It’s been 10 years since Tickle Me Elmo caused parents to lose their minds and spend crazy money (and in some cases engage in physical violence) to get the must-have toy of the season for their kids. Mattel/Fisher Price is predicting that there will be shortages of Elmo Tickle Me Xtreme (TMX; note that the “X” also signifies the 10th anniversary) if sales are anything like what they were 10 years ago.
As a new parent, it’s amazing to see how attached small children become to characters like Elmo — we already have 3 sizes of elmo dolls at our house and pre-ordered the TMX from Amazon to make sure that we had the perfect Christmas present for our daughter. Several interesting things have happened today, the release day of the TMX:
- We received notice from Amazon that the order has shipped, so we will definitely have a TMX for Christmas
- Searching for “Elmo TMX” on Amazon no longer brings up Amazon results, but instead of receiving an Amazon purchase page, but this page that is from a company called “Dakota Sales” and lists the price at $100, which is about 3 times what we paid.
- Our local Target had about 15 TMXs in stock, so we bought a couple just in case the same sort of madness that happened a few years ago happens again; I figure that we can always return them if we keep the receipt and don’t open them.
- Ebay is already swarming with listings that seem to, on average, start at double the retail price. This auction, which ends in 9 minutes from the time of writing this post lists the high bid at $305.
I’ll be watching closely to see what happens and whether or not our purchase of the 2 TMXs was a worthwhile investment.
Tags: elmo, elmo tmx, ebay, amazon, toys, Ross Hollman, Strategize
1 comment:
A friend from the bay area told me that she said her local target had a ton of these at lunch but by dinner when she called back to get more after seeing them on ebay, they were gone.
http://www.ticklemeelmotmx.net
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