[Coco] Coco's Origin Date

[jdaggett at gate.net]

Well if Tandy was getting ready to sell them for the 1980 Christmas season then 
they would start to ship to the stores in September/October time frame. They would 
be expecting their suppliers to have the units to them by the end of July. So the 
stores would have knowledge of the upcoming product release date by late July. 
The district managers would be in the know by say June or maybe even May. 
Chances are that some friends of regional managers may have been alerted to the 
up coming release. I was good friends with a store manager and he told me he gets 
word of sales about three months in advance. I was given heads up warning that he 
Coco 3 was being dicontinued and that much of the items he had were going to be 
on sale about 2 months in advance. I got MultiVue, and the Multipak interface plus a 
bunch of games and the nice pistol grip game controller on sale. It was great until 
he transferred out of the region. It was nice to know when stuff was going on sale 
ahead of time.  

In the consumer market Christmas stuff is wanted by retailers in July. Stores like 
Target, Walmart, Kmart and such all want sufficient stock for Christams 
merchandise in warehouse by July. They want to make sure they have the 
merchandise before the flyers go out for announcement. They do not want to get 
into a situation where flyers and anouncements go out and the have to say that the 
product is not available. Could lead to the cries of bait and switch ads. That gets the 
FTC down on their backs and a black eye from the consumers. 

My guess if that report appeared in September's issue, stock was being shipped to 
the stores as that was being read. Probably not on the shelfs until October.

james


On 28 Dec 2003 at 21:47, Steve Ostrom wrote:

> Just wondering if anyone knows the date when the first announcement of
> the Coco was made, the date when the first real Tandy advertisements
> for the Coco were published and where, and the date when the first
> Coco was sold retail.
> 
> I was able to track down an early official Tandy announcement,
> published in the September 1980 issue of "80 Microcomputing".  Ed
> Juge, in his "Inside 80" column, writes, "I'm writing this prior to
> any announcements; bear this in mind when I say, we are about to
> announce our new TRS-80 Color Computer!"  He goes on to describe the
> early version of the Coco in good detail.  Since this was published in
> the September issue, which must have gone to press early in August, I
> figured some other publication may have had an earlier announcement,
> or maybe even a Radio Shack outlet broke the news before this.
> 
> If anyone else has any other documented information, please let me
> know.  I'd be interested in hearing about other rumors and official
> announcements.
> 
> Thanks, and have a safe and happy new year!
> 
> -- Steve --
> 
> 
> 
> 
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