Anyone else losing interest?

[Adam_Pawlus]

Like I said, YMMV.   My Wal-Marts are absolutely stuffed with H*V figures, and yet they get new Saga cases.  About half a dozen of Wave 8 was there on Wednesday and gone this morning.  It's not just "five minutes" but a day or two at times, and crap or no crap, it seems all the dozen plus stores I frequent keep getting new stuff in.

Except Kmart, they suck.

[Jeff]

Like I said, YMMV.   

And, as Brent (Morgbug) is in Canada (you know, a place where they don't actually get every wave thanks to Hasbro Canada and not just because he missed them) his milage varies quite a bit from yours in Sunny SoCal...   

[Adam_Pawlus]

Like I said, YMMV.   

And, as Brent (Morgbug) is in Canada (you know, a place where they don't actually get every wave thanks to Hasbro Canada and not just because he missed them) his milage varies quite a bit from yours in Sunny SoCal...   

Well, that's Canada, where any and all toy shipments are purely coincidental.

[Darth Slothus]

I live in SOCAL and I totally agree with Mikey and Brent

The only store that got wave 7 (the first 22-says wave 7 on the cases) is the exact store I caught a store employee removing dozens upon dozens of rehash GB,HV ect from the shelves a week earlier to go to their whse a stold by the employee..coincidence? The other 3 WM are yet to see the new stuff and ARE stuffed by HandV, GB ect.

Did I fail to mention that all 4 stores skipped wave 6 (Endor) except the one that I just mentioned above only after they 'coincidently' removed the crap figures the week before?

If your in the LA side of the mountains Adam, I understand from many collectors in that area that not much stays on the pegs for long......it's not realistic to compare your millions of people area to other rural areas in the US or elsewhere.

TheDS 

[Adam_Pawlus]

My experiences in Phoenix and Tucson, AZ were pretty much identical.  Actually, stuff was easier to get there than it was in LA, and when I lived in Phoenix, people in LA always told me stuff was harder to get here.   I've also had people that live in tiny towns like Cottonwood who have had no problems finding anything reasonably expected to be found there (open stock stuff) and complained that some "rare" items (MODS 2-pack) were pegwarming.   

When I go back to Phoenix, I go to about 8 Wal-Marts-- because that's what I do when I have time to kill.   The stuff is usually out there if you hit enough stores regularly.  If you only have 2 stores in your area, well, that's a different story, but Tucson was a smaller (but not tiny) town and I had no problem tracking down Skiffs there as well as Simpsons figures and everything else when my radius was limited to where my feet could pedal my bike.

One town's pegwarmers are another town's gold.   YMMV.  It's like the whole Unleashed thing-- Hasbro claims a lot of stores were choking on them.  The stores I visited indicated otherwise.   And as stated above, I've had many people in rural areas go on about how whatever exclusive is clogging their pegs when the rest of the country is hunting them like madmen.   Still, the stuff often filters in eventually assuming you didn't miss your two- or three-day window of opportunity to snag it.  (Sure it sucks, but them's the breaks.   I'm not here to discuss some sort of utopian collector project.)

If you live in a town with two stores, well, yeah, it's unrealistic to expect to be able to find everything without a little extra help from outside the community.   But that wasn't the argument I came to make, I just came to post and say "yes, I am enjoying the new figures."    Except the freaking Cantina Band tin I can't find and am convinced hasn't hit LA yet as I've been hitting 1-2 of the 3 "reasonable" Wal-Marts in my area every day or two.

[Darth Slothus]

If you live in a town with two stores, well, yeah, it's unrealistic to expect to be able to find everything without a little extra help from outside the community. 

Which was exactly my point. I'll wager there's alot of folks like that in here too.
Actually, those cantina tins only hit one of our 4 stores here in the desert in SOCAL..they probably just haven't hit(distributed) everywhere yet. 

[evenflow]

I am pretty sure that i mentioned earlier that my interest had diminished, but my love for the old POTF coins has made me love the new coins. The figures we have seen thus far look good, so i am being more optimistic than i was a while ago. We will see how things turn out once they are released.

[Morgbug]

If you live in a town with two stores, well, yeah, it's unrealistic to expect to be able to find everything without a little extra help from outside the community. 

