International Collecting, Exclusives, Mattel shipments Cncld

I just want to echo the OP... as another (long time) UK collector, it's coming to a point where I may just give up - it's becoming less and less fun and more of a headache. Collecting toy figures really shouldn't be this difficult(!).

I'd LOVE to actually buy Mattel's product (Ruthless Aggression Elite & Ultimates, MNW Elites & Ultimates, Superstars figures, various 3 & 4 packs etc)... none of it is available though. It's just so frustrating 😔.

I think that statement in the middle above is a big point that a lot of people miss about Walmart. Most metro areas seem to not have an adequate supply of Walmarts compared to more rural areas.

I live in the northwestern portion of Wisconsin. I live in a town that has a population of just shy of 70K, with a couple smaller suburbs/townships adding another 24K, so roughly 94K population in the area. We are big enough for one Target and two Walmarts in the area - however the local wrestling figure collector base is not that big.

So based on these numbers, I have 2 Walmarts, or one for every 47K group of people.

I can drive 90 miles and get to the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area, and by my count, I see 16 Walmarts. But per a quick google search, the metro area of Minnapolis/St Paul has 3.69 million people living in it. So dividing that by the 16 Walmarts gives us 230,625 people per Walmart - which is just short of 5 times the amount.

This is by no means scientific, but these are my findings:

Rural Walmarts - 1 per 47K of people
Metro Walmarts - 1 per 230K of people

This certainly is also a factor of people trying to find these exclusives. And that is not counting the fact that Walmart has horrible distribution issues - not all stores are certainly not getting all of their exclusives.

I am fortunate that it is rare for me to completely miss out on a Walmart exclusive in my local stores, simply due to the small size of the collector population. The ONLY one I can remember that did not come to town was the Walmart Retro series that had the Harley Race figure in it. Or the last basic figure series of that set (WCW set with Flair in business suit). Luckily another collector on here sent me a message that his town got in the basics that afternoon, and I drove 90 miles to get myself a set with an extra Flair or two. We did get the Decade of Domination two a couple years ago, but I missed the Kane & Mark Henry, but had a few other Walmarts near enough to make an afternoon of it to get them. But all of these are in smaller cities and larger rural towns.

I do feel fortunate, but if I lived in a larger metro area, or outside the US where shipping is just completely horrendous, I would have curtailed my figure collecting a long time ago. I don't even know where the issue fully lays either, but I would put the bulk of it on Walmart distribution. Target doesn't seem to have nearly the problems that Walmart does.

Apologies if this got a bit away from me and I rambled on a bit more than normal.

Thank you. I was bored at work, LOL. Gave me something to dive into.

As an international collector I've come to terms with buying regular elites and ultimates online for a few extra bucks but at least I can get what I want with a little hard work. Stores here are next to useless. My biggest frustration is when it comes to Target and Walmart exclusives. We have Walmart here in Canada but they never seem to sell exclusives and we don't have any Targets. Both websites don't ship international so people like me have started using a shipping company to get them over the border which means we are paying an extra shipping fee plus whatever extra fees they charge. It's better than nothing but then when you add Walmarts notorious track record for canceling online orders it makes everything even more frustrating. At this point I'm all but done collecting as the added retail jump, extra cost for international and availability of products has pretty much taken most of the joy out of collecting. I'll most likely only buy the odd first time in the line from now on.

Said it earlier and will be repeating it again... I'm not collecting wwe stuff as much as I use too collect a couple of years back.... Making all the legends and alumni character US exclusive really hurt me. I have just move on to collecting Yamaguchi, Mafex and Jada toys stuff as they are easily available and major retailers have them.

Don't put nothing on Mattel Creations, because they have put a block on my payment ever since I tried reloading the page when I tried to purchase the Muhammad Ali SDCC exclusive. It's been almost a month and these clowns still haven't gotten around to resolving my issue. I have been round in circles with them for the last three weeks. They have an automated computer message whenever you reply to their emails and knocked back to square one.

Their customer service is a joke and the worse I have ever dealt with. They don't want to give me compensation for all the frustration this experience has caused me and so this is why they are dragging their feet.
Don't put nothing on Mattel Creations because it's awful. If you need help with their customer service than you are straight up ed.

Says it all really. Is it smyths fault they havent had Brother Love in or is it mattel screwing them around I wonder for example.

...and why are Smyths charging a full £8 MORE for Legends figures than standard Elites? Where do they get this RRP from? Mattel?

No all Elites are the same price across the stores that sell them. The only ones that were ever more expensive that I can remember were Defining Moments (which technically aren’t elites they’ve never been called that) and the Toys R Us build a figure waves were more expensive but the modern PPV ones are not