I was looking over my collection of DC Figures and remembered 30 years ago when there was no internet. That made collection very tough. You had to travel if your parents would take you to stores all over to get what you wanted. It was that or a mail order catalog(that days version of the internet). Anyway I was just looking over my collection and thought I would have no where near the amount of figures I have if it wasn't for the WWW. Just a thought I had and how much easier it is today.

 

I agree. I've been collecting a fraction of that, but remember seeing something on the show American Pickers where they were saying that items were worth a lot more when the only way you could get them was by how far in the country your contacts were. Now with the internet anyone is able to purchase just about anything.

I do think though that it has some positive sides. It's easier than ever for anyone to get in the hobby of toy collecting, which I think is extremely positive!

 

Maybe easier than before, but still not very easy. Companies like Hasbro, Bandai and Mattel does Web exclusives, you literally have to stay up all night to wait for a small window of opportunity to place your order, and from placing to finalizing the order, you still have the chance of losing them. The worst part is that once you miss out, it is to eBay world where the scalpers reside. So yeah, same shit different day  

 

To a certain extent it can be easier collecting today compared to 30 years ago because of all the options through the internet,although some of those options can be pretty pricey.Unfortunately thanks to sites like ebay,finding stuff in-store can sometimes be much more difficult because of the people that buy all the popular/hard to find figures just for the sake of re-selling them.

 

I do agree the internet does make things easier to track things down from current lines, but it also helps people acquire older toys that would probably be incredibly rare finds without the 'net. I couldn't IMAGINE trying to locate the guns for my incomplete Duocons without the internet.

But on the flip side, along with the scalpers who take all the most recent stuff from the stores, the fact it IS so easy to find things on the internet also makes finding things still in the wild a unique feeling all to itself. Could I have saved myself the trouble of hunting for months all in the name of aquiring Generations Wheeljack by simply getting him online from a store or another user? Probably. But finding him secretly hidden under a shelf atop some crappy Destron PCC sets? MUCH more enjoyable and made the figure a little bit more unique by adding to the story behind it, because how many other Generation Wheeljacks were found like that?

 

Same Boat 30 years ago gathering everything the minute they were stocked and selling them at their stores or in the News Paper. Those peoples sons and daughters now lurk the internet.

 

I dunno, I may be getting older, but toy collecting is becoming less fun for me. And I sorta blame all the information for that. I rather miss not knowing what is being released 9 months early and exactly when it hits retail. Today, collecting feels more like work than fun or collecting. I might as well be a scalper for all the stores that I've visited only to leave empty handed. "Collecting" as a kid, if we can even call it collecting because very few of us were actually building collections, was fun because if we didn't have a "must have" figure we could easily move on if we never found it. Now no matter what, we have the option of getting that rare figure even at a high price, of course, we also get to complain because of that price.

 

I agree with this. It was awesome walking into a store and just being wowed by something insane that you had no idea even existed. It was really exciting to look at the product catalog or the card back seeing what was available and hoping each week you would find it in stores.

 

Well, this wasn't exactly a mail order per say, but there used to be a store in my city called Consumers Warehouse that primarily worked on catalog orders. That's how I got my Optimus Prime back in the day because none of the stores ever had him, and it was pretty much the only way of getting lots of shit back then.