Which was exactly my point. I'll wager there's alot of folks like that in here too.
Actually, those cantina tins only hit one of our 4 stores here in the desert in SOCAL..they probably just haven't hit(distributed) everywhere yet. 

Well, Canada is a lot like Siberia, but to qualify:

Walmart: 6 stores in town, 3 more within 1 hour.
Zellers (like a poor man's Target or a rich man's K-mart): 6 stores
Superstore: kinda like Meijers (for the midwesterners): 6 stores
TRU: 2 stores.

So it's not that there's not much here and if it comes, I know about it and usually find it. 

The original point remains though.  Much of this stuff clogs the pegs (rehashes/recards) and that results in waves not making it to local retail.  How do I know?  snowtroopers.ca has store reports from across Canada and I can see what does and doesn't arrive elsewhere.  Those thrice weekly visits tell me what's in the store and what's moving and not moving. 

Anway, I have relatively little to complain about right now as the Endboo wave is clogging the pegs and there are US locales that have little or none of that wave.  Once the last 22 shows up, if it even does (historically we get the shaft on the last 1-3 waves of every series of cards produced), then I'll be happy.  Sort of.  Ok, not really, I'll still be bitching.

As for helping Hasbro's bottom line, that's good for me too, because ultimately I still collect these things, albeit much more selectively than a lot of folks on the boards.  BUT....I don't recall a figure having a two year life span (sorry, I was drinking beer and dating girls during the vintage era, I kept my geek under wraps until after I was married) during POTF2.  Yeah, some were recarded from orange to green holo to maybe a couple getting freeze frames, but not too many.  And that covers the time span from 1995 to 1998 anyway.  I can't really think of an orange carded figure that made it beyond green holo though.  So when I'm seeing a commtech (1998/99) Han coming out in 2006, I ain't buying the 3 month lifespan argument.  That's 8, count 'em, 8 friggin' years.  Time to retire it.  'Nuff said.

[poddie]

Releasing $30 tin sets ($40 in Canada) that have at best three kit bashes and one new figure isn't gouging both collectors and kids alike?  I dunno, to me it seems like an effective strategy to prepare people for even higher prices for single figures down the road.  I've seen parents buying kids the tins and they don't really balk at the prices but then they don't have 500 plus figures at home either, so it's not an impact.  And it's not just Hasbro that's done this.  It's irritating when any line releases a figure only in a box set.  Toy Biz is the master of this (or was.

On this point I agree in full... packaging one or two "new" figures along with two old ones is a lame move on their part, and it's hard not to see it as an effort to "trap" people into rebuying stuff.  I certainly didn't bite on these...

As for H&V and GB clogging the pegs, this to me seems like something that should be blamed on the retailers.  I think Hasbro has done their part by giving them a separate SKU... retailers need to order appropriately.

[Dressel Rebel]

So when I'm seeing a commtech (1998/99) Han coming out in 2006, I ain't buying the 3 month lifespan argument.  That's 8, count 'em, 8 friggin' years.  Time to retire it.  'Nuff said.

Whew, we better not get started on the 1977-1983 molds for vehicles that have resurfaced in 2006!

[Oboewan]

So when I'm seeing a commtech (1998/99) Han coming out in 2006, I ain't buying the 3 month lifespan argument.  That's 8, count 'em, 8 friggin' years.  Time to retire it.  'Nuff said.

Whew, we better not get started on the 1977-1983 molds for vehicles that have resurfaced in 2006!

You mean the exact same molds but without even the "ahead of it's time" electronics?

 

[Dan]

I like bashing Hasbro's corporate slant as much as anyone, but I think the topic of this board was sound and we should try to get back to it. If you hit the first page, you can see some of the feelings that lead to a topic like this-
  Frustration with heavy releases of recently released figures
  Multi-packs that have 1 or 2 new items
  Overpriced examples of the same in shiny new boxes
  New product lines that seem to come out of nowhere, and then sit and sit and sit
  corporate mouths saying ships don't sell, then painting them every color of the rainbow and putting them on the shelves (which I like for the most part, except the double-speak)
  The same corporate mouths telling me playsets and environments won't sell, then making packages look like one because it enhances sales (snowspeeder, dagobah x wing, even the GH 10 packs)
  The fact that some of us have been buying huge number of plastic toys from the same line for 10 years plus and there is bound to be some questioning of whether we should continue
  And then there are other great lines of products out there. On some comparisons, Hasbro doesn't compete well. In some cases, it is Hasbro itself making a better alternative (titanium anyone?)

