Nah, you get stuff super cheap at garage sales. Garage sales are usually the last step before tossing it in the trash. People running garage sales are normal everyday Joe's that are just happy to get a few bucks for the junk they no longer want. It's cluttering up their house & taking up all the space & they just want it gone. Ebay is the exact opposite. Ebay is a scalper clusterfuck. Like the ones I described. The so called "dealers", the GI Joe guys that hoard Transformers. They don't know anything about them & jack up the prices. As soon as a figure is no longer in stores they start pushing the prices up. And every other seller copies. They basically play keep away from collectors that would really appreciate adding the figure to their collection. They don't care about the toys or the hobby. A lot of them like to "sit" on the figures for years & don't actually want them to sell. It reminds me of the Twisted Sister song "You want what we got". You want it, we got it We got it, you don't You want it, we got it We got it, you WON'T
I paid $35 for my TR Misfire not counting shipping. If you want something enough you find a way to get it.
Been gone for a few days. Glad to see this thread is still civil. In case it needs clarification I want to make my stance clear again. I absolutely believe scalpers exist. Scalpers existing and scalpers being the main reason for supply shortages are different things. Lots of people get that confused so I'll keep banging this drum. I'm not on this thread to ruffle any specific person. The mention of the guy making $106k being an a-hole is exactly what I'm talking about. He's more in it for a sense of superiority with money making secondary. It's take a special kind of a-hole to do that and I can not for the life of me believe there are so many that they can effect Hasbro's distribution. We might as well end the human race if that was true. That's why I said truly scalping isn't easy. You've basically sold your spark. Finally, do we know what the $106k represents. I would be aghast if it was profit instead of revenue. As far as SDCC, I don't have any experience to comment. Conventions and exclusives is a whole nother layer of complexity to discuss. I thought SDCC limited the amount you could buy. How are people getting crates? @Aimless Misfire, if those guys you know buy a bunch of TF they know nothing about and just hoard it can we really call them scalpers? We need a different term for those people. I believe hoarders-wannabe-scalpers are by far worse for the hobby. If you don't mind my asking, can you give us a little more detail. What size figures were you scalping? How many were you selling on average? Is $15 pure profit or just ebay profit (i.e. before gas, time = minimum wage, etc.). How much did you actually make in a month? How much of your time did it eat up?
While it's been a few years, I sold my Bay bots on the Bay and I made money. I wish I hung onto some of them though...they went up in price. I tried the boards, that was a complete waste of time. All they told me was to give thr stuff away, yet those items were exactly what went for the most. I figure that isn't the norm, and I'm too lazy these days to deal with the horrificly inaccurate shipping calendar, but ebay is still going to be my choice for future sales. Wish there was sometuing better but there ain't.
At the convention itself they are limited, yes. But my guess is that the cases people get "fell off the back of truck" probably before they even left Asia to be shipped. Bay bots are a crazy market. Some are worth a lot, while others have seen their value come down thanks to MPM's and Studio Series. I think no matter what if you want to off load something like that, though, always try and sell them first for anything you get because sometimes you never know.
I do like that this debate is civil here, too. Emotional, yes. Passionate, yes. But nothing out of bounds. A few observations: 1. Some people despise scalpers / flippers. Some people just see it as a way to make money. These two people will probably never see eye to eye. If you're trying to slowly convince anyone of either, you're probably going to be frustrated. At a certain point, you just have to realize that some folks have just made up their minds. I am one of those that despise flippers. However, I have been around long enough to know that whenever this comes up, a certain segment says, "I HATE THEM TOO! PITCHFORKS! LETS DO THIS!" and a certain group says, "Oh, it's not so bad! Quite being a baby!" I think it's the dismissiveness that sets the spark off (there's an us vs. them mentality and a "this causes me pain, why are you rubbing salt" thing going on) but that's the world for you. I'm speaking generally, not specific to this board or any person. 2. As for SDCC, they do in fact limit how many you can buy. Let's say it's 2 per person. The folks that do this for a living (or try) know that. They bring their kids. Their grandparents. Their wife. You've heard people use the word network. It's true. In my example above, a guy brought a bunch of old people with crutches and made them wait in line and then bought so much stock that they needed a tarp to haul it away. I've seen guys at the Mattel pickup place come with three guys and three handcarts to take away the sheer number of cases they bought. And these were Monster High dolls. Flipping is an art form at the con. 3. I'm not so jaded I can't imagine a scenario where a guy comes to a group, "innocently" buys up some bots people are excited about, "innocently" tries to flip them, and then takes massive blowback. I've seen it happen. The guy starts a sort of "What? I'm not doing anything wrong? These are selling for X on Ebay right now. This is fair market value!" I would contend if you haven't been in a group long enough to know how they are going to react to flipping, maybe...just maybe, you shouldn't try to flip there. Most groups consider that insulting. So, yeah, at the end of the day, I will always side with the community. I'm not trying to be stubborn. I don't expect anyone to be swayed by my decision. It's just how I feel.
Scalpers do exist and don't affect the entire market as a whole, but can affect multiple smaller locations. Effectively cutting holes in the distribution map so it all looks like swiss cheese (except with even more holes).
