Thomas And Friends & Chuggington Toy Hunting Shopping Study
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- čas přidán 21. 08. 2024
- Where's Thomas The Tank, Percy, Henry, Gordon, James & Diesel? And lets not forget Chuggingtons Brewster, Koko, Wilson and Action Chugger? This is a Thomas And Friends / Chuggington toy hunting study in Chatswood, Sydney Australia. I visit K-Mart, Target, David Jones, Myer and Toys"R"Us stores twice in roughly 6 months (it was actually 8 months to be exact) looking at the areas where the toy trains and train playsets are on display. I found Toys"R"Us tends to be the best place to find the most difficult to find toy trains, but the prices there tend to be the highest. Across all retailers stocks can have huge variations during the retail year. Sometimes it pays to grab a toy at full price and not take the gamble waiting for a discount price. To be honest It's looking like the way to secure these difficult to find toy trains is online. But even that does not guarantee a purchase.
There is an update related to this video, I returned to Toys"R"Us 6 months after the second visit seen in this video, much had changed.
Thomas And Friends & Chuggington Toys"R"Us Toy Hunting Update Gold Track Mystery • Thomas And Friends & C...
This video took a long time to make and it's a very delayed upload onto youtube. Basically it looks at the Thomas & Friends / Chuggington stock as Tomy started to do Chuggington toys, and just prior to the new Trackmaster2 and many changes in design to the TakeNPlay Thomas toy trains by Mattel. I'm sure some of the Thomas and Friends and Chuggington stock will bring back some memories, much has changed in only a few months. Anyone who lives where I do will know of how difficult it can be to find a great selection of Thomas toys, I don't see these problems when looking at other toy brands, Hot Wheels is a great example. But seeing the disappearance of the Chuggington toys and the Thomas and Friends display area shrinking is somewhat concerning. Is this caused by the new generation of children who use iPads as playtime entertainment. Is playing with toy trains becoming a thing of the past? It certainly seems there is not enough interest to sustain two giant toy train franchises. I certainly remember the time when Chuggington and Thomas & Friends shared equal area in the toy stores. These days thats not the case where I live.
I also show you where I see the G scale garden railway train set similar to the Newquida train I showed on my channel. Let's also look as some curious shopping areas in Chatswood. Because of the Hong Kong Chinese connections it tends to be a mini mecca for knock off dark side toys if you know where to look. But some of these shops have now vanished! One wonders what happened to them.
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Sadly everything you have noted in this video I have also found correct. Where I am, there is only a one toy shop within a 30km radius (Kmart), and it has indeed shrunk everything away. We used to have a huge Uncle Pete's, which was a little more pricy but worth it for the sheer choices... going there was Christmas and Birthdays rolled into one! Even I remember Kmart having lots of choice of toys, and selling branded clothing/appliances... even "Aussie" names like bonds have vanished from Kmart shelves...
I have found the situation with Transformers equally as bad. Back in the day there was lots of TF stuff... now it seems nobody cares... which is odd, because it makes me wonder what toys people are buying!
***** Good luck with your HSC exams, once they are done it's time to catch up. K-Mart Oz has really changed over the past 5 years, bit by bit they have completely re-formatted the store into a massive collection of very cheap made in China items. When I made the Thomas Love video the Thomas area in K-mart was 1/2 an aisle, now it's one tiny cell only the width of your lower arm. I would not be surprised to see Thomas completely vanish from K-mart. Uncle Pete's was great, but I feel ToysRUs has really taken over as the mass toy shopping experience. The Uncle Petes I used to go to was at St Leonards, it was the most epic place to buy fireworks when they were legal.
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Excellent video, Leo. I have no idea why Thomas stock is becoming harder and harder to find. Even the big retail stores near my house have slowly been lessening their stock over the years, although I'm sure Thomas items are still much easier to find here in the US than AUS. It's a strange paradox: Thomas & Friends is more popular than ever yet it appears that the companies that produce merchandise are not keeping up with the "aisle demand" or making sure that Thomas gets a premium spot in stores. Maybe it's the beginning of a slow transition to eventually buying all toys online...who knows!