For myself, it is a combination of a number of those items. For one thing, I am not the most creative, and don't have as much freetime as I would like, so making good-looking action figure environments is not something I can do. I dabble a little, but I find myself thinking "I would rather give Hasbro some of my money for  a cool display environment than "blank".  I don't necessarily want playsets (a toy with some display features) I want display environments, with maybe a play feature or two built in.
I also love kubricks, but medicom is not perfect either. And I have been in to the Hasbro/Kenner modern line since the first orange back vader hit those pegs at TRU. Hasbro has covered a lot of ground since then and done a pretty great job. But one can only have so much of anything.

The fact is, any hobby loses people and gains people over time. Star wars collecting, or hasbro collecting in particular, is no different. It is a good thread for people to:
1) share if they feel the same way and
2) why or why not.

There are some figures I really look forward to next year. But it is fair to say that I have lost some of my interest/zeal, and appreciate a board where others who feel the same (or not) can say so.

[Nathan]

I'm not so much losing interest, as just not really caring anymore. I've been cutting way back on both collecting and other areas of SW geeking, both due to practical considerations and a reevaluation of my priorities.

Being laden with college reading lists sucks all the fun out of books and the last thing I want to do during a break from homework is to read Expanded Universe novels. I went from buying and reading almost all the novels as they came out, as well as a decent chunk of the comics, to almost entirely abandoning the novels, and just buying the occasional comic since they're much quicker reads.

I go through one of these "I'm so through with this fandom!" phases every so often, but I really think this one signals a more fundamental shift.

Over the past half-year or so, the following things have happened:

I've switched from living at home and commuting to college, to living in the dorm at a residential college in a relatively small town. This means I went from Twin Cities suburbia, with literally dozens of SW shopping options (Targets, Wallys, TRUs, etc.) along my commute and across several suburbs within my "hunting" radius, to a town where the only place to get SW figures is Target. And the closest other options are 20+ minutes away. And I don't have a car on campus.

Not to mention, living in a dorm vs. living with parents significantly cuts down on the amount of space I can fill up with SW junk collectibles.

Due to the move, I had to quit my cushy part-time retail job (although I have been back there a couple times over breaks), and have been too busy/lazy to find a new one in this backward little town. Naturally this killed the steady influx of disposable income with which I funded my SW purchases and with which I bought gas so I could drive all over Christendom hunting for the things.

I also developed a social life and outside interests, both of which I mostly lacked until 2005 or so. (I'm only half kidding.)

I took up drinking and turned 21 (in that order) . The first one means I found something else interesting to spend my disposable funds on, and the second means I've passed the final milestone into "adulthood". I'm going thru the "what do I want to do when I grow up/what is my place in the world/what will I do when I graduate" phase.

And most recently, one of my closest friends got pregnant and married (in that order). That development is really throwing my **** into perspective.

So, as one might imagine, I've been trying to cut down on extraneous junk in all sectors of my life. Star Wars seems the most logical one to jettison.

Oh, make no mistake: I'm not going to stop being a fan, and I'll still collect, just on a much more selective basis than during the hedonistic days of my youth. And don't worry, I'm not leaving the forums I frequent, either--although now you know the reason I now spend more time in Watto's than any of the Collecting sections.

P.S.: Apologies for the length of the post, but I've been contemplating these matters for a while, and it felt good to get that all out of my system.

[CHEWIE]

I haven't lost interest at all... there's been a few times that I might get a little bored with the line, but seeing all the upcoming 2007 stuff has me licking my chops!

 

[P-Siddy]

I would have said yes to this about the middle of this year, but after seeing next years stuff, that's exciting.

Now I can curse Hasbro for keeping me interested with new cool stuff! I'm sure this year's gonna kill me.