More January Shelf News

More Stuff on the Shelves here in the Heartland of America.  I may not be the first to have seen it, but you can bet that if it's showing up here that it'll either be at your stores waiting for you by the time you read this or on it's way shortly!

I made a routine trip to Wal-Mart and spotted the largest stock of BuzzBee Shotguns I've ever seen.  Traditionally, my Wally World has not had many off-brand blasters in stock.  However it looks like there's as much presence for BuzzBee as there is Nerf now.  They're the new layout shotguns too, with the over-under barrel instead of the side-by-side we've seen so much of.  There's nearly 20 of them just on the shelf!  In addition to the Double Shots, there's Tek series blasters, Tommy 20s, and Berserkers.  Oddly enough, this particular Wal-Mart was out of almost all of the larger Nerf brand blasters.  No Stampedes, Swarmfires, or Nitrons were on shelves there.  However, they do still have their Longstrike's on sale for $29.  Wal-Mart also has  Rayvens and Speedswarms now.

Then I made my way across the street to Super Target to check out what they had.  Sure enough, those Stampede ECS-50 displays with that 50 round drum were teasing my brain.  Along with the new misleading display was a slew of new ammunition.  The 20 and 40 round Disks were on shelves alongside the new Glow Streamlines.  20 Round Disks are sitting at 14.99, 20 disk sets are at 8.99 (which is only a dollar more than the 10 disk set) and the Glow Darts are at 4.99 for a pack of 16.  Target still has Rayvens and Speedswarms too, though a few other stores I've checked are already out of them.

There's also a Toy Clearance going on and among the items are Light Strike targets that I previously mentioned were on sale for 3 or 4 dollars.  They're now an additional 50% off, putting them at a mere 2.98 at my store.  The rest of the Light Strike system seems to be hanging onto their original pricetags, which either means that they are actually expensive to produce or Wowee still thinks they've got a system worth that money.

Next to them there's still Max Force sets lingering on the shelves.  There's a new Value ammo pack out there that doubles the pellet count from 300 to 600 for $9.99.  Max Force and Light Strike systems both seem to be hanging onto their pricetags more than I would've expected at the slow rate I've seen them selling.  Perhaps there are other parts of the country where they're selling better, but it's not that way here.  I wonder if my perception of these two newcomers would've been better had I seen them received better by consumers?  Oh well!  That's it for this installment of Shelf News!