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Brittnie Brooks and 3 other people SHUT UP SPAMMERS
Feel lucky that you have what you have! Down toy stores in my town barely has any wooden railway, all of mine came from ebay...
I'm having problems with a Thomas youtuber who has spammed heavily in the comments area of this video..I'm sorry but this channel is not a portal for your promotion. You need to remember the spam filtering here on youtube is now set fairly strong. If your laying in masses of comments you will be seen as a spammer.
That's sad to hear a spammer I hate them on my own videos. :(
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Omg Leo that model display at toys r us reminded me of a display at my local toys rus (which was replaced with best buy) that had the Thomas wooden railway sets and you could play with it. And the table that the display was on was a cool custom Thomas table with Thomas,Percy,and James head popping out in the sides. Ahh memories :')
Store Retailers Make alot more money Selling Toys & items online rather then sell them on store shelfs. At My Local Toys R Us, I saw that The Chuggington Trains have been moved to a different spot & is at a medium size. While the Thomas Trains are well stocked & takes up the whole side of the isle.
Great vid Leo. We hit Chatswood about once a month. The TRU shop there always seems like a mishmash...store could use a new layout or merchandiser. I think with Target stores they concentrate so much now on L eg o that other toys lines seem secondary. Don't fret on the empty pegs...at least that means some little boy or girl has a toy at home being played with rather than it being a peg warmer.
If you want Thomas heaven the best place I've seen is the TRU in the Ocean Terminal shopping centre...in Hong Kong. Long Live Tomy Takara!...lol
This video is a relic. Seeing Classic Trackmaster fade away as TM2 takes over...
I must say I really liked this video thanks for showing the difference over six months!!
ThomasTheTankMan111 I went back to the same ToysRUs yesterday, and again much has changed...good news for Thomas, bad news for Chuggers. I will try to rush upload this video so you can see how much the Thomas area has changed.
I will look forward to seeing it!!
Gotta love Boost Juices!
Great video Leo! It'll be interesting to see if the pegs and shelves start to fill up again as we approach Christmas, or if they'll be compressed again in favour of something cheaper.
i love your videos so much i watch it with my littel brother everyday
Hey, Leo! I am watching this video the ninth time! It's a great Time Pass! I love all of your vids, L! Keep it up!
Awesome video! When you were at Toys R us and at David Jones, I spotted some pretty old TWR items from around 2001 or a bit later on the shelves, I also spotted Duke in one of the stores! Those are all retired items! You're so lucky to have had those items around! Also its very sad to see all the Thomas merchandise shrinking, it has been a very popular show ever science 1984 and has been going strong for 30 years! Why would they get rid of them!? But once again great video! :D
Nice to see the last of the classic TrackMaster and smart magnet Take n Play stock here!
Leo, I remember having one of those Japanese Thomas candy tubes and I was curious how exactly the faces can come off and fit onto the Tomy/trackmaster trains
I assume you are filming with your iPhone. Do you use any kind of mount to help stabilize the shots? The footage looks pretty good and smooth, when I go phone handheld I get a lot of shaky footage.
kkehoe5 The visit to the shops was done with two cameras. The first visit I used a small casio camera I use to use in my reviews, the second visit was done with my iphone. I think the trick with using small cameras is use two hands, don't move around too much and keep the lens set wide. There was a fair bit of footage cut out which was shaky or had weird focus problems, especially with the casio camera, these problems were more to do with me being too lazy to manually set up the camera.
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+Leo. Их
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Well, Chuggington stuff used to be sold at a lot of stores, but now a lot of them don't carry it. I stopped watching Chuggington when it moved to a channel I didn't get then. Thomas stuff is plenty where I live at all stores that carry it. I saw some take n play Peter Sams were metallic, and where an engine's face would be on a not-that-old trackmaster box of Dodge, was Thomas' face instead.
