Hasbro To Lay Off Almost 20% of its workforce Amid Continued Slumping Toy Sales

[JayC]

It is being reported that Hasbro is planning on laying off 1100 employees which accounts for almost 20% of it's workforce amid continued slumping toy sales.

“We anticipated the first three quarters to be challenging, particularly in toys, where the market is coming off historic, pandemic-driven highs,” Cocks said. “While we have made some important progress across our organization, the headwinds we saw through the first nine months of the year have continued into Holiday and are likely to persist into 2024.”

CEO Chris Cocks announced the layoffs in a memo earlier today to it's employees. Some workers will find out if they are laid off this week while the rest will be laid off over the course of the next 6 months.

[thetruth1013]

Fingers crossed Emily is at the top of that list..

[MagnaPrime]

CEO needs to go IMO

[MrWolf12000]

Merry Christmas you dont have a job! Absolutely disgusting. Cocks is aptly named.

[Hassenfeld]

Typical business. They never tighten their belts at the boardroom, when sales are down, just like they never share the wealth when times are good.

Just lay off 20% of the workforce, and over work the remaining.

[ozzy]

Ya know...  If they bothered to listen to the fans instead doing things like Plastic free packaging, less accessories, more basic sculpts, less and less paint apps and continuing with failed exclusives and poor ratio outputs(nobody wants two ratchets for every one gamerverse optimus) then they wouldn't be having these problems.  They have caused the clearance epidemic they currently face, and the shrinking market they are a part of.  They have flat out called the fandom babies and refused to make certain figures and now they are firing the people that didn't make those poor decisions.  What a great company.  I hope the folks that get fired get hired on somewhere else immediately.  Nobody should have to find out they are unemployed during the holidays.

[TheOtakuX]

I want to be happy about this due to how Hasbro bought Power Rangers, then ran it into the ground and put even the collector's series that doesn't rely on a concurrent TV show on hiatus.

But I can't, because I know nobody involved in killing Power Rangers is going to part of the layoffs.

[Goldbug]

Their prices have been ridiculous. It is apparent they are going for get  the early buyers to pay more then everything left goes on clearance.

[kILLMonger]

This is what happens when you continually raise the prices on figs, short change accessories, churn out figs people don't want while opting to ignore figs fans do want, and having horrid distribution that feeds a ugly secondary market.  I hate regular people will be out of work at the holidays yet I can't say I'm not sorry to see corporations have their chickens come home to roost.  

 

I know my purchases have gone WAY down.....sometimes I'll even wait for clearances or scoop them up at Ross and I don't feel the least bit bad about it.  With the way the economy is.....its not a hard decision when I have to choose between bills/food/gas/clothes and overpriced toys.

[RecklessEndangerment]

18 hours ago, thetruth1013 said:

Fingers crossed Emily is at the top of that list..

I don't understand the hate that Emily gets from a certain segment of the collector community.  

[Frozentenderloin]

2 hours ago, RecklessEndangerment said:

I don't understand the hate that Emily gets from a certain segment of the collector community.  

I’m with you. While I admit that she can be a little annoying during live streams and stuff, I certainly wouldn’t wish job loss on her! That’s just mean. Losing your job sucks, especially when it is unmerited. I genuinely feel sorry for those who are going to have to deal with finding another job, especially during the holiday season.

[Satam]

Huh. I don't find Emily annoying at all. In fact I think she's pretty likeable. Also for someone who was a newcomer to GI Joe, she shows more genuine enthusiasm and clearly does more research to learn about the product, characters, and lore than a number of people I've seen in the same position on other brands over the years. She's been an integral part of Classified's success over the last couple of years, and the idea of her no longer being a part of the Joe team, let alone Hasbro at all, bothers me almost as much as the idea of losing Lenny.

[Jscott991]

2 hours ago, RecklessEndangerment said:

I don't understand the hate that Emily gets from a certain segment of the collector community.  

I have no desire for anything bad to happen to her, but I would be very grateful if Emily were working in a great job somewhere where I didn't have to listen to her.

She is a big reason I do not watch any of the livesteams.  Frankly I hope they save money by ending that entire livestream production and just announce figures the way McFarlane does.

[Satam]

I obviously contributed my two cents, but let's not turn this into an Emily thread, okay, folks?

