This is my favorite post on TFW, but be careful: math is a scalpers worst enemy. There will be hatred for introducing sound reasoning and logic to people's get-rich-quick schemes!

If I had a say, I'd love to post an analysis like yours at every toy store. Because most people are REALLY BAD at math.   And their hoarding instinct makes the toy industry decline faster, imo.

 

Hmm.

If the tables were affordable, anybody and everybody would get one, from the major retailers down to the individuals selling their private collection. But the major retailers are going to have non-negotiable prices and pallets of inventory. Private sellers will usually have only one or two of each figure and can often be negotiable on price. Let in enough private sellers and they will start to undercut the major retailers on the same product. Perhaps Hasbro is trying to avoid a situation where the major retailers don't profit from coming, thus disincentivising them from coming back next year.

 

The ridiculous part is that scalping is actually more viable than low volume retail. If you found Blitzwing and Octane early at Target, you could've doubled your money. To make that same $50 on a distributon order takes a few orders of magnitude more product (how many depends on the circumstances).

No matter how bad distribution is in your area, it's not bad enough to put up with this.

 

That's not entirely true. For example, the major retailers have more stock and name recognition. Not everyone wants to buy from Joe Dokes at half price. And the major retailers have their own discounts, too.

$25 + tax for Voyager at retail. Sell for $50... So about 15% in fees, or 7.50. Then there's shipping - $8-10. So $26 + 7.5 + 8 = $41.50 cost... Profit of $8.50.

And that's assuming you are fast with your listing AND that you are not getting undercut already by an overseas seller. If you want to sell fast (or be competitive), you are selling for less than $50. Now factor in the driving and search time... Is it really worth it?

$8 in profit. You spend an hour to get the product, half hour to list and package/mail it. So you are essentially working for $6 an hour? Am I missing something?

Let's say you get lucky and find 4 Voyagers on 1st stop. You clean them out. But you still spend about 30 min to list and mail each one. So then it's $32 in 3 hrs of work -- about $11 an hour. Minimum wage is around $10, and is now going up to $14 in some areas. But yeah, let's keep on scalpin!  

 

Scenario: you go to the BBTS booth at Hascon. They have TR Fortress Maximus on sale for $120 ($30 off their online list price). But look! Joe Dokes' booth next door has the same TR Fort Max for $80, and you're pretty sure you can talk him down to $60 because you know for a fact he picked up that Max at Ollie's for $40. Are you really going to give twice the money to BBTS?

 

Where you went wrong was including shipping in your $100 selling price. The 14% comes off of about $110 so that's $15.40 in fees. Now the toys at $24.99 times 2 plus 6% saled tax works out to $52.98. Your profit is $31.62 on $50 worth of toys or 63%.

Meanwhile, the sucker ordering that voyager through a distributor starts with about 10% assuming no EE-style horse shit with shipping. By the time he receives his shipment, people are balking at $25 (forget the nearly $30 MSRP, it's a fantasy to make you think the distributor's price isn't robbery).

eBay swings around and takes about 15% if you work backwards. Amazon takes nearly 25% with its fixed component, percentage fee, and shipping games. You are operating in the red either way.

Or you go to a show where there's just the fixed table cost to pay. A reasonable show with $100 tables, you need to sell 40 to break even. Crazycon, sorry, Hascon, that balloons to 400.

Now, do you want to make $30 picking up two extra toys at Target on the way home from work or get a tax license, tie up thousands of dollars, maintain a show schedule, and box up hundreds of orders in between?

 

I doubt Joe Doke is going to negotiate at a convention if his prices are already that competitive, but otherwise you make a good point.

If Joe Doke wants to sell his FortMax for $60 he couldn't have asked for better luck than to set up shop right next to the guy selling a bunch of them for $120. Hell, if I was Joe Doke and saw that I'd hope nobody noticed my first price while I furiously scribbled "$80" on a brand new price tag.

