I don't understand why they can't get this information tbh. There is someone along the chain who just doesn't care enough to do their job.
My understanding is brand factories send to distributors, and distributors send to OCUK. I don't know how many distributors are in that chain but that's irrelevant tbh. It just seems so weird that apparently, one of the following situations is happening:
Gibbo asks distributors how many cards they'll have for OCUK this week. distributor has no idea because the cards just apparently come randomly with absolutely no warning from the factory, or
distributor asks factory how many cards they'll make this week, and factory has no idea and it's just however many the workers feel like making.
Neither of these make sense? The factory will know it's output volumes, with a small margin of error for things that fail QA or when the line has to stop for some reason. They can still get a rough estimate, divide that number up amongst the distributors, and say "you'll get this many cards next week". Distributors can pass that info on to retailers, and retailers to us. It's really not rocket science? So it's not that the information is unavailable it's just someone somewhere along the chain being lazy with it. And considering we've seen retailers in the UK stating potentially a week or more in advance when cards are due, and retailers in the EU even saying the exact figures, it does seem like OCUK are either not passing the info to us, or not pressing to get the info.
This is especially true for cards that AREN'T coming right now. It just feels like Gibbo calls the distributor, says "hey you got this card? no? ok cool bye". Press for info, why don't they have the card? Will they get the card next week? It's just the absolute void of info that makes it seem like OCUK don't actually care, they have our money that's all that matters.