The whole warehouse stock thing puts Sega into a different perspective, even during their succesful period. It seems they were punching above their weight all the time.
This also sort of answers why their software always seemed to sell relatively shitty. They didn't fit with their Genesis hardware numbers. Sonic 1 was at 15 million but heavily bundled during its run, for the rest it only had a dozen or so million sellers. Compare it to SNES which was supposed to be outsold at the peak of this generation.
Yeah; big box retailers really helped give the impression Genesis was a massive player at the time in NA. Not to say it wasn't; it
definitely still was. And with plenty of high-quality games in its own right.
But the software numbers generally always favored SNES, and the hardware numbers, for a couple of years, only favored Genesis because Sega were willing to engage with an open buyback policy with big box retailers that I'm assuming Nintendo wasn't, and companies like NEC weren't able to (more specifically, whoever handled American distribution of the Turbographx). Meanwhile in Japan, that type of practice simply didn't exist (and AFAIK, still doesn't).
It's like a gambler guaranteed a big pot at the end of every week, then given three days to try gaining that equivalent amount (time 100% interest) through actual winnings. But they can't, so they pay back everything they couldn't win, and then some.
That an unconsolidated accounting was a real 1-2 mega punch on Sega during the mid-nineties, turns out.