Why No Street Dates?

[arscott]

is its name, pat?

diaglo " the It mang " Ooi

I imagine 'it' referse to the e-mail rather than the sales rep.

btw, where to you work, thalmin?

 

[kenobi65]

btw, where to you work, thalmin?

Thalmin is the proprietor of my FLGS, Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL. I'm truly blessed to have such a great game store within a short drive; if Games Plus isn't the best game store in the universe, it's gotta be top-5.

 

[Tom Cashel]

As far as I'm aware, making sure a product makes a particular street date nationwide costs extra money. You shouldn't announce a date any more precisely than you're willing to guarantee it.

Huh, I didn't know that it costs extra. Not broken after all, I guess.

 

[thalmin]

To try to have a street date, you start by stagger shipping, so al the distributors should receive the product at about the same time, or you get a big enough stick so the distributors don't sell early. Likewise, the distributors stagger ship to arrive at the stores on the street date. Now just shipping when you get it is easier, and in business "easier" usually means cheaper.
Most of the gaming companies, at least the larger ones, use and enforce either street dates (arrive at the store on same day) or release dates (ship from distributers on same day.) The latter is less fair to stores located further from the distributer.

 

[arscott]

Then, if you're lucky, the guy who does the games ordering bother to tell his co-workers not to put a product on the shelf just yet.

The store where I used to work experienced one or two snafus in that regard.

 

[thalmin]

Usually the product doesn't arrive at the store before street date, and it is almost always labelled, both on invoice and shipping box, "Do Not Sell Before..." as an extra reminder.

There are mistakes, and there are "mistakes"

 

[thalmin]

Oh, kenobi65, thanks.
And, yes, "it" referred to the email.

 

[diaglo]

And, yes, "it" referred to the email.

yeah, but where's the fun in spoiling the joke.

as for the store. goto www.tomwham.com

iirc, he has a pic on his site of the place.

 

[der_kluge]

I've heard that WoTC often fudges their dates to keep the competition guessing. It's no secret that a lot of publishers will do this to one another, and WoTC competes with other companies with trading card games, as well as some of the larger d20 publishers. So, if one company is set to release a new card game, historically WoTC would try to release something else big at the same time to less the impact their competitors had. So, nowadays any date any company gives on a release is about as useful as the weather reports in Raleigh, NC.