Now, that our one-night/two-hour stand with Kmart is over and we got what we wanted, we move on to our next target which conveniently has a giant red bulleye …

Here’s what your Target endcap display should look like:

Pegs of Storytellers, the books (World of CARS & Meet the CARS), the Storytellers Simpletown Speedway & Lights & Sounds McQueen …

In reality – um, not so much …

But then again, most other toy lines don’t have customers unearthing the internal item SKU and making employees go in the back to bring them out … of course, CARS is not like any other toy line – diecast or not. The rest of the endcap is completely empty, The second Target I went to had the Lights & Sounds McQ but about 5 singles and about 4 3-packs just like this one.

So, it will be interesting to see what happens next. My feeling is they are pretty surprised that people have essentially stripped the shelves clean. I think they figured it might sell – a nice “gift” along with the book – during the holidays but not at the blistering sell through rate that the first cases are already down to a few CARS left. I would imagine there will be another re-stock but not to heap fire on this thing, you might want to keep in mind Target does seem to order pretty conservatively so while it’s unlikely they didn’t plan on another re-stock before Christmas (other than CASE B), it is not completely out of the realm that we may not see more of these until February, 2009. I’m not trying to panic you but I’d rather you buy these at regular retail versus eBay pricing in another month on these things … and hey, if you grow to hate them, just hang onto your receipts 🙂

If you look closely, you’ll notice that there are Halloween mini’s on the shelf here in the CARS section and not in Halloween section so as someone mentioned, in some stores, they never opened them thinking they had enough Mini’s on the shelf … so if you’re still looking for them, maybe now they will get around to putting them out.

And of course, the other CAR book being offered next to WORLD OF CARS is MEET THE CARS (the Target exclusive version includes a mini book) – a nicely done book with illustrations of over 100 CARS/characters from the film but ultimately, it’s disappointing as the Blu Ray Finder on the DVD lists over 200 CARS and if you start adding in the Pitty’s and haulers they have just assigned names to, it’s clear this book is not encyclopedic and maybe only covering 25% ofthe CARS actually out there. It’s nice with fun illustrations and a paragraph for each CAR but just not good enough – it’s all very cute for kids and lots of reading so nice for a 3-7 year old but overall, not good enough. In fact, it will take most kids about 5 seconds to realize not all the piston Cup racers are in there … they clearly didn’t want to have to pay extra to Dale Jr. or Apple and of course, since people would notice if only 34 of the 36 racers were there, they skipped over another 10 so you would just think it’s some co-inky-dink … now if it said, Volume I, I could live with it but again – cute but not encyclopedic. Nice but not great. Amusing but not satiating.