by Doc – Owner, Founder, Investigative Collector
Most Min Min amiibo preorders are being cancelled by their respective retailers, and many retailers never had preorders at all. Gamestop seems to be the most recent retailer to fall on its own sword, as they’ve started to quietly cancel already-paid preorders for the Min Min amiibo, despite the fact that the customers have paid full price for the amiibo.
I think this is because Nintendo is basically not supplying any Min Min amiibo at all. Let me explain why.
You can produce amiibo chips using these NTAG215 chips. These chips are sold through the Amazon Affiliates service, which gives us a cut of sales made.
A “Target warehouse employee” managed to get a hold of four Min Min amiibo, who promptly sold these amiibo for $10 each on Facebook Marketplace (I can’t link you to the original posts because they’ve since been deleted). These suckers were definitely stolen: no legitimate seller would need to unload the amiibo at an immediate loss of $6 per figure, and these amiibo aren’t even sellable in Target’s systems for another week. So let’s assume that they were stolen.
According to some personal friends of mine familiar with Target’s typical amiibo releases, each Target store that gets to sell Min Min is only getting four Min Min amiibo. This means that A: not every Target is going to have Min Min, and B: this store, which served a region of 1,000,000+ customers, got four Min Mins. I’ve checked this with an old pal at Best Buy and an Amiibo Doctor fan who manages a Gamestop, and their stories are all similar.
It’s not surprising, either. Supply chain issues are getting worse by the day (as I predicted) and we’re running low on amiibo chips and other paraphernalia. It’s gotten so bad that Nintendo actually delayed the Steve and Alex amiibo to an unknown date. I think Nintendo is diverting its productivity towards making more Steves instead of Min Mins to satisfy that significantly higher demand because they know they’ll only be able to make a limited number of amiibo until this supply chain issue ends.
What do you think? Is there a hole in my theory? Tell me in the comments.
Amiibo Doctor 