[MGTAJ]

Apologies for the double post but I came across this post elsewhere the other day and it really sums up the collecting game to a tee. It's a long read but the dude speaks the truth about the situation.

Quote:

Birth of a Toy Scalper

Toy companies used to make action figures in fairly even numbers per case assortment and then ship to retail stores. Retail stores had not yet perfected the science of stock rotation and would frequently leave product on a shelf for years until it sold, without reducing the price for clearance. Many collectors would opt not to buy all figures released, instead buying up the fan favorites leaving the less desired characters to pegwarm in to oblivion. This practice eventually lead to stores realizing that some figures simply would not sell as quickly and that any figure holding up space on a shelf was basically raising it's cost to the store every hour it sat on the peg/shelf.

Clearance items became a bigger thing for consumers as they realized they could buy items at discounted prices by simply waiting long enough. What consumers didn't know was that this process was leading to stores changing how they stocked their shelves for years to come. Wal-Mart would no longer stock 48 pegs of GI Joes, 120 pegs of Star Wars. No, instead, the bigger retailers began reducing their orders because action figures just were not selling as quickly. These reduced orders didn't reduce the number of consumers buying the product though. This phenomenon lead to the inflated priced secondary market due to supply and demand. As consumers began to realize that the supply was decreasing, the greed factor began to overtake consumers and collectors and they began to pay more for toys they wouldn't pay retail for on the shelf just 6 months prior.

Enter the opportunist: the dreaded scalper, the type of person that looks to make a buck in every way they can. Popular as folks with low demand jobs, like delivery boys, your scalper would frequently have both the time and cash on hand to scoop up any short packed figure they could find. These short packed figures would then fetch more money than the opportunist had paid for the item when sold second hand. The consumers who were obsessed would gladly pay the few extra bucks rather than drive all over town and miss out on the newest figures for their collection. This symbiotic relationship inspired others to try it as well. The greed factor reared it's ugly head as more scalpers joined the fray! Their prices driving higher since their operation was denying the shelves of any product became the downfall of my scalpers. Over spending themselves to the point of being broke, these scalpers would be forced to return their purchases to the store in order to buy food that week.

Oh, but the smart consumers didn't realize how bad this process was. When the scalper returns the item to the store, the store reads this as an unwanted item and creates a series of files counting the number of items returned and determines that, once their sales show that each item has technically been returned, the toy line is unwanted and thus, future orders are reduced once more.

Suddenly even more rare than before, the scalpers have a new target, a short printed run of figures with even shorter shelf stocking!

Now our consumers are engulfed in rage over the habits of the scalper, but sadly, too few realize they are the very cause of their own grief because of their own buying habits.

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It sucks but it's true. We did it to ourselves. We demand variety and then bitch at the quality. We bitch at the price increases. We bitch at the length of time between releases then we bitch when they release too fast. We bitch, bitch bitch until manufacturers stop trying to cater to us and cut out the articulation we love instead returning to targeting marketing to children, with brighter colors, fewer points of articulation, smaller selection and lower prices. The truly worst of the bunch are the folks that buy the BAF sets, strip the baf parts then return the figs to the store in order to sell the baf. That idiocy results in a toy that no reasonable consumer will ever purchase and the store will drop the orders as a result of this. The predatory behavior is the snake that eats itself.

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It's just a rotten situation. Retailers don't want product that doesn't sell. Consumers don't value every toy in a series at the same price.

Things like that are also why we see prices increase by1.00 some times. If you get a case of 10 figures and raise the price by 1.00 per figure and then sell 10 figures, the store made as much money as if they had sold 11 figures out of a 10 figure case. That is 110% of what the projection stated. The other end of that is if 1 figure doesn't sell, then they STILL made their projected cost and when they clearance 1 figure then they didn't lose any money, even if sold at 0.50 just to get it off the shelf.