AT-TE's and Falcons are on clearance everywhere around me at Targets and WMs. Does this bode well for the future of large vehicles? Did they sell enough to recoup their cost? Do retailers know there's more big vehicles coming so they're trying to make room? Obviously Joe and TF should have a larger footprint this year - SW still has the CW cartoon so I can't see them scaling back shelf space.
I honestly think the biggest issues with the big vehicles this year has been price point and availability. People are jumping at the opportunity to buy AT-TEs at $80 and Falcons at $100...maybe this is all part of the strategy. You don't crowd the shelves and put out a very high price point with an initial release. When sales or clearance hit, they knock a few bucks off, but maybe that's just going down to something still profitable. If I was Hasbro and made a ship I wanted to retail for $100, why not offer it at $150, get those early adopters to pay an inflated price, then let it filter down to $100, where people are lining up to get them and thinking they got a huge deal. There are a LOT of people who fool themselves into buying things based on what they're "saving" instead of whether the total cost is acceptable to them or not.
I think this is one of those issues where it's clear that the action figure section needs to be expanded. There was a time when Target had an aisle and half of action figures - I don't know why they ever moved away from that. When you consider how low the margin must be on things like the vehicle section (hot wheels) or some of the other slower moving toys in the department, it seems like they would be much better off trading off some of this dead weight to make more room for some of these lines. Even the latest Target reset has an expanded GI Joe set, but that's just 8 pegs of basic figs and a few pegs of comic packs at my store. An extra aisle would offer much more room for some of these battle packs, smaller ships, and big playsets and vehicles.