Quote:
Originally Posted by sixshot1981
Simple.
Inflation, production costs, supply costs, shipping costs...list goes on and on. It's life. Smaller economy. They're toys. Get upset when they jack your food prices 3-5% this year...that's bad.
USA got an increase as well too...and life's not fair either...
At this point everytime there's a price increase its paint by Numbers with the posts here. What's next we gonna complain Coke isn't 5¢ a bottle anymore. Houses arent $5000...
Ain't nobody holding a gun to your head to buy them. Vote with your wallet and don't buy it...or better yet if aren't getting one go demand a COLA increase at work every year...
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And we can probably expect another increase fairly soon. Maybe not from Hasbro, but it seems production costs are going up for the little guys. At least according to Brian Flynn at Super7.
His interview with Pixel Dan was really interesting. He went into more detail than I think pretty much anyone in a company has before, at least publicly. His breakdown of cost factors was great to hear.
According to him the factories are operated around the Chinese New Year as their "year end". So every year, for them at least, March brings the inevitable price increase to production. Hence why they are increasing their Ultimates price by $10. This might not affect Hasbro as much since they have moved a lot of production to Vietnam.
Now Hasbro is the big boy, so they have more power to keep costs down, especially at the factory level. However they aren't immune as we have seen with the recent price increases. Also they have no control over raw material prices, and according to Brian Flynn those prices have been steadily increasing ever since Covid. Mostly because a lot of the raw materials for PPE are used in the manufacture of lots of common products.
Then there is the shipping problems. Again according to Brian Flynn, they could normally get a container of product on a ship in about a week. Now it takes them 2-3 weeks minimum, plus another couple weeks to get the product out of port once it arrives in the USA. On top of that, the shortage of containers worldwide has pushed up the price to actually get your products on a ship. Something that is affecting everyone from little companies all the way up to the biggest ones in the world.
All this long-winded jibber-jabber is basically to say get ready for another price increase probably a lot sooner than we realize.