I'm not sure I pared the post down correctly, so hopefully this makes sense. I definitely mentioned something offhand about "low-key flippers themselves" so I hope you don't think I was calling you out. Like you seem to have, I've also been around a while and usually when someone has a pretty understanding demeanor toward flipping it's either because they honestly don't mind the hustle or they have done it themselves. I honestly am new here and don't know the names and don't know the people. So if I gave you the impression I was being passive aggressive, I apologize. As for the rest of it, I think at a certain point we all have to admit that it's here to stay, it's always going to be a hot-button topic, and few people are going to change their minds once they are set. I don't mind the debate and the conversation, or even a little venting, but that's all it is.
I think if you're going to do that in a Facebook group, there should just be at least some etiquette involved. I've seen someone buy something like a Grotusque off of HTS and the next day go on Facebook and immediately offer it for double. It's like "no dude, the thing just came out and will still be available again for retail later, so just slow your roll." Or another guy that was trying to sell his open Blast-Off for $55 while it was still available for preorder on Amazon. There's nothing wrong with trying to sell something to make some cash, but at least calm down and don't seem so eager about it and maybe people will take your attempts more seriously.
I have seen what you are talking about happen before when a decent person tries to sell something at a mark-up and is declared a scalper. It sucks but some people just hate everything regardless of anything you do. But I have also seen people who brag about buying up a product and then ordering people to pay them a huge mark-up or else "they'll never get what they want, mwahaha." They are the two sides or reselling (one the extreme so) but there's a lot of room in between for nuance. My point was that you're using personal experience to define the norm. You've met crappy people before because we all have. Now imagine those crappy people becoming scalpers and then tell me that they're the victim. It's hard to when you know that they'll continue to be crappy, especially if they enjoy screwing people over. But our viewpoint on them can change too where we start to feel sorry for them. And sometimes it is justified, and other times, they'll just go right back to being crappy. Oh and as for admitting to being a scalper, I am someone who couldn't care less. You aren't being an asshole about it so it makes no difference to me. My point wasn't that scalpers are the devil (though they can be annoying but that's mostly personality based), it was that bad people can be scalpers too. You don't seem bad, and you aren't rubbing it in people's faces so who cares? Worst thing you'll get is shame and you can either choose to eat it and vomit back up, or just say whatever and move on. But for some reason, you chose to defend someone you don't know for reasons of a personal grudge against people who may not even be listening (i.e. the vomit option). That's why I had to say something. To get your mind back on track with a jolt instead of a nudge. But now we should get this thread back on track. Maybe we should actually define a scalper and see how many different varieties there are.
There definitely seems to be at least two types: someone who gets a hold a lot of items occasionally and sells them, and the "villainous" scalper who is buying every available item and reselling for egregious amounts thereby being blamed for a lack of figures everywhere as well as other atrocities. It seems like, at least to me, the former is far more common than the later.
Yeah, the first type is definitely more common. The second does exist (sadly without a twirly mustache and an evil lair) but they're much harder to come by. I did come by one. He sucked. He's in jail now. Unrelated to scalping... sort of (he stole). Now here's where things get fuzzy. I define a scalper as someone who purchases a toy with the intent of selling it. But is there a particular profit margin needed to fit the criteria? Is a person who buys and sells at cost a scalper? What about people who buy up stock but instead of selling it, trade them? That's where my definition kind of falls apart.
The person who buys and sells at cost is just a middle man, and the guy that buys and trades is just a trader. A scalper really only describes someone who buys up as much of a high demand product that they can find and sells it intentional for a high price to make as much profit as they can, which is a little different than say a regular reseller who is a person that buys up whatever they feel they can sell and attempts to sell it for as much as they can to hopefully turn a profit.
I think most consider a scalper someone who buys most or all of the stock of a particular figure with the intent to sell it for a high profit margin - actual percentage open to interpretation. I personally wouldn’t see someone reselling at cost as a scalper, but would question why they bother if they aren’t going to make some sort of a profit. Someone who is stocking up for trade, probably pretty rare.
I don't think someone who buys two and sells one to the group at MSRP because some folks have trouble finding them is a scalper. The term used to refer to people who would buy event tickets and charge outrageous prices when the event sold out. So, in my book, it's someone who buys with the specific intent of making profit. If the margin they want to make is small, it just makes them a dumb scalper. I've seen people do the buy to trade thing. Also the scalp to fund their habit. Which seems...odd. It's like, "There's this thing I am passionate about and I love it because it contains all the good memories of when I was a kid. Please allow me to ruin your fuzzy feeling about this same passion that we share by screwing you over so I can continue to buy figures." I mean, I like that we are all here and we all love these crazy bots. I wouldn't want to ruin that for any of you. At the same time, some folks just don't have the money, time, etc to do it the right way. So I am at least somewhat sympathetic. But the dudes who are sneaker flippers and start branching out when they recognize some big money can be made in other fandoms. For those guys, no mercy.
That first guy is definitely not a scalper. I would just call him a nice guy because he's trying to help someone out. It's no different than when I was a kid and my aunt would find some toys for my cousins at Wal-Mart (back then they had them in Texas and we didn't yet) and pick up an extra TMNT figure or something to send to my mom to give to me, only in this case doing it's the same thing but for a friend or stranger and getting compensated accordingly for doing so. I think if you want to see what a true scalper really is, check out the people trying to flip the tickets to opening night of Avengers: Endgame.
I personally think a scalper / flipper is anyone who buys something and sells it for more- regardless of quantity or profit margin. So let’s look at my Studio Series Ironhide, a hard to find item purchased at retail that I can sell for $45. Thoughts and reactions? It’s ok- I can take it. I just want to get an idea of peoples perceptions.
