I like the fire and forget aspect of preordering online, but it's not all sunshine and roses. Sometimes, you have to preorder from Walmart and there's a good chance they are going to just put your nice, case fresh action figure in a mailer envelope and then proceed to drive the truck over it. Amazon still has the chance of doing something similar.
I do miss seeing new product on the pegs, but being married with kids, getting up to go on a toy run just isn't practical for me anymore.
About 50% of the carded figures I have ordered over the last few months from Amazon or Wal-Mart have come in CRUSHED. I also love the times when they mash the figures into a box that is obviously too small and the wrong shape all together.
Luckily I'm mostly in the same boat too, as I am mostly an "opener." But I do still prefer opening figures from a nice card and bubble that isn't all smushed. I like to cut the figure off the VTC cardbacks and save one of each cardback. I also buy the occasional extra carded figure. It's been hard to do that lately since the condition is just so hit and miss and I can't see it before hand, like I could in store.
Otherwise, I am on the fence about the Online vs Brick and Mortar purchasing as a whole. There will always be a big part of me that is nostalgic for the days of going on daily/weekly toy runs to a few local stores. The excitement from finding new figures in the wild was one of my favorite things about the hobby, especially when it was something I was really after. I have hardly hard that feeling over the last 10 years or so as it got harder and harder to find ANYTHING at retail around me. That was part of what was driving me out of the hobby. I felt like I was wasting so much time and gas only to be constantly striking out. At the time online shipping was generally not free, and it was harder to justify trying to buy a whole case and having extras I might get stuck with.
Picking back up with collecting this year, online has been the only way to go. COVID has changed my retail vs online buying habits in general, and I have been favoring online orders more than I ever have. On top of that, I donated my car earlier this years since I WFH and barely needed to drive it over the last 3-5 years. I'm generally without a car M-F until my wife gets home from work. I never really get out to the stores like Target more than once a month or so. And even
if they had anything to buy, I'd not be there often enough to find it. Online ordering has been a life saver. There are definitely some frustrations with it that I've noticed, so far, but I also am out of practice on some of this and don't have a good system back in place yet.
Personally, I liken this transition in the hobby to what we have seen with movie theater seating over the last few years:
I loved the old days when Star Wars, LOTR, or any other movie I was really excited about was coming out. The days of sitting in line to get a good seat. It was so much fun to hang out with fellow fans in line. I really miss that layer of excitement. Assigned seating kind of blew that up and killed much of the meta-event. It is just not the same as it used to be. HOWEVER, in many cases it is better. For any normal movie, I really appreciate knowing my seat going in, getting to see how full the theater is, and love using the extra time I would have used getting to the seats way early to spend more time at the bar/restaurant. At this point, while I miss things about the old days, it would be hard to go ever go back fully. But there is a small part of me that would not mind the occasional G.A. opening night showing.I think the same is true for me with collecting at retail. In an ideal world for me, collection would be more of a hybrid than it is now. I'll still probably primarily buy online, but I'd love to be able to find stuff at stores occasionally and get that old rush again.
