Toy Bender

In case you’re catching up on your G.I. Joe news like I am, there has been a development with the mail-away Doc figure. (Check out Toy News International’s pic here)

Originally, Hasbro was going to require six stickers from the upcoming comic figure packs and $4.95 for shipping and handling. No big deal right? It’s what Hasbro has been doing for Star Was figures the last couple of years. Well, thousands of G.I. Joe fans hit the internets to bitch. While many of them desire Doc, they didn’t want to have to do what Hasbro was asking. Instead, they wanted to use old flag points or battle points that Hasbro wasn’t accepting for this offer.

Yeah, I can see the point that Hasbro has accepted these in the past and that fans might have thousands of these things that they’ve accumulated over the years, but come on. Hasbro is a business. They want you to have an extra incentive to buy their products. Does it really come as a surprise if they want to stop using something like a flag point that people have amassed enormous quantities of since the eighties? Maybe I’m too much in the thrall of big toy, but I’d like to believe that it’s also a matter of toy fans having a huge sense of entitlement. It’s the same thing as the jerks who whine about having to buy all the current Star Wars figures in order to get all of the 30th anniversary coins. Believe it or not toy fans, Hasbro owes you nothing. Sure they want you to buy their products, but they also aren’t a charity. The whole point of the promotion is to entice you to buy something that you might otherwise not purchase in quantity (in this case the comic packs). It’s their product, their rules, and they’re in business to make money. It might not be fair to you and it might not be exactly what you want, but that’s the way that life works.

The bright side of this is that you don’t owe them anything either. If they conduct business in a way that you find unreasonable, then don’t buy their products. In turn they’ll come up with new ways to try to entice you to buy G.I. Joes. Crying about it won’t change anything… except in this case. The news now is that Hasbro is accepting flag and battle points. I really hope that the biggest Hasbro hating G.I. Joe fans will now take note that they listen to their fans, especially when they whine a lot.