, they fueled a rush to buy the bundles in the following
hours, and those sold out as well. Collectors
saw this as WEG trying to unload as much excess inventory as possible, using
the desirable exclusive to force unwanted merchandise on to them, and I’d have to agree.
A couple weeks passed before the next great slam –
after several months of being ‘sold out’, PPB showed up again in
bundles! Claiming that they had
cancellations and returns, they placed these additional Burns figures on
their web site, again bundled with many non-Simpsons related items. To top it off, not only were these extra items stagnant stock, they
were extremely expensive stagnant stock, so that many of the bundles were in
the $150-$200 range.
I bet you can imagine that the Simpsons collecting
community wasn't too happy. None
of these 'returns' went to the poor folks that had tried to order in the
first place but had been refused. Instead,
WEG used these new found figures to sell extremely expensive items they
couldn't move otherwise.
But the hurricane that was the Yahoo survey was still
around the corner.
One of the Simpsons collectors that had ordered a
bundle received a feedback form from Yahoo, asking for feedback on his level
of satisfaction with the transaction. He
was upset of being forced to buy the bundle, and was therefore displeased
with the transaction, and told them so. They shared this info with WEG, and Stephen Shamus threatened to
cancel his order.
Yes, that's right. He complained about the way they handled the situation, and in
retaliation they threatened to cancel his order. They’ve included this disclaimer at their on-line store
“Wizard will gladly cancel an order, if it has not yet been charged, or
refund and cancel an order, if it has been charged for anyone who leaves
negative feedback to express concern over any of the Simpsons offers or any
other purchase.”
I’ve also talked with Mr. Shamus about this
situation. It is possible to
argue that the Yahoo feedback forum wasn't the appropriate venue to complain
about that particular subject, and there are two sides to that argument. However, that certainly doesn't constitute any sort of right for WEG
to cancel orders entered into in good faith for payment and shipment by both
parties.
If the order had actually been cancelled, it would have
been such a immature and juvenile act by the company that it's simply hard
to fathom. Just think about how
it would have appeared to customers - Hey, here's a few more PPM figures we
can add to bundles next month! We'll
tell people they were 'returns'!
Fortunately, the collector and Stephen Shamus continued
their email conversations, and eventually cooler heads prevailed. They ironed things out between them, and no order was cancelled for
making any sort of complaints that I know of .
I’ve been told that Stephen Shamus is new in the
Wizard World group, and that he came over from another WEG department
because of the problems they were having. As many folks know, it was only a month or two ago that rumors were
flying that Wizard World was soon to be history. I believe WEG would like to patch up their customer problems, but
I’m not sure if they have the ability, or if anyone is even willing to let
them try at this point. I think that’s going to be up to the folks that
buy these exclusives, and the company that supplies them now.
There are currently two outlets for expressing your
views directly to Playmates on these issues. First is the petition to stop Toyfare from carrying any further WOS
exclusives. It can be found at:
http://www.webpetitions.com/cgi-bin/print_petition.cgi?20622610842
Second, there is a survey up at:
http://www.simpsonscollectors.com/survey.asp
asking questions on WOS and it's exclusives, how they
should be handled, and what collectors prefer. The results of this survey will also be going directly to Playmates.
And finally, if you believe your order was cancelled by
WEG due to voicing your concerns in any forum, please let me know at mwc@mwctoys.com. I suspect this isn't all over yet.
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