 

There should really be some policy against scalpers... 

 

Just lifting the embargo would make an incredible difference. Scalpers weren't a problem as long as I could preorder with an online shop. All it ever accomplished was to worsen an already bad situation.

What it effectively does is destroy the illusion that a smaller operator can make it. Some drop out, some turn to scalping, in either case, it's more of a fight to find stuff, let alone at a price that you're willing to pay.

In case anybody is getting confused, I live in a terrible distribution desert and thought there was an opportunity bringing in cases. I was wrong wrong wrong and now I just put what I've learned out there as a warning.

 

This is such an odd question I don't know how to respond. Star Wars is so much bigger than Transformers as to deserve many, many more official conventions of its own than Transformers ever will.

Certainly I think Transformers deserves its own official convention, but using Star Wars as a basis for reasoning this is a losing proposition. We'd want to cite a smaller franchise that gets its own official convention before citing one of the biggest franchise of all time.

 

Actually your point holds true even for areas with good distribution. No matter if I went through EE or Diamond the results were similar...I'd get cases about 2-3 months after Target and TRU had the same assortments and at a cost that was pretty close to or above their retail. Its why I went to selling 3rd party...at least then I knew I wouldn't be behind the curve of the big retailers. When hasbro tried to crack on me (Over IGear Ramjet) they actually tried to threaten that I wouldn't be able to have a Hasbro account. They weren't too pleased when I pointed out the fact that as a small store I was never going to be able to afford their $35,000 per year minimum orders (with the first order each year needing to be above $5,000)

At one point Diamond promised we could start ordering by individual characters. We'd still have to order them by full cases, but back then I'd gladly have ordered cases of everyone but Bumblebee and Optimus if I could have. Sadly they never did it (or if they have now it was after we shut down)

 

Not just "its own convention" but it's own official convention.

 

I don't believe so, but I think E-tailers, at least the larger ones, have mostly more current stock. Others, which still buy collections and whatnot, Captured Prey, etc, might have that older stock, but then you have to weigh in how much do they charge for new stuff in packages, or loose, and who is going to buy what. The pricing on this convention is very very high both for dealers and fans, and that raises the ceiling of A. Who can afford to go, and B. Who can afford to go and buy stuff or sell stuff.

 

What's this embargo everyone is talking about? I'm not sure I heard about that.

 

Consider my above revised. I've only ever been talking about official conventions.

 

Right. Now take it a step further: John Dukes, and Jim Dicks, and James Deke, and Deke James also bought booths at Hascon, because they live on ramen and they can afford it, and they also cleaned out their local Ollie's' of $40 Fort Maxes. Each guy got 20 units at $40 each. If they sell all their stock at $80 each, they've paid for their booths and are at $600 net profit per guy (not accounting for travel, lodging and food, of course, but they've hit the ground running). But look what else has happened: BBTS has not sold 80 Fort Maxes, for a (gross) profit loss of $9,600. Now, because BBTS is not run by the Corleones, they aren't going to start breaking kneecaps, but they are going to tell Hasbro they won't be back next year because they didn't meet their expected profit.

So the $1000 tables isn't Hasbro trying to gouge the little guy, it's Hasbro trying to protect the big guy, the guy who buys volume from them direct to the tune of at least $35,000 a year, by shutting out the little guy entirely.

 

Hasbro abandoned real solid cases very quickly, like within 6 months. The only real cases that I saw were T30 Arcee and Chromia. After that, they were cancelled or repacked leftovers delivered months late. Sure, every now and then they'll do a case of Deadpools or Darth Vaders, but it's always a second run deal. Rather than solicit earlier to gauge interest and plan more effectively, they went the opposite direction with the embargo.

 

So Hasbro hurts them with the embargo and then "helps" them with super high booth fees behind super high attendence fees?

 

Yes.  

 

Absolute nothing I've read here makes me think that attending this thing would be a good idea.