[RKillian]

In defense of comic shops that do that, in some places it's a matter of survival. At one time I was looking to open a toy shop. My area had lost 75% of its toy stores over the years and my town never had any options. When I was scouting rental prices, they were insane, upwards of five times my mortgage payment on a small house.

With the margins that you get going through a distributor, you have got to sell an incredible number of toys each month just to break even. On top of that, you have to sell enough to pay for a house to live in and food to eat. It was a very daunting prospect. I'd been selling out of my garage for awhile and it looked like I would never reach that level of volume at the rate I was going.

Then the Hasbro embargo came. If things were difficult before, then they were beyond impossible after. I would be solicited for stuff mere days before it hit stores but could not expect to take delivery for months. By then, all of the people willing to pay even retail had exited the market, leaving only those looking to pay _below_ wholesale. With free shipping.

What's perverse about that is that it really encourages scalping. Anybody that might've opened a distributor account runs the numbers and sees that they actually make out better if they luck into an early batch at retail. Back when Titans Return Octane and Blitzwing were new, I flipped a pair from Target for $50 each. If I had waited for Hasbro to deliver cases, I would still be struggling to get $25 months later.

Hasbro is not the only villain though. I was frequently shorted by Entertainment Earth on any number of lines. One of their favorite tricks was to list Mattel products as due next week or "hot off the truck," lock in preorders, and then revise the date three or more months out. I was in the habit of ordering Mattel as filler for major pushes - a show, Christmas, whatever - and that delay would put them past the point of having any value. When you cancel an order, they take a 15% restocking fee and I believe they do this bait and switch purposely to artificially boost their own margins.

Anyway, when I would do shows or have a decent month on eBay, it was always two types of items that saved me. One, the rare toy I actually got on time, usually by ordering from overseas. Two, a toy that I had sat on for years and forgotten about because I couldn't get retail out of it when it was new. Neither case was what I really signed up to do. If I had a shop with bills coming due each and every month, I would have no choice. Since I don't, I do, and I chose to quit.

I feel bad for "scalpers" because I imagine some of them are just broken people with broken dreams trying to get by the only way that they can. Collectors...not so much...because, ironically, if the market wasn't so tight-fisted, prices wouldn't be so high.