Reverend Keith> Thanks man.
Aeonite> No offense taken. I really should have sourced it in my review, anyway.
Assuming my memory isn't playing tricks on me, Ryan Dancey posted this information somewhere on the internet. Could be here on rpg.net, actually. He used to post here fairly often. Sadly, I can no longer find the quote. (Only a
secondary reference.) I did find another report of his analysis of TSR's business, which you might also find interesting, but which doesn't mention the boxed sets. You can find it
here.
I can only speculate about what caused the boxed sets to be unprofitable for TSR. As you said, Hasbro and others are still releasing plenty of boxed games, so perhaps it wasn't so much the box itself, but the large number of printed items they generally contained. For instance, in the case of the Dark Sun boxed set, the same content could probably have fitted in a single book of 224 pages. That would also have taken up less than a third of the shelf/warehouse space. Or perhaps the problem was specific to TSR. (Bad printer contracts maybe?) Or maybe they could have gotten away with it if they had just set the pricing a little higher. Like I said, I can only speculate.
ChopSockey> Absolutely! But be warned that it will probably take me a while.