You can read the post here or you can just read the important part which I will handily cut and past for your viewing pleasure:
David Young, a Wal-Mart employee, dropped us a line to clarify the future of Alternators at Wal-Mart:
I work at Wal-Mart and wanted to clarify something that had been going around about our stores and the sale of the various Transformers product lines. We are in no way dropping the Transformers brand. Certain regions sell certain toys more than others and those store managers & their regional supervisors have the authority to order more or less of any given item than you might see in a Wal-Mart from a different area. As far as the specifics of the ALTERNATORS brand, other than those specific stores that wish to continue to offer them, as a chain, Wal-Mart will not be carrying the line again until next Spring. This was not an aritrary choice on our part or any sort of "revenge" from Hasbro Toys, as has been speculated. We have a very specific reasoning for this action. We want to clear out our shelves during the holidays before the brand gets a complete reset in 2Q 2006. As collectors are often noticing, certain toys sit on store shelves while other sell briskly. These are your "pegwarmers". virtually every line has them, but the ALTERNATORS line is especially plagued with them, as about half the product line. And the way the figures ship -- four different action figures per case -- it's harder to keep the popular ones in stock for our customers without sitting on product that only moves at clearance prices. We have spoken to Hasbro about this at great length and we feel that we have a simple solution. Single-figure case assortments. If the red Honda S2000 isn't selling, but the yellow one is, we will now be able to order a case of nothing but the yellow Hondas. And since there is such a limited selection of action figures for this brand, Hasbro has offered to keep product the popular action figures in production for as long as the customers (and the retailers) have demand for that toy. But in order to do this, the existing distribution method and method of ordering needs to be overhauled. That will take time, and that is why we will begin our ALTERNATORS restock in the Spring of 2006. I can tell you now, that when our stores do restock, we will launch with eight different ALTERNATORS models, including several older models that will be brought back into production. Scion XB - Blue Acura RSX - Police Highway Patrol Chevrolet Corvette - Blue with flame decal Dodge Viper - Yellow redeco Mazda RX-8 - White #4 street racer redeco Subaru WRX - Fire Dept redeco Acura RSX - Blue street racer redeco Mazda RX-8 - Purple Villian We will also be offering these and all future releases on our web site, www.walmart.com. We are very excited about this experiment and hope that it will better serve our customers and our manufactoring partners. And we hope to offer even better service than you have come to find in our neighborhood brick & mortar stores and on our website. Thank you, David Young.[/url]