[A_Spidey_Fan]

Looks like Hasbro isn't the only Grinch this Christmas, as GM is laying off 1314 workers.  However, it seems that they may offer some of them placements at other GM places, so maybe not as Grinchy as Hasbro.  Still, it to me, makes it seem like those employees will be competing against each other.  Here's a link from The Detroit News for more info and references:

 

- https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/2023/12/14/gm-layoffs-autoworkers-uaw-chevrolet-camaro-bolt-production-end/71923598007/

 

Either way, I sort of understand how both GM and Hasbro employees that are now or will be layoff feel, at least to some degree.  Though I will admit, not the same extent of course, but still.  Sometime ago, shortly after a Black Friday, the store I was working at was told by our HQ that they were not going to be renewing the lease, and that we would be layoff sometime in January.  Many of us did our best to work through this bad news through Christmas.  Though there were some rumours of hope, but those were to be not.  And I'm not going to go into major details, but lets just say HQ did a move that would really hit us in the gut that I and many would come across as disrespectful.

 

Many of us were upset, worried about our future, what was going to happen, but we still had to work through it all.  At the very least, they paid for our final party.  Me and I assume others had a downer Christmas that year, however, I was able to find a bit of joy and happiness after I had finished work on Christmas Eve.  I will admit, there were tears, both sadness and joy at the same time, as I walked around a Christmas setup on Christmas Eve, as if the Spirit of Christmas was trying to uplift me, which I guess, it did.

 

As for buying toys in 2023, I had to do a sever cut back, mainly due to price of items, and less sales(As far as I can tell).  For Hasbro, it didn't help that they has done a huge amount of Markups on the prices of their items. Heck, I was kind of starting to do so back in late 2021 or 2022, but 2023 was a huge cut back for me personally.  Stuff I would of gotten for sure or maybe I would of consider, I left on the pegs.  So that didn't help, especially for Hasbro.

[interoceptive]

In regards to the earnings report story I will say one of my favorite quotes “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is life.” Jean Luc Picard. Now, I'm not saying they have made every correct choice but I'm not going to armchair quarterback and pretend I know what they could've done better. Publicly traded companies have to chase endless growth at the behest of shareholders and they have to do it quickly. A business should be allowed ebbs and flows but when you have to focus on the day, the month, the quarter and make decisions to change your course so the next small bracket of time looks marginally better, sometimes you have to do things that could hurt in the long term or can't make changes that will take longer to make things better.

[Rhanen]

And still, they dismiss big markets like South America and Europe with terrible or no distribution at all. They keep feeding that nonsense exclusiveness on certain items and then flood shelves with figures like Eternals or similar 

[RobertD]

1 hour ago, Rhanen said:

And still, they dismiss big markets like South America and Europe with terrible or no distribution at all. They keep feeding that nonsense exclusiveness on certain items and then flood shelves with figures like Eternals or similar 

Eternals wave came out in 2021. Nobody bought them, so you still see them around, but let's not pretend it's the reason last year's financial drops for Hasbro.  A poorly selling wave here or there does not sink the ship.  What has really been killing them over the past two years has been the closed box initiative, which while I personally don't mind that much, generally went over like a lead balloon.  You make an excellent point about their poor South American/European distribution, though. 

[Goldbug]

PAST time for a change in leadership

[kILLMonger]

And they are STILL refusing to look at external/internal inflation.  People's money doesn't do what it used to do. And there are the new figure bought to the market NOBODY asked for.   Why the hell am I going to pay 10-15 dollars for a basic fig with 5 points of articulation?

Why do I have to "waste gas" (If I am compelled to look) searching for a wave I'll never find except for mark up on eBay?

Why are they rehashing figs and not dipping into the stable or never done ones?

Why are Black figs now 25 and vintage 15?  I used to be able to go crazy with figs with the same articulation in vintage size for like 6 bucks?

Someone needs to really take a deep sip of common sense and see if the prices keep going up....purchases will go down.

The Mando Naboo fighter would have been like 20-40 dollars about 10-15 years ago....now y'all want 100? I'll pass and just get the Mission Fleet/Micro Galaxy one. 

 

[JayC]

Yesterday word started making the rounds on social media that Hasbro somewhat rather unexpectedly started another round of layoffs at it's company. One of the most notable people to be laid off this time was long-time employee John Warden who had been a former Toy Design/Director on various brands including G.I. Joe, Transformers and Power Rangers. John who had been employed at Hasbro for 25 years made this post on Instagram about being laid off.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DBerjsNyBO6/?img_index=1

You can tell the news of him being laid off came rather unexpectedly as just the day before you can see where he was posting about traveling to the MCM London convention this weekend to help reveal some new G.I. Joe products.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DBbngi-RCiJ/

This is only the most recent round of layoffs at Hasbro which according to a local Rhode Island TV news station channel 12 included less than 100 people, half of which are located at their headquarters in Rhode Island.

