[Skoob]

I find most bricks-and-mortar collection-shopping more trouble than it's worth. In Canada, the most common problem is slow distribution. You never know when a given product will finally, finally arrive in-store. Wal-Mart just received the last wave of Star Wars Black Series that I ordered online quite a while ago, and because they took so long to stock it, they missed a lot of sales to collectors like me. Consequently, many days later, most of the inventory is still sitting there, collecting dust.

I sense that some major retailers are trying to use their website "Pre-Order" and "Send-me-an-email-when-this-product-becomes-available" features as a way to measure demand prior to specifying their own order quantities. In the Black Series example, the Jango Fett wave was posted 'unavailable' for many weeks before it finally came up as 'available in stock.' What's more interesting and aggravating to me is the out-of-control pheonomenon of SCALPING that seems to dominate the sales at these websites. If you don't sit around 24-7 with a hair-finger hovering over the 'pre-order' button when it becomes available, it's hard to say when or even whether you'll get another chance to pick up a popular item you're after at MSRP. A particularly dramatic recent example is the Ahsoka Tano figure, wherein scalpers apparently wiped out online inventory from all major retailers within mere moments, and then continued to do so, over and over and over, every time a new batch of inventory became available. It seems remarkably systematic and consistent. I wonder if some of it is automated, maybe using a web bot and some kind of script.

I've never shopped at ToyWiz, but the 'scalper' / 'flipper' description seems apt.