Quote Originally Posted by Prowl View Post
I may be very wrong indeed but if a 3 year agreement was signed during the period when the AU$ was very low that would explain a lot.
....if though the retailers would all have different contract dates & lengths.

I also suspect that there is a bunch of resale price maintenence transpiring between Hasbro & their distributors.

Other retail departments may well have prices locked in for lengthy periods that you have mentioned (I wouldn't know, so yield to those who have experience in that), but since the Toy industry has the ANNUAL toy fair, and sign up retailers to pre-orders every year, their prices would only be fixed for a maximum of 12 months.

And Hasbro distribute direct to the major retailers, so there's no middleman to add any extra expense. The wholesale prices I've seen at Toy Fair (which are more than double the wholesale prices in America) is what is in question anyway... something that shouldn't be happening unless our exchange rate was close to half the US$. (which is hasn't been since July 2002)

The added factor here is that when you have a foreign owned company (like those car companies mentioned in the post above), a commission goes to the head office in that other country... problem with Toys though (and some other industries) is that they have been getting greedy with the massive exchange-rate shift, by doubling the US$ value of our toys, just to make extra money for their American Companies, essentially for nothing (because the foreign countries/branches are doing all the work to sell those products).
Based on the price differences, it appears that a Deluxe sized figure sold in America makes Hasbro America about $2-3 per toy (the yellow bar in my graph)...
BUT, a Deluxe sized figure sold in Australia is making Hasbro America about $7-8 commission - and that's if you give the local branch a healthy profit of about $4 per figure (from the yellow bar). Hasbro America are making a lot more per toy in Commission when sold here than they do from figures they sell in America (at our expense), and make more per unit than the local branch do despite them doing the work selling the stuff here.
Sure, give the Head Office a commission to cover their R&D costs, but not at such a huge margin that ends up making it cheaper to import the product.


I guess with so many figures, factors and variables, it makes it easy for Businesses to price however they want, and confuse the consumers enough to not have to be competitive.
My gripe just comes from watching prices and exchange rates since I started this community 16 years ago... we hit a low of US$0.50 on the exchange rate in 2002 and toy prices went up a lot in a hurry. We've now been at or above parity for the last 12 months - the value of those products have now halved in that time and someone is making all that extra money, because it isn't being reflected by the prices in the stores.