[flaccideagle]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iceman

It's that darn price of oil effecting plastics, shipping, and everything else. There really is no excuse for how high the price of oil has risen in the last 10 years.

There's actually a lot of reasons, whether they're true or not...

Personally I think there's a lot of issues with the factories, and profit margin per piece- how much toy companies make per item sold, and what modern business practices are. The economics of scale. Sometimes it feels artificial, sometimes justified. I think oil is used as an easy scapegoat a lot of times. The factories have been going through a huge number of changes, political and otherwise, which results in workers getting better wages (a good thing) and that is passed along the line too.

When you discover things like how fully painting a face on some lines costs almost as much as the materials for the whole figure, or how sometimes adding an accessory for one figure means three others get extra too, the cost of double knees/elbows, or even how the hated practice of a store exclusive that makes a line live for three more waves- it becomes tough to take the varied excuses at face value, when they understandably don't release information that could back those things up.