Toy Bender

During my cross country trip I couldn’t help stopping at a couple of stores that were near our hotel pit stops. I’ve been trying to remove myself from collecting mainly due to lack of funds, but I couldn’t stop myself from looking occasionally. A few times I got away without a purchase, but I did find myself a Ms. Marvel that just had to come home with me, but back to my main point. One store I thought I’d check out when I hit Illinois was Shopko. In case you’re not familiar, Shopko is a retail store based out of Green Bay that has been a staple of the Midwestern retail scene for years. However, they have never really been able to keep up with the likes of Target or Wal-Mart. They’ve always been a bit higher priced when it comes to toys, so sometimes you can find older figures you might have missed out on if you’re willing to drop a few dollars more. I was hoping to find something old at maybe a dollar or two more than their competition, but instead I found that all of their Wolverine Origins, Star Wars, and G.I. Joe figures were thirteen dollars. Thirteen dollars! That’s at least five dollars more than the highest price I have seen at any other store.

Now Shopko has always been higher priced in the realm of toys, but this is crazy. They aren’t a small chain, a comic book shop, or a grocery store. They position themselves as direct competitors to Wal-Mart and Target and with these kinds of prices, they deserve to fail. I figure that this insanely high pricing strategy is due to the fact that Shopko is one of those stores that tends to have huge “percent off” sales, so when the knock five bucks off the cost of the toy it looks like a great deal to the uneducated, but is really still more expensive than the same figure found at say, Toys R Us.

Now a popular whine by toy collectors when it comes to high priced toys like a twelve dollar G.I. Joe is, “price gouging.” I’m sorry, as much as I don’t like high prices, there’s no such thing when it comes to toys. Unless you’re talking about the staples of life (milk, bread, baby formula) during a natural disaster, a store charging more than you want to pay for a toy is not price gouging. If Shopko wants to be insane and charge twelve bucks for a seven dollar (at most) figure, then they have every right to and you have every right not to buy it. It’s the beauty of capitalism. Now if every store starts charging twelve bucks for these figures that isn’t gouging either. It’s your choice whether or not you want to spend money on something as completely unnecessary as a toy. In my case, I figured that I could pass on a three inch figure for over ten bucks.