2023 Calbee: Missing in Action

 

Something weird is going on with this year's Calbee baseball chips.

Last month on Calbee's website (as also noted by Dave in his post about it) it was announced that Series one would be on sale from March 27th.  That is pretty normal, Calbee usually puts there Series 1 sets on sale at the end of the March, roughly coinciding with the start of the season.

I was looking forward to that date since I had so much fun putting the sets together with my kids last year.  So on March 27th I eagerly hit one of the supermarkets that normally sells Calbee baseball chips.  They didn't have them.  I then went to another.  They didn't have them either. And another. And another, etc etc.

Day after day for the past 10 days I've been hitting everywhere they might be available and always coming up empty.  I initially thought this might be due to the fact that most stores were still selling Calbee's Team Japan soccer chips and wanted to burn though their stock of those before switching to the baseball chips.  But last weekend all those soccer chips were pulled from store shelves, but no baseball chips appeared to replace them.

On looking a bit deeper into it, I discovered in a Calbee press release that the March 27th date was their release date for convenience stores only, which would explain why I didn't find any in supermarkets.  But I haven't found any in convenience stores either yet.  And the release date for supermarkets, April 3rd, has also already come and gone without them showing up. 

So I'm playing a very frustrating waiting game with Calbee right now.  Its not unusual for Series 2 or Series 3 to appear in stores later than the official release date since stores usually only start selling those once they've exhausted their supply of Series 1 chips.  But I've never seen Series 1 fail to appear on shelves within a day or two of the offical release date before.  I know the sets have been made because re-sellers on Yahoo Auctions are already selling singles and even sets.  But I want to do it the old fashioned way this year (even though, as Dave has informed me, the set is smaller than usual and has no design innovations or anything like that).