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Quote:

Originally Posted by maczero

That's the majority? I've always felt like the oddball here because I rarely buy anything at full retail price.

Actually, it is. I've been involved in toy retail personally or through close friends/immediate family for years. Stores can sell a product every day for 19.99, put out an ad that states the product has a MSRP of $24.99, and suddenly foot traffic for the $19.99 daily price doubles or triples. Nothing changed, except the perception of a deal. Amazon does that ALL the time across all products. Especially during promotional weeks.


With the collectors market, which is honestly a VERY tiny percentage of global sales, it's different. There are many different levels of collectors. There are the people are almost OCD about their toys one way or another. They will preorder to make sure they get the chaser figure, want perfect boxes, and will send a figure back to the seller if there is so much as speck of blemish on packaging or toy itself. They try to wheel and deal at collectibles shops. They go in and try to haggle the price of figures.

There are the average collectors, those are the people that don't mind looking for a figure locally. They enjoy the hunt, and if they can't find the figure, or it's not MISC/MISB it's ok. If there's a sale, they'll check it out just to satisfy the plastic crack addiction. These are the majority of collectors, and are often collectors that started a hobby with their kids.

Then the "lowest rung" of the collector ladder, the ocassional collector. These are the rarest, who really don't care about toys, per se, but will pick up a toy if it talks to them. 90% of these are spouses of the other collectors or parents of kids. They are impulse shoppers only, so hooking them on price is important.