The amount of hubris in this company is staggering. To think more than one person thought they could move anything close to 7000 units of this boggles the mind.
Nah, totally explainable: they have no deadheads on staff. From the outside, if you're not a deadhead, you just see a rabid fanbase that immediately buys up every record that a band that's been broken up since 1995 has put out. But apparently no one noticed that the dead stuff that sells is aimed at their audience: exclusive stuff that hasn't been re-re-re-released 10 times. It's "we finally made a copy of that show you went to in '74 available for purchase. Also, here's an $800 box set of every show that month. Also, here is that one show everyone says is as good as europe 72, with a better 'morning dew'" What it isn't is not "American Beauty, again, but pressed on a primary color". If you want high quality dead stuff, there's mofi presses and the new reissues are honestly pretty great. If you want box sets, the dead have at least 2 vinyl box sets of their studio stuff and countless live sets.
If they had to put out a box of studio albums, a box that had the stuff that wasn't in the Warner Box (GD, anthem, aoxomoxoa, workingman's, AB) or the RSD box (flood, Mars, blues, SYF) would have been very, very welcome. A box with terrapin, shakedown, go to heaven, in the dark and built to last? Not their best IMO but it would be nice to have it all in once place. Or a box of their "official" live albums (live/dead, europe 72, skull/roses, bear's, deadset, reckoning, without a net). Something like that would have absolutely flown off the shelf, especially with an exclusive like WAN. You could have sold it with no box, held together with a rubber band and a hemp string that smells suspiciously of patchouli.
The anthology as-is is an obvious and transparent money-grab perpetrated by someone who is not a fan or who doesn't give a damn about fans.
