Toy Bender

The other day Yo Go Re of OAFE.net (and frequent ToyBender commenter) and I got into a friendly discussion about “price gouging” and “scalping” when it comes to online toy retailers. I have some strong opinions on the matter and so do a lot of other toy collecting types, but mine usually differ from the “let’s grab the pitchforks and torches” mentality that a lot of other collectors have.

Instead of pointlessly discussing why online retailers charge more for toys than say Wal-Mart or Target without any input from an online retailer, I turned to Brian of the online toy shop Brian’s Toys* to get to the bottom of things.

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According to CNN (how often does that phrase appear here?), three people were killed during yesterday’s Black Friday retail events. One death occured at a Wal-Mart where an employee was trampled to death when he was killed trying to unlock the doors at five a.m. This is arguably the more tragic of the stories as the guy was just doing his job and his killed by a bunch of idiots.

The next two deaths occurred at a Toys R Us in Palm Desert, California. Two men were shot dead in a Toys R Us in Palm Desert, California. There’s not a lot of details at the time of this writing, but the shooting may have been brought about by an argument between two groups of shoppers.

Here’s a video report I managed to dig up:

This just goes to show you that it’s better to sit out these kinds of events where tempers can flair and people lose their sense of decency.

There’s a humor website that I enjoy visiting quite a bit called Overtime Comedy that recently posted an item that was both toy related and noteworthy for this site. They do a regular series called Irony Watch where… they talk about things that are ironic. In this post they talked about how Toys R US was (and still pretty much is) advertised as a toy paradise for children. They ran the following YouTube video of a classic Toys R Us commercial:

Their point was that most Toys R Us stores look like warehouses without any personality, which is something I never really thought about. In my child’s eye view of Toys R Us it was a magical place, but in reality it was just long rows of metal shelves filled with junk that my parents would rarely buy me (I don’t blame them, Toys R Us was a lot more expensive than most other stores that sold toys). There wasn’t anything about the place aside from the products that was really interesting or appealing about the store. Am I wrong here? Was your Toys R Us store any different?

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MattyCollector.com opened at 11:00 a.m. PST and quickly crashed while I tried to submit my order. If there’s anything that you’d like to get as far as SDCC exclusive figures go, then good luck to you. You’re going to need it if you want to try to get the likes of King Greyskull and Lobo.