Late last year Hasbro announced it was laying off 20% of it's workforce which resulted in 1100 people over the course of 6 months loosing their jobs.

Beyond layoffs, Hasbro has also been considering moving its headquarters out of Rhode Island to Boston Massachusetts. Hasbro will be holding a Q3 earnings conference call later this morning where we will likely be hearing more information about all of this.

[lordtom]

On 12/12/2023 at 2:30 PM, kILLMonger said:

This is what happens when you continually raise the prices on figs, short change accessories, churn out figs people don't want while opting to ignore figs fans do want, and having horrid distribution that feeds a ugly secondary market.  I hate regular people will be out of work at the holidays yet I can't say I'm not sorry to see corporations have their chickens come home to roost.  

 

I know my purchases have gone WAY down.....sometimes I'll even wait for clearances or scoop them up at Ross and I don't feel the least bit bad about it.  With the way the economy is.....its not a hard decision when I have to choose between bills/food/gas/clothes and overpriced toys.

PREACH!!! Been saying this since Hasbro bought the license and every apologist would dog pile on me defending their greed. Sickens me and now they're even worse. £180 for sentinel are you insane? My collecting now is nothing like it was. For the sake of a visual, when prices were £15-£18 I'd buy 30-40 items a year (mix of toy lines) fast forward to today's prices and I can tell you in 2024 I've bought 8 figures. 8! 2 legends, 2 WWE, 6 joes. That's it. Life is too expensive for toy companies to be jacking up prices AND have all that go to shareholders. Fire some execs, boom $250mill saved right there

[JayC]

1 hour ago, lordtom said:

PREACH!!! Been saying this since Hasbro bought the license and every apologist would dog pile on me defending their greed. Sickens me and now they're even worse. £180 for sentinel are you insane? My collecting now is nothing like it was. For the sake of a visual, when prices were £15-£18 I'd buy 30-40 items a year (mix of toy lines) fast forward to today's prices and I can tell you in 2024 I've bought 8 figures. 8! 2 legends, 2 WWE, 6 joes. That's it. Life is too expensive for toy companies to be jacking up prices AND have all that go to shareholders. Fire some execs, boom $250mill saved right there

Problem with your argument and has nothing to do with being an apologist, but your applying one small area of Hasbro with the overall performance of the company and that just doesnt work. Action figures for adult collectors barley even rates in the big picture of Hasbro. I'm listening to their Q3 earnings conference call now and action figures for adults hasnt even been mentioned. Things like Wizards of the Coast, Magic the Gathering, Monopoly Now, Play-Doh are where their profits come from and where their focus is.

They have for sometime been moving to a model where they produce less action figures and instead license those brands more and more out to other smaller companies. Its not that adults aren't buying action figures but not in the kind of numbers a major corporation needs to be profitable. Building Blocks stuff IE LEGO is the biggest performer in the world of toys these days and those prices are really high.

I get you are only interested in things that effect you directly and no one likes high prices, but adults still buy plenty of action figures despite the so called bad economy, its just not and never has and likely never will be in the numbers to offset the loss of kids who no longer buy those kinds of toys because today's generation of kids are into other things like digital and such.

[Jscott991]

Hasbro, Mattel, McFarlane, and others certainly put a lot of effort into products and lines that some people continually tell me don't matter.  Webcasts, conventions, enormous numbers of PR people (every brand seems to have a communications person for some reason), etc.

I do think pushing prices on a lot of their products from 2020-2022 has hurt these companies over all.  That's not just toys. Prices seem to have gone over a tipping point where increases have brought negative returns.

[JayC]

25 minutes ago, Jscott991 said:

Hasbro, Mattel, McFarlane, and others certainly put a lot of effort into products and lines that some people continually tell me don't matter.  Webcasts, conventions, enormous numbers of PR people (every brand seems to have a communications person for some reason), etc.

I do think pushing prices on a lot of their products from 2020-2022 has hurt these companies over all.  That's not just toys. Prices seems to have gone over a tipping point where increases have brought negative returns.

McFarlane is not in the same category as Hasbro or Mattel and in fact no Hasbro and Mattel do not put the effort into these things you seem to think they do. Those companies are HUGE and yes its certainly the thing we here focus on but its a drop in the bucket for these publicly traded companies. Sorry it just is. And even licenses like Star Wars and Marvel, we of course here focus on things like Marvel Legends and Black series, but their are a ton of other kind of products that get produced in supporting those licenses.