5 Worst Examples Of WWE Manipulation

By far one of the biggest d**k moves by WWE is manipulating merchandise sales to distort wrestler popularity. As CM Punk once said, it doesn’t matter how good of a wrestler you are; what matter is how much merchandise you sell. That’s why someone like John Cena constantly received title shots, while a workhorse like Tyson Kidd got nothing.

If that’s true, then the best way for someone to become a bigger star is for them to sell more merchandise, and let supply and demand do the rest.

WWE, however, have other plans.

In a recent report, fans at WWE live events reported that the only WWE T-shirts available for children are John Cena t-shirts. This came about after a fan wanted to buy a child’s size Randy Orton T-shirt for his son, but none were available. After the fan tweeted the issue to Orton himself, the Viper replied that the fan asked “the million-dollar question.”

What WWE is doing by preventing fans from having access to different merchandise is that they’re perpetuating the notion that John Cena outsells everyone else. But if the only options that young fans have is John Cena merchandise, then of course he’s going to out-sell everyone else. WWE is hindering the demand for non-Cena merchandise by only supplying Cena merchandise for younger audience member.

This, in turn, leads to other WWE Superstars, who in all likelihood have young fans just as much as Cena, losing out on merchandise royalties because WWE’s higher-ups only want young fans to have Cena merchandise, instead of diversifying their products and using those merchandise sales to build bigger stars out of their current roster.

When ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin became a megastar, they build a merchandise empire around him, but they didn’t ignore the other big sellers, like Triple H, The Rock, The Undertaker, etc. These days, by manipulating merchandise numbers, that’s exactly what they’re doing: making one star rise above all the rest, and keeping money away from the hard-working wrestlers.