More on the Pandemic Pre-release

The annoying thing about the early release of Pandemic 2^nd edition to Target is that, unlike broken street dates on Magic and Yu Gi Oh products, theoretically, Z-man Games had much more control over the release of the second edition game and therefore should have managed to keep the February 6^th release date.  WOTC and Konami both have a number of distributors to deal with regarding street dates and each distributor has hundreds of stores to deal with as well.  In the Pandemic case, Z-man had only one distributor with which to work and that distributor only had one account carrying the product.  I am not privy to the inner workings of that particular channel of distribution but I would imagine it not too difficult to make certain that Pandemic did not arrive in Target’s distribution center until just before the release date, or even after. 

I really doubt the amount of sales generated by the extra week of early release amounted to even a fraction of a rounding error on Target’s income statement.  Meanwhile, it cost stores in the game channel sales, generated negative publicity for the company,  and likely annoyed to no end Alliance Distribution, Z-man’s official distributor to the specialty game channel, and likely the recipient of hundreds of emails and calls from perturbed retailers, wondering why Target had the hotly anticipated reprint a week ahead of the scheduled release whilst they did not.