FORESHADOWING LOL
Funko, purveyor of the (in)famous Funko Pop dollies, the creepy, samey hunks of plastic lazily modeled after every single piece of pop culture that has been released in the last two hundred years, announced that they have "30 million dollars' worth" of stock in, well, stock, and they would be... let's see how their statement put it:
"Inventory at year-end totalled $246.4 million, an increase of 48% compared to a year ago. This includes inventory that the Company intends to eliminate in the first half of 2023 to reduce fulfilment costs by managing inventory levels to align with the operating capacity of our distribution centre."
Basically, "we're shitting 'em out faster than we can flog 'em, so now we're knee-deep in plastic we have to get rid of."
And how will they be... aligning the inventory levels with the operating capacity of the blah de blah?
By sending $30 million worth of product the way of Atari's E.T. - straight to some landfill.
Normally products like that get discounted, to recoup some of the losses, but it is literally cheaper to just dump them than to manage logistics.
And also selling them under the full MSRP would be dilluting the perceived value of the toys and casting doubt on their normal pricing.
And all in all it's more profitable to just skip the middle man and ship them straight to the landfill.
Which brings me to the "$30 million" number, which was pulled from the same source as the gaming publishers' estimated "losses" to piracy: straight from their butt.
It is the full retail price of a Funko toy, times the inventory. It's nowhere near the cost of manufacture.
That doesn't make the dump any less colossal though, at a rough estimate that's 300 metric tons of Funko Poop.
But hey, that's business baby.
https://www.ign.com/articles/funko-is-sending-30-million-worth-of-its-products-to-a-landfill