[kylactus]

it's the labor, not the plastic. I would imagine it takes about the same number of man hours to produce a 3.75" figure as a 6" one, you cut two points of articulation that take an individual 3 seconds per unit to assemble (6 seconds there), and 8 seconds to strip from the mold (I'm just talking production not tooling) multiply that by 500,000, that alone on one figure is 1945 man hours at lets say 5$ an hour that's $9725 saved by cutting one joint. China's emerging middle class has seen an average pay increase in the last six years of nearly 400% (as an example, Chinese consumer desire for gold jewelry, something the average Chinese citizen could not afford ten years ago, is one of the primary drivers of increased gold prices recently) that coupled with the slump in the US economy has lead to a sort of "leveling out" of the previous standard of living disparity between the US and China that gave us cheep labor to produce cheep goods. My guess the next decade will see the factories move to India where you still have a large pool of people willing to work for next to nothing and our prices for consumer good will drop again.