Over the past week or so, I had the chance to visit a few different retail/toy stores and take a look at the toy aisle. I thought it might be nice to have a thread to discuss current setups and/or trends in the toy aisles in your respective areas. As far as what I saw around here (I visited 2 Wal-Marts, 2 Targets, a TRU, and K-B), here are a few observations:
Star Wars: Wal-Marts were set up as we heard, basic figures only, six pegs..as well as lightsabers. Unfortunately, most was old product, although one store did have the research droids and DF Padme. Targets didn't have much for basic figures (actually a new Greatland Target that opened about a month ago has been pretty good about toys, found the Scenes there a couple weeks ago, but now they have Clone Wars ships, red clonetroopers, and some empty space. TRU pegs have been packed with Pilot Jangos for months, although they do have the Officer/Han/Lando 12" wave there, as well as Luke/Sidious/Obi Unleashed. KB doesn't have any new product, just the four packs, $1.99 2002 figures, etc.
Other Observations...
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is really getting a lot of space in the stores around here. Is it because they are being pushed hard, selling well, or both? I had a few of these back in the day, but I'm not collecting the current line. Too bad though, looks like you could find about all of them right now, wouldn't that be nice with other lines?
MOTU has been the same for the most part around here, 1 Target and 1 Wal-Mart have completely dropped the line for now, the other two still have it...with mostly older figures. I'm hoping Roboto will show up in the stores. Overall though, the line doesn't have a whole lot of space, probably average.
Surprisingly, it doesn't seem like LOTR has a whole lot of room, but this will probably increase as ROTK gets closer. TRU had mostly ROTK Smeagol/Gollum repacks, and one of the new Treebeards (as well as several figures from the other movies). Target has the first wave of ROTK figures, as well as some AOME stuff. Wal-Marts around me didn't really have much representing this line, just a few figures here and there. K-B about the same.
Marvel Legends...I was so happy when my wife found me Gambit and Beast right when they were released (around my b-day), but this weekend I saw almost every wave of ML so far in mass. I didn't see a whole lot of Gambits, but everything else was pretty plentiful (I didn't dig for chase figures or anything like that though). Hopefully it will be as easy to find Colossus, etc. in Dec/Jan whenever these come out.
Well, there are other lines to discuss as well, but this is getting long enough. I just think it is interesting sometimes to see how much space is taken up by certain toy lines, what "seems" to be selling, etc. I guess I was most surprised by the big space TMNT has at these stores...not that I have any problem with that line, I was just a little surprised. They seemed to have the most space of any individual line by far around here. Any other observations?