Stores Caught With Shortage of Hottest Toys

Still haven’t secured the Lego Bionicle toys your children are counting on for Christmas? Still need to pick up that Babblin’ Boo doll from the movie “Monsters, Inc.,” or a Sugarplum Princess Barbie?

You might be out of luck.

Many retailers are running out of these and dozens of other popular toys.

Toy sales have held up unexpectedly well in a recession-marred holiday shopping season. Because many retailers--fearing depressed sales in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks--cut back toy orders, they are now facing the prospect that some items will be out of stock in this coming final shopping weekend of the season.

Many consumers have put off toy purchases to the last minute, figuring that with no Furby or other must-have toy this year, there would be plenty of desirable toys to go around.

“This Friday and Saturday are going to be huge days, but parents who are expecting to walk into stores this weekend and find everything will be totally out of luck,” said Jim Silver, publisher of industry magazine Toy Book and consumer magazine Toy Wishes.

“This could have been a good holiday season in toys and instead it’s going to be a flat holiday season,” Silver said.

For the most part, toy makers won’t talk about late-season cancellations and cutbacks, for fear of turning away customers and investors.

But Silver and others said the ordering mistakes would be obvious even if many in the industry didn’t openly talk about them.

“I’ve talked to hundreds of manufacturers who all spoke to me months ago about not getting their reorders,” Silver said.

Every year, parents fight over one or another hot toy, such as this year’s Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCube.

But this year’s shortage list includes:

* Several Harry Potter games and toys, including the $90 Hogwarts Castle from Lego.

* Mattel’s Professor Snape’s Potions Class, a make-your-own spells toy, also based on Harry Potter.

* Fisher-Price’s Pixter, a hand-held drawing toy.

* Hasbro’s Babblin’ Boo doll from “Monsters, Inc.”

* Several items in Hasbro’s Bob the Builder toy line.

* Fisher-Price’s Rescue Heroes line of vehicles and characters, popular all year but even hotter after Sept. 11 because they reminded many parents and children of real-life heroes.

Sellers at Internet auction site EBay are already benefiting from customers’ inability to buy what they want in stores.

Toy buyers come to EBay, spokesman Jim Griffith said, mostly for collectibles and hard-to-get items.

And the hot items are the same toys in short supply at the stores.

“In the past it would be driven by one or two hot items for the season, with people bidding on Tickle-Me-Elmo or something like that,” Griffith said.

“This year there’s not one toy; there are a wide variety of toys that are extremely popular.”

Babblin’ Boo, which lists for $25, has sold for more than $50 on EBay.

KB Toys Inc., a chain of 1,400 stores that keeps prices low by buying close-outs and overruns, picked up some of the products other retailers left behind.

“We were getting a lot of offerings of products, in some cases current core products that the manufacturers hadn’t even advertised yet,” Chief Executive Michael Glazer said.

At Tom’s Toys in Beverly Hills, part of a four-store California chain, manager Steve Meynig said he is fielding calls from around the country from parents begging for particular toys that have long since sold out.

With a focus on upper-end, educational toys and other classic items, Tom’s is less dependent on the big promotional toys, which the small chain can stock only in limited quantities.

This year, Meynig is hearing about shortages elsewhere as customers come to him for items the big chains ought to have, he said.

“I got one lady calling me from New York for Harry Potter Lego,” Meynig said. “She said she called three states on the East Coast and couldn’t find any. Good luck now.”

Although inventory management has long been a precarious road for toy sellers, this year’s early shortages are all the more problematic because a retailer’s year can be made or broken in the final few days before the holidays, said toy industry analyst Sean McGowan of Gerard Klauer Mattison in New York.

“Inventory management can be either brilliant or disastrous,” McGowan said. “It’s brilliant if you wake up on Dec. 26 and everything you wanted to sell is sold. But if you wake up on Dec. 23 and you don’t have anything to sell, it’s disastrous.”