Is Your Spending Inversely Proportional to TVC Product Volume?

In these days of pre-order mania, I am sure that I am not alone needing a spreadsheet to keep track of everything that's coming to my mailbox. I was just taking a look at that spreadsheet, and I surprised myself in how much I am purchasing these days. Now, I'm not talking pure dollars. Obviously prices are way up for a wide variety of reasons. I'm talking about the size of my purchases. My gut would tell me that with the volume of today's annual 3.75" output from Hasbro being less than half of what we were used to seeing 10-15 years ago, I would be buying much less. But I seem to have dramatically ramped up my acquisitions.

It's been a very long time since I have had my collection displayed as I would like. When I do so, it's with the intent of recreating scenes from which the figures and toys are sourced. I have always been a modest army builder, but I usually would only buy one - possibly two - of a non-army builder figure. I usually only needed one sample of a character to accomplish this. Also, many of the core characters were re-issued, re-painted, and re-sculpted so many times, that buying one Farmboy Luke was fine, because if you collected them all, like I did, you eventually collected a veritable army of the many iterations of that figure, so were never shorthanded for display purposes.

I find that I am now buying 3 or 4, sometimes more, of such figures. For example, I have 6 Bespin Landos in-hand, and 2 more on order. What do I need 8 Landos for? How many different scenes would I need to set up in my soon-to-not-be-hypothetical Star Wars rooms? Maybe one with the Carbon Freezing Chamber, and another in a general Cloud City display? What am I supposed to do with the other 6? I also have 6 Bib Fortunas on pre-order. One is for next to Jabba's dais in the palace display, and another for The Sail Barge. I guess I could use a 3rd as a stand-in for a younger Bib in a Boonta Eve setup of sorts, but I'm not even sure that's accurate. And he's no good as a fat Bib for some kind of The Mandalorian finale / Book of Boba Fett prelude scene. But however I slice it, I have too many of those figures. Why am I buying them? I am not a carded collector, so I don't need "one to keep carded."

It's probably due to a combination of factors:

I want MORE. I'm definitely starved for more TVC. I guess I'll buy more of what we do get in order to compensate for what I wish we were getting.

Incredible quality. Today's figures are mindblowingly amazing in sculpting, articulation, likeness, and paint apps - and I just like buying them more than in the past, when I often found myself buying sub-par figures just to collect them all.

FOMO. Perhaps it's because I feel a little bit like I'll miss something and fall short. In hindsight, I definitely should have bought doubles of several of Jabba's henchmen, because I didn't buy enough to populate both the palace and the barge.

Short Supply / High Demand. Because of the short supply of today's releases, it creates a limited retail window followed by a quick jump in secondary market value, which makes buying later difficult, so I might as well pick up enough now so as not to worry about paying much more later.

Never-ending needs. With the almost overwhelming load of upcoming series and films, there's always the possibility that an old character may make a surprise appearance in new media, and an extra figure or two for a key scene would be helpful. It's certainly possible, if not probable, that we'll see a Mandalorian version of Jedi Luke in the main line. But just in case that doesn't happen, I'm glad I have a few extra ROTJ Lukes for that .

Speculation.. I have never been in the hobby to make money. I do it strictly for the love of the hobby itself. But knowing the secondary market prices of so many TVC figures makes it hard to not add an extra to the ol' inventory here and there just in case something goes wild. It's not my conscious intent, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that there's at least some feeling that I might pay off my mortgage someday by selling off a few of these figures down the road. A little more noble reasoning, perhaps, would be that I have extras to trade for some figure that I couldn't manage to get at retail price.

I am getting close to having a dream space to set up my collection within the coming months. When all is said and done, I'm going to have boxes and boxes of extra carded TVC figures for which I have no real use. In the meantime, while everything in storage, I'm not yet able to take stock of how much is too much, unless I look at that overly long pre-order spreadsheet. I think I'll just ignore it for now.

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