K-Mart New Zealand is much the same as K-Mart Australia in the sense of downsizing stock. My local K-Mart seems a lot more empty than it used to be. They've done away with the large DVD section they used to have, and the toy section is also a lot smaller. K-Mart used to be the place I'd go for the newest Transformers toys, but now their Transformers selection is small, and well behind the times compared to how it used to be.
Leo it's very sad to see the last Of HiT Toy Brand Trackmaster
I love these price videos :)
This is such a great coverage of what is happening to the Thomas stock in Australia so far, spot on. I shop a lot for Take 'n' Play items myself but I just can't seem to find any store which carry a good variety of stock. It's usually stocked and left for such a long time, and then I guess I lose interest in actually buying from these stores. Sometimes the stock is great but most of the time it's a let down. I usually tend to buy online, sometimes cheaper but sometimes a little or much more expensive, but I guess that it's a much more convenient way to buy Thomas items these day. I really hope all the stores begin restocking properly with items of variety so people like myself who buy Thomas can enjoy the shopping experience again and also save money too hehe :D
Great video as always Leo, love your videos. Keep up the good work and looking forward to future videos too. Take care and have an awesome day :)
***** from the comments so far it seems Oz is the only place where Thomas stock is left in a fairly poor state. So maybe it's the retailers here who are not trying their best to have toys on the shelves.
leokimvideo Yes, I do agree very much. One of my local Big W store is an example. They ordered so many, and I mean so many, of the same Take 'n' Play toys, now they are not only struggling to sell it all but because of that massive haul...New items are not ordered (or very very little new stock). As you said in one of your videos, I think some people need to go back to business school haha :)
I haven't seen any diminish in stock here in the US but I have seen a significant increase in price on the Thomas franchise.
Over here in the Southern US, Thomas, from what I can see, is still very much popular. The main places I frequent (Walmart, ToysRUs, Target) all have decent stocks of Thomas, yet TRU is the only place I remember seeing Chuggington. TRU is also the one place which has the higher prices for everything, especially Lego (We call it the TRU Tax because they usually get new sets before the regular retailers have them)
Interestingly enough, the old Trackmaster is still available here, but last time I was at Walmart I saw some Trackmaster 2 stuff starting to peek in, along with some other new toy stock (Newer Lego, MLP toys for Rainbow Rocks, action figures, etc.)
James Bowen Seeing the stripping out of Chuggington toys to me was a bit sad, I really felt they took a far greater effort to render their toys to be very similar to what you see onscreen. Seems not even with the good changes by TOMY to make sense of the Chuggers die cast playsets track system could save the railway. But in the end who decides on buying a toy? Is it the children or the parents. Chuggington were always going to have a fight to muscle in on the very well established and loved Thomas & Friends brand, who is morphing back into stories and characters from the early years (thank God for this change even if it is Scooby Doo inspired). I think Thomas's biggest fight will come from the newer shows like Octonaughts, which is becoming very popular. But I feel the biggest battle for the toys is the shift to children playing with iPads and free game apps. Will toy companies start handing out free toys to combat the new enemy or use the apps to sell more toys. Angry Birds Go sort of pulled that off but the toys (especially the playsets) were weaker than the app. I did purchase some Angry Birds Go toys but between the very high price and poorly designed playsets I decided not to review the toys. Yet others gave them glowing reviews..I just don't get it.
Some toys are using apps to their advantage, like again, using Lego as an example, their Ultra Agents like has an app that you can use with the sets, and their next line will do even more with that. I'm certain other toy companies will follow suit and use these devices as partners than competition. Some of them were failures though, like there was a toyline that was an Angry Birds knock-off but the toys themselves were nicely done. Problem is the app itself was garbage.
James Bowen
Jasmine Carrera the i8u
Very good video nice to see how they show of the stock, wish we had Take and Play Ducks in the UK I have never seen any.
I think in order to buy exclusive Thomas and friends items is to buy online because most of the new sets and trains are always ordered online. Because here in my country, Philippines. Thomas and friends franchise are getting reduced and changed like; the trackmaster railway they changed it to motorized railway and the take n play they changed it to collectible railway. To make us worth buying for.
