I'm too lazy to dig it up, but they mentioned in one of the QnA's from last week that this is a very limited set and that we all need to go out and buy it or something like that...
Oh yeah - they
CLAIM its extremely limited and sure, maybe we're talking that normally Target buys 75,000 units of any exclusive and for these, they only made 40,000 (or whatever the minimum order quantity is).
But the cynic in me says that the extra "message from DePriest" that accompanied all of the recent Q&A answers was a marketing ploy to get as many people as possible to jump at this set.
If you think about it - there has been past precedents where a big box store will have the first wave of an exclusive and then cancel on the second wave due to poor sales of the first wave. WalMart did it with the cantina sets. Target did it to Playmates ages ago with the Star Trek transporter figures.
So net-net is that the message was an attempt to get collectors, scalpers, etc... to run out and grab this 9-pack under the guise of it being "more limited" than the other exclusives (heck, make 1 less than the others and you can still claim it's more limited, you're just not saying by how much) and thus solidify the agreement between Hasbro and Target to have two more waves of 3-packs.
I think having this as a 9-pack was a huge mistake, they should have shipped the 3-packs individually, like they are doing in the next two waves and like Chewie says, they should have made little tweaks like given us another way of getting the Rebel w/Scarf and in the Bespin set, throw in the moustached Bespin Guard - I mean really, how hard could it be to come up with a new head. The Imperial Set stinks, but that's the configuration of the old Kenner set, so the only thing they could have done to make that set stand on its own would be to introduce an new updated TIE Pilot, which would have been fine.
I just hope that if they still go through with six more sets of them, there is something "new" (even if it's a 'new hat' to borrow from the Simpsons) that makes them worth buying.