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This whole Psycho Green showing up at Walmart thing got me thinking. Now keep in mind the following may or may not be accurate, I'm just using my experience in the warehouse industry to speculate what may have happened at a distribution level. (THREAD)
Now if you're familiar with the current climate of U.S. employment rates, then you'll know a lot of big companies had to issue furloughs at the start of COVID and some that didn't have to at the start are beginning to now.
I've been back from my furlough for about 2 months now. Out of 21 employees that were laid off at the start, I'm 1 of only 3 full time employees they've asked back. 1 of those was only within the past week. The warehouse is currently operating at about 1/3 of the usual personnel.
Now even though we're operating at 1/3 of the manpower we had before, business has been picking up so we have to start meeting that demand and it's becoming...challenging.
I've been at my job for a few years so I'm very versatile in many different departments throughout the front office and the warehouse and I'm not kidding when I tell you that I have done a little bit of everything in that warehouse within just this week alone.
Meeting the demand is difficult right now. Sometimes you're moving so fast just trying to get product on and off a pallet to keep things moving. It's not surprising that there's a shipping flub like this.
My thought is it could be an instance where Hasbro's warehouses got the figures from the factory and whoever received the figures into their inventory received it as some other lightning figure.
So when it came time to shipping out store exclusives (which I imagine the Alpha and Zordon set was about ready to start shipping) they shipped out Green to Walmart's distribution hub.
Now obviously, later on they must have caught it because Hasbro Pulse sent out that email asking everyone to be patient with them because they probably realized they just shipped a shit ton of the wrong figures to Walmart. Luckily, COVID is a very easy excuse to use right now.
So now what I imagine Hasbro is doing on their end is having their sales reps contact Walmart who then has to contact all the stores they shipped Green to so they can begin the process of asking those stores to send the figures back.
I imagine it's gonna be a nightmare for whoever the inventory manager is at Hasbro because they aren't getting all the figures back obviously cause some Walmarts have sold them already.
Anyways, my point is yes, it's super frustrating that Hasbro shipped stuff to the wrong place and now people are getting something before people who pre-ordered the same thing months ago, but remember that behind the scenes of all this stuff are people.
They're people who are more than likely not getting paid enough to deal with the demand their corporate overlords expect of them. It's very stressful coming into chaos at work every day & it especially doesn't help if your bosses are asking you to do 10 different things in 1 day.
Times are tough right now guys. COVID is affecting ALL aspects of your life whether you realize it or not. It's definitely frustrating and those feelings are valid, but with toys right now, you gotta have some dang patience. (END)