Wow Leo I never knew Sydney had such cool places to shop. I rally would like to visit here someday.
Chris Hillmon It's funny, I look at the toy hunting videos from the UK and USA and think how lucky they are compared to me. Sadly retail in Oz can be a half hearted affair unless it's near Christmas.
In the city where I live in the UK there is one shop that has a big toy department and they have always had a very good Thomas stock. However I have noticed that the stock of Thomas toys in Toys R Us has demised slightly.
Wow! Were I live the Take N Play normal engines are $6.99 and the medium are $9.99 and it is in a Toys R Us
I can only guess that because LEGO became the number 1 toy company, Mattel will do anything and everything to get back up to the top. We'll see if they succeed...
The toy isle at my walmart has a very very small section of Thomas stuff as well. So the same thing is happening over here in the us but I did notice some old track master stuff on the shelf and only one track master 2 play set. Hmm
leokimvideo It seems that in my area, Chuggington is slowly dying out. I stopped at a local toy store called Ray Willis for some Thomas Take n' Play, but didn't find any. I did find a few Wooden Railway Thomas items, and a nearly empty shelf labeled Chuggington. I asked around, and a woman told me after they sell the last of the Chuggington they have, they won't be getting anymore. It seems that the Chuggington series has even stopped airing on Disney Channels, but if it is still on, I can't seem to find it anywhere. It seems both Thomas and Chuggington are become hard to find at my local shops, but I can still find them in abundance at big Supermarkets such as Walmart.
At the nearest Kmart here in NZ they have not a single piece of Thomas merchandise which is sad, I really want the Trackmaster 2 Gordon and Edward as I've got a broken TOMY Edward and a fine TOMY Gordon but they don't sell those two here. Good vid as always Leo
Another Great Consumer report... I love kmart I don't shop there but my friend does and i like to watch her shop.
My local Target only has Chuggington DVD.
That a shame it's getting harder to find Thomas items where I live to
Hi Leo love your videos, as i model a lot of Thomas the tank stuff I go around toy shops here in the U.K. and find the same thing is happening here. Talking to the staff at one of the shops they said it's the time of year were they try and sell off the old stock and make room the the Christmas stock.
The Thomas stock in toysrus where you live has so much more than the smyths in Ireland
There's so much Thomas stock in Adelaide
Wow, toys are really expensive compared to the US. Hot wheels are 97 cents a piece here, while Thomas Take n play are 5.99
ThatGuyWhoStutters The price for a basic Hot Wheels car in the USA is one of the toy industry's grand mysteries. How can a price be suppressed since the late 60's in the US yet where I live the price keeps climbing.
first 19 second with creepy thomas
well, the Thomas wooden railway merchandise seems to been just fine here in america
I would have bought the Thomas stock in the video if I could!
Nice video isn't it strange in Australia the stock for Thomas is shrinking and in the U.K. In my nearest toys r us the Thomas stuff is taking over the store.
hitwotwothreethreefourfour's channel I think we are looked upon as a very weak market, low population base miles from anywhere, but hell we pay top dollar for cheap toys made just to our north ;)
+Thomas the Aussie engine I know that because I grew up with it
qwer2350 i hate spam comments not to do with the subject
hitwotwothreethreefourfour's channel if you don't like spam comments, well youtube is not your sort of place...youtube was built on spam
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leokimvideo Have you ever thought about coming to America to see the differences between the stock and prices? (Kmart U.S. has a great Thomas section)
Cool
It takes 2 hours just to get to my nearest Toys R Us (I have to catch the bus) so it is not worth a penny to go there
did anyone else nearly die when they saw dodge? i didnt think he still existed
Hey Leo can you do a few videos on PEZ? My son started collecting them about a year ago and he loves watching your videos, if you would do that I would greatly appreciate it. P.s. The toys r us where I go to holds a huge stock of PEZ and if you do want to get some I think toys r us is your best bet
At the end the kid running down the ally fnaf
In America there is Thomas everywhere
well I live on the north east cost, and though the stock has diminished the prices have doubled and I cant find way that would be
in denmark there is NO thomas and friends or at all
MyAlexDK wow
I have a friend in Denmark and he said Thomas is quite popular
Mike O'C'onnell well in the north part of denmark there is none
tottaly thomas town has a lot of chugginton
Isye Hasan totally thomas town should make a separate website called totally chuggington town
It's happening in the usa
Hi Leo in this video you are hunting thomas and chuggington toy but you find a less amount that you found earlier but i,ll honestly say that i live in india new delhi and thomas toy i find are thomas collectible railway wich is sort of new its the same as the circular magnet thomas take n play only the difference is they have a hook to couple the older magnet take n play were replaced in 2012 and the chuggingtn stock we get is the dino and camera car,camoflauge brewster,camoflauge koko,parrot wilson and mtambo's safari cars i think in your place you are quite lucy but any way i'm a big fan of you and i like your youtube channel.
