It's May 16.  I think Graham and I just spent the last 24 hours looking for Transformers: Dark of the Moon stuff.  Sure, there was a sleep break.  And we probably ate at some point.  And we took a few moments here and there to open some toys.  But that was a midnight-to-midnight deal we just wrapped up.

I gotta tell ya, this sure wasn't 2007.  In 2007, we woke up, went to a Toys "R" Us, a Target, and a Walmart, hoping to pick up each of their native exclusives as well as the general releases, and that was just a three-store run.  We were done by lunch.

Not so with Movie 3, nosirree.  It wasn't totally surprising that Walmart wasn't putting up Transformers 3 toys at the crack of midnight.  They're not Ethan.  And so in the wee hours of the night, Meijer was the only real game in town.  But was surprising was that, nearly 24 hours later, most of those same Walmarts still had nothing!  Several didn't even have their old product cleared away to make room!  And forget Targets.  Even though they definitely have the toys out back (I should know!), searching them was a waste of time.  Only Toys"R"Us, the old standby, was consistently good to us. Not that, like, they had anything Transformers on the feature wall.  No, that's still dedicated to Pokemon Black and White.

Is this the general malaise that sets in on the third movie of a franchise?  And, yeah, Revenge of the Fallen was not a beloved movie, but its many faults didn't hurt sales at all, that's for sure.  The last two Transformers movies have been like Christmas in July for retailers.

At any rate, after much searching, some of it redundant once we started backtracking to Walmarts previously hit under premature circumstances, I did manage to find everything that I was out looking for.  Plus a few impulse buys.  I've had a pretty good haul.  It's no '07 haul, but it's a good haul.  And if it were the '07 haul, it woulda taken about 20 hours fewer.

Seriously, screw a Target.

(If you want to see a list of everywhere I hit in the past 24 hours, check out my Foursquare history.   It paints a picture of... something.  And it may not be flattering.)

On the strip's subject, I just got back from visiting two Targets.  The first wouldn't get stuff out of the back because I wanted one toy out of an assortment, and the guy didn't think it was okay to open an assortment for one guy for a collector, which is very reasonable, and the second Target totally got me a Bumblebee.  That Target actually had ZERO Transformers out on its clearance-tagged pegs, so I figgered that probably greased the wheel, so to speak.