thatn3rdygirl:
momdusa:
allisonnicolle:
thatn3rdygirl:
mhrevolution:
1. If you see an auction starting low and it has days to go, don’t bid! You only draw attention to the auction and it has more time to increase in price
Case and point: I saw a SDCC Ghoulia with a starting bid of $.99 but it had a reserve, no bids, and 3 days to go. I decided I’d bid and try to…
Scarah sold for $60-80 as a pre-order. Now that she is, for all intents and purposes, “sold out”, it should come as no surprise that she has doubled in value.
When she sold for $25 originally and only ebay scalpers offered a pre-order of $80 I don’t find it very fair. I realize she is sold out, but “value” has little to do with it.
Yeah its not value, its greed. Also, TBH- I could care less about the “signed” ones. I would’ve let my daughter play with it anyway! But it pisses me off that they are going for $100+ cause there is an autograph. How do we even know its real?
It’s not “scalping” or greed. This is how things work in the collectables world. The SDCC doll(s) is/are collector exclusives. Unless you want to pay to go to the con and wait in the lines, etc, to get it for $25, you will need to come to terms with the fact that you are not going to find one for “face value”.
The doll DOES have a higher value - it is a limited production item that was offered exclusively at one location, with very few held for online sales a week later (which sold out within 13 minutes).
THIS is how collecting in the adult collecting world works. If you don’t like it, then accept you may just never have those pieces in your collection.
Well, I’ve been “Collecting” (Barbies, action figures, comics etc) since before ebay. I know how it works. But as people mentioned, last year the price for the Ghoulia wasn’t this high this close to after Comic Con. It seems like in the last few years this is how people are trying to make a living, instead just, I don’t know, getting a job?
I used to pay up to $50 for an action figure, until I learned to just be at TRU when they opened, and learned when the truck days are for each of the stores. I’ve been through ebay looking for old Barbies I had when I was a kid, or limiteds I never got to buy and have never paid more that $40. And we’re talking about dolls that are 10-30 years old! Not a doll that came out 3 weeks ago.
With Limited Editions, I’m fully aware that I’ll never get my hands on any of them, I just feel for the people who felt the need to pay $80 for a preorder, or $125 for a doll that should be closer to $40, if you throw some in for the buyers expenses. If you bought 6 dolls and sold them all for $40 or 50, you are getting a decent enough amount back. I mean, why should they be completely compensated for their ticket to Comic Con? You didn’t go JUST to buy dolls, right? You got to look at pick up freebies and take pictures and just revel in the magic of SDCC! …So you are getting what you paid for, imho
And yes, I think its greed. An example: There is another thing I collect, a small brand perfume oil made by a very talented family. A few years back, you could find their limited editions online for a few dollars more than what they charged, say if a person found the blend didn’t work on them, or if they bought two bottles online and ended up not liking it. If the blend got better with age, or was discontinued, they might ask for a few dollars more. A few years ago I was able to find many of the ones that were sold before I discovered them, and at a reasonable price.
Now? Psh. $150 for last years Christmas exclusive. A single bottle of perfume. 5ml. Less than a year old. In the last two years, I’ve stood in line behind people at their trunk shows and watched as a scalper (and trust me, this is a tiny, close knit fan-dom, we KNOW each other, and this was no fan), bought bottle after bottle (close to 80) of exclusives SOLELY FOR THE PURPOSE OF PUTTING ON EBAY THE NEXT DAY. And I remember the owners of the company mentioning, sadly, that their Comic Con Exclusives were bought up in an afternoon and on ebay before comic con was over.
THAT’S straight up Greed.
THEY started limited bottles per person and stopped allowing third party orders (no more “but I need 5 bottles for my friends!”). I don’t even think they did Comic con this year. And at another event, they passed out numbers to the fans in line, so we could get a chance at the perfumes first. The gal passing them out recognized us in line. None of the fans have been hurt by this, and in fact there weren’t as many scalp-y people there at the last event.
Can Mattel do this? Probably not, but they can limit the number of dolls sold per person. I also wish there were fan based system so that people who are active on forums, or go in cosplay, or have kids singing the goddamn theme song with them, could have first crack at them. Scalpers could figure out a way to exploit that, I’m sure, but eh- at least they’d be TRYING to help the fans.
But anyway, don’t tell me its not greed when someone buys up dozens of something they have zero interest in for the sole purpose of racking up the cost to sell to desperate fans. If they want to start the bidding at $25 and see where fans go from their, that’s fine, but the automatic charging of $90 for a single doll is redic. Like I said, in my opinion, they shouldn’t be compensated for having to get in to Comicon cause THEY GOT TO GO TO COMICON.
If they are going solely for the purpose of buying out Limited editions, and it was such an inconvenience, and that took a ticket away from a fan who WANTED to go, then they are a waste of space and deserve to let their dolls sit and rot in storage.
