Where do retailers buy their WWE figures?

They buy from Mattel directly and they have a minimum number of cases they have to buy. From what I've heard, it is not a small number, something like 50-100 cases.

At the Wal-mart distribution centers.

Ok I see

The minimum orders would likely depend on the power of the retailer. I work for a manufacturing company similar to Mattel. Unfortunately, salespeople will bend over backwards and rarely push back on anything places like Walmart, Target, and Amazon want. A few years ago, one of our salespeople made a ridiculous deal with a certain retailer (probably considered mid-tier, but her biggest customer). In exchange for them taking a particular new product, she agreed to allow them to place orders for single cases at a time. Now we get hundreds of orders from them every week, each order for less than $50. Meanwhile we have far bigger customers placing one order per week for between $10k-$100k. It makes things so complicated and it’s so time consuming to get those orders in the system. I’m not sure if they changed it, but my company’s minimum order used to be something like $450. When you divide that number by the price per case, it more or less works out to a certain number of cases. I think somewhere in the region of 10 total cases. That could be like 5 cases or 2 items, or 2 cases of 5 items. Different companies do it differently. It basically comes down to Cost of Goods Sold and if that customer is worth the resources.

If that’s the case (no pun intended) then why not order more to distribute….we all know how well these things sell & they would obviously make money from them…you would think they would see it as a sound investment

I gotcha …. But if you seen how bad the distribution is here around my area you would have believed that too …. LoL

Man it’s terrible here….nothing on the pegs except for a few unwanted basics that have been hanging around for at least 2 months now…..Elites, you can forget it….there’s been none of them since the Walmart exclusive Undertaker, which I grabbed one of after standing there in shock & awe for literally a minute because they actually had something….like I said before, right place right time

Then there must be several ordering managers not doing their jobs because a Walmart hardly receiving elites is not uncommon lol

I have a friend who inquired and was actually approved to buy direct from Mattel a couple years ago. It was around $10K a month in product purchasing. He had to provide proof of a storage facility which has a minimum square footage requirement (he owns a clothing company and has a shipping facility). The deal breaker for him was they wouldn't let him just buy cases of Elites. He had to buy Basics and 2-packs too and he wasn't willing to take on that extra overhead just to get Elites.