Getting over it!

That Piper will be hanging around Walmart’s for a while once they hit retail. Like the other guy said, patience pays off, people only grab and scalp what’s new. The legends series, they’ll all be found in stores or after a month or 2 you’ll find on eBay from $20-$30. The only ones I’ll pay around $50 for is the chase figures because I can’t bet I’ll find them in stores, yet I’ve found every legend besides Ted Dibiase chase, I paid $55 ish for him online, and that’s only because my local target is 30 min away, that’s a lot of gas money running back and forth looking for it, so I’ll save that time and spend a little more over retail for it. Actually just bought the chase Brutus for $52 also, only saves me time of driving back and forth looking, the rest I’ll wait and find them online, Big John Studd will be going for $15$-20 before to month.

We all know new figs start out around $100 and they’ll drop over time as more hit retail, just have patience on the target/Walmart exclusives. The only ones I’d be worried about are the online exclusives like Slaughter/Hogan.

Mattel may not see it since they make a lot of profit. But I couldn’t tell you the last time I bought something Mattel related directly from the store, maybe legends 7 Valentine? I can’t remember, but mostly now I just wait around and buy from eBay or sellers on FB pages, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one, the running back and forth to target is pointless, Walmart isn’t so bad since I’m close to like 4 of them. But if Mattel would figure out ways to help collectors obtain these figures instead of making it harder, I think most of these lines would last longer than 2 series.

A lot of this just seems like common sense to me:


1)  If they make enough to meet the consumer demand, they'll make more money.

2)  If they frustrate their dedicated fan base with availability, eventually there will be fewer of them and they'll make less money.

3)  If I have to spend $90 to get it on Ebay instead of $20 at retail, I have less money to spend on other WWE Mattel products, so they make less money.

Harley Race was an outlier. An exception, not the rule.

The pandemic has brought out more scalpers. They have scalped toilet paper, gasoline, Pokemon cards. It just never ends.

Finding figures sucks. Exclusives suck even more. It’s just depressing.

Great post. I hope someone at Mattel reads this.

This has been an aggravating week for lots of collectors. I start and stop and start and stop. If I stop again, I’m done. This was as close as I came to quitting forever as the Harley Race debacle. The only reason I returned was COVID-induced boredom/depression.

There are a few Hogan figs that I will get, and Cammo Adam Cole to finish the UE, Iraqi Slaughter, and I think that’s it. I don’t have the time or energy to play internet monitor to hopefully catch a preorder window of five minutes or less. Especially when they can pop up at any time, like Slaughter today. Mattel will be fine without my business, because they are clearly after scalpers and ride-or-die-ers and not meager 20 plus year collectors. That’s there prerogative.

A major part of the problem (at least for those in the United States) is the death of Toys R Us. Since then, WWE figures have had to make due with much more limited shelf space and distribution. The addition of the AEW line has only worsened this. Your local Target or Walmart is likely to only get 1 case of a series and that’s it. If you aren’t in the right place at the right time, oh well. Recently, I checked a local Walmart two times in the same week looking for new stuff. A case AEW series 4 was put out on a day I couldn’t check, so I missed out (probably completely) on getting that set at retail.

With Toys R Us, they had a reason to keep getting more shipments of a series or set, they were all about toys. But with Target or Walmart (or any other similar store) the toy section is just one of many departments. That especially sucks for exclusives.

This in turn creates an additional problem with online sellers. Since TRU died, I have bought a lot of my figures from Amazon because it’s better to get a guaranteed figure I’m looking for than try searching stores. With AEW, I’ve had to buy almost everything from Ringside (who has definitely made out like bandits due to that line’s bad distribution). So I am forced to pay an additional $5-10 per figure on top of the already expensive $20 retail price because the odds are incredibly poor I will find them in stores. (When I started buying wrestling figures they were $8. The greed of every company jacking up their prices to $20 each has priced me out of every other figure line but wrestling.)

This week was really bad for online collecting. I will never buy from Mattel’s site again after my items were taken from my cart while I was forced to wait in the checkout queue they created because their site was unable to handle the traffic. I will pay scalper prices not to deal with that stress again.

It's fairly obvious that the preorder issues with Legends are on Target's end, not Mattel's.