Why are people breaking all of the Thomas toys in the shop? Do they know once they break something they have to buy it even if they do it by accident.
Why is the Thomas products in Australia disappearing from local stores I've never seen so many gaps for one toy brand before. Thomas is very popular they should be well stocked all the time I'm from the UK I don't see problems like this shopping on eBay or amazon should be easier for Thomas fans than finding items in stores.
Conrad Bennett Lets hope HiT see this video and speak to the toy companies to make a mend. But in the end it's the retailers here who need to man up and start making shopping fun again instead of trying to shift the experience to online stores which suck.
where I live in America all Thomas and Chuggington toys have seamed to be disappearing and the prices have been doubling on the wooden ones from $10usd to $22usd can some one pleases explain this.
Also another thing where I am you will all ways chuggingtons on offer, they are never not on offer
Chuggington is faling into obscurity, Here in Holland Chuggington is only watchable on 1 channel and still the merchandise is being sold. However it IS getting low on stock..
In my Kmart there is not even half an idle
In the us the thomas haven't drunk in the slightest not ever during switch of track master
i was at kmart usa (oakdale california) and the place looked like a bomb went off . i only found 2 items of take and play tracmaster items . 2. and the kohls here only has a toy section around christmas . walmart offered t.p last christmas . plenty of hot wheels , what ever happened to matchbox ? i do know that at one time they got bought out by mattell
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Funny this the same story with the transformers stuff in 2020
where is that place? and what place
In jersey there is not alot of stok in bambola jersey.=(
i think the stock is worse where i live in england
I have a diesel toy
NJ
What do you mean he stock is horrible in target wait this video is old I liked the old track master the good old days 🙁
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Hi in england there are barley any thomas stuff but there is loads of chuggington why is that
Ok thanks
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Have you tried big w at westfields liverpool? Or parramatta?
MossyGamer The BigW I go to has also had a huge reduction of the Thomas area, it's not at Chatswood so sadly I could not include this store in the comparison.
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But Thomas is as popular as ever I think. Y is there a decline.
AMR. THOMAS FAN simple....blame the iPad and free apps...thats killing the toy industry, especially the lower age group toys.
leokimvideo Yes Leo it`s like the toy stores are getting smaller and smaller. Kids dont know what there missing out on these days...
leo no thomas and usa and aus are the saem in 2020 and 2021 becus son 25 ov thomas is 2 d
You are incredibly heavy handed. The phone picks up your noise from you tossing toys around. Ever think of the damage you could be causing to packages in the stores? Or do you not care? You seem to have an unhealthy hatred for knock off toys as it is. I was poor growing up. Glad I could get some knock offs. Otherwise I would never have the experience with some of the things most kids my age did- in example a knock off starter coat, and a knock off pocahontas Barbie and horse I got in 1995. Knock offs aren't as bad as you preach. They're also hilarious and affordable.
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Hey leokimvideoo can you make an Instagram I would love to send you pics of knock off toys :)
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I haven't seen any diminish in stock here in the US but I have seen a significant increase in price on the Thomas franchise.