Too right. I want one of the Night Ravens for a custom, but I am not dropping £40 on it.

Beav, check out any discount stores you have locally. The good thing about the UK is that action figures do not sell very well and often end up in them. Except Star Wars. Even then, I would check stores like Tesco and Asda from time to time.

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also the The TJ Max ( as opposed the TK Max in the states) - had some good stuff when we were in Dublin

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The recent price increases are really making me question my collecting future. I definitely feel like "when is enough" is coming very soon, if it isn't already here.

As much as I would like to continue collecting the Marvel Universe line, the cases seem to be stacked with pegwarmers from previous waves, and getting a set of the new figures only is just ridiculous on BBTS (I understand why they do it, but that doesn't make the set any more affordable). Local distribution seems pretty random around here, except that I can find most of wave 3 really easily. It doesn't help that I'm sick of the endless Spider-Man and Iron Man figures.

Joes have been pretty bad too. The vehicle price increases are astronomical, and the figures only seem affordable when Toys R Us has the 2-for sales. I'm guessing we won't see many more of those sales, if any more at all. I was largely unimpressed with the figure offerings shown for the Pursuit of Cobra line, especially since we're getting like 85% core movie characters, so I imagine I'll be scaling back tremendously in 2010.

Transformers seem to have increased in price the least. But, since recent Hasbro comments suggest that there may not even be a Universe 3.0, I may never buy another toy from the line.

Like "The Original Factory Shop"? I'll keep my eyes out in a few months. The Dundee TRU doesn't seem to be doing that badly and the figures/mini-vehicles seem to be moving OK at the Tescos I've seen.

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Watch as I pass on these and then they become impossible to find at retail. Then people will have to resort to ebay to get their Snake Eyes fix at $30 a pop.

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It's time to pay the piper. All that cash I've been socking away for the past few months has been whittled down considerably due to the flow of movie product. At current prices I can't and won't be picking up everything. Doubt I'm gonna quit cold turkey, and it'll hurt to leave Grand Slam on the shelf if I see him today, but I do have almost exactly the same figure already. Somethin's gotta give and I'm not giving up eating!

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I gotta go with pluv. That Snake Eyes is something everyone wants really bad it seems. But since without looking I can say that it is sold out preorder by itself, you would have to by the whole wave.

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What comments were those?!

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I just sent an email to BBTS about the ridiculous pricing:



Everybody needs to contact them and let them know that "We're not gonna take it anymore!" (Yes that was a twisted sister reference!)

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I agree, I've always thought the adult collector base has a bit more pull then the big H will ever let us know.
With figures at 8 an over there are plenty of RoC figures that I would have bought that now I won't. Troop building is right out, and custom fodder is getting hard to justify.

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I'm not 100% certain if it's the same store, but isn't it TJ Maxx here in the states? I've never heard of TK Max.

Lalalalalala, TJ Maxx. 15 years later, that jingle haunts my dreams.

On topic, I've said for years that I won't pay the price hikes on just about ANY online retailer. No offense to some of our friends here, but I've always found them to be a little unreasonable.

Interestingly enough, during my lunch break today I ran into a mom buying figure for her teenage (hey i asked, she said 15 lol) son at a Toys R' Us. She reiterated his desire to want to buy figures to keep on card b/c they'd be worth something some day.

... She got the talk about why it's perfectly ok to open them b/c if anything the company will make better versions down the road like they've been doing the last 5-10 years and how it's happened with Star Wars figures, etc. Especially since older stuff is only worth more b/c no one thought to buy and keep it sealed up at the time, like old baseball cards.

And then I went an aisle over and laughed with a guy about how much easier it is to carry star wars stuff compared to girls stuff and he joked about how it's easier to pick stuff out because it's "not an explosion of pink crap everywhere like in the girls' section"... irony: on casual friday i was wearing a pink shirt lol

But anyway that thought that they're always making better stuff that more or less makes older figures inferior (interestingly except for customization heh) and increasing prices, even in a bad economy, leaves me wondering where they think they're going with all this? I can tell there's fewer competition for my collecting dollars, but still...I'd spend more if I could get more for my $ than what I've been getting the past few months.

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http://www.cybertron.ca/boards/showthre ... 64&t=18113 question 3

http://tformers.com/transformers-hasbro ... /news.html

The second response sounds the worst. Admittedly, they do suggest that they will be doing "heritage" characters later. However, the answer suggests to me that they may be doing more G1 homages using movie toys, probably not unlike the tow truck movie toy being repainted like Hoist. If that's the route Hasbro is taking, I still won't buy them if they use movie-specific molds.

Though I feel that BBTS's pricing is getting too high, I see no reason to send them angry mail unless they provide poor service, and I have always been pleased with the service I have received from them. Though I'm sure that they run a larger operation than most toy dealers, I can't imagine that they can purchase in volume anywhere near even the smallest retail chain, so their base costs are higher. Ultimately, BBTS is allowed to set prices as they choose; if they set prices too high, they won't move merchandise.

I concur. Sending them "spammy" emails won't do a whole lot of good. If you really want to send them a message, Don't buy the product and convince anybody you're trying to get to send the letter to not buy the same product....The only way their prices will change is if they have too much of the items in stock (Supply and Demand).

Having Just gotten my RULK over the weekend, I really think a better option is to find like minded collectors in your geographic location, get together, and help each-other out with, rather than compete for, products. I'll point you towards http://www.Johio.com as an excellent model and the reason I've got a RULK.

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