Scalpers Only Hurt Your Pride

He's impossibly fat. His hygiene is deplorable. His shirt stopped providing cover for his plunging belly three sizes ago. His jacket is a patchwork pattern of mustard stains, pizza grease, and dried peanut butter. You can smell him from the Hot Wheels aisle which is always his first stop. Looking at his hands, you wonder if he's more Cheeto dust than man. His van has three less windows than is socially acceptable. While he may not have existed in this exact form, today, he doesn't even exist in any form.

Long before social media made sport of declaring moral superiority over strawman villains, we were complaining about scalper caricatures on message boards and forums. We're still doing it today, but I promise you the reason you can't find that hot figure is not because of some mustache-twirling scalper. The odds are another collector beat you to the punch. How do I know this? Because the hobby is at a relative low point and these high MSRP's provide absolutely no margin. No one with half a brain would invest hours driving around for the low odds of finding maybe one hot figure to sell, only to forfeit the meager profits to Ebay's or Amazon's fees. So where are those who are selling Black Series Darth Revan figures for nearly double the MSRP getting these figures? Chances are, they are getting their product via a "wholesale" account. I put wholesale in quotes because I promise you that most of you wouldn't even be willing to pay the wholesale rate for these figures. Those sellers aren't hurting you because they're not taking figures off your pegs. Furthermore, no one seems to complain when market forces cause those same sellers to take a ten dollar bath on unmasked Kylo Ren figures.

Now there was a time when scalpers roamed the aisles of your local Walmart or Target ripping figures from the pegs, but they weren't the cartoonish sensory insult we've crafted as the focus of our derision. He was just a dude, likely indistinguishable from the average collector. Sure, it stinks when you think you've missed the latest figure by a few hours to someone who has no interest in keeping it. But could scalpers be like spiders, some unpleasant creatures that actually do a lot of good for the ecosystem? They do keep the cash registers ringing at a blistering pace and take inventory pressure off the retailers on whom we rely to feather our collecting nests. This, in turn, means the retailers can frequently replenish stock. Or, is the presence of scalping like having to pay capital gains tax on a shrewd stock move? Unpleasant for sure, but also an indicator of success. Retail scalpers do indicate that the line is very healthy and generating a lot of interest, otherwise it wouldn't be worth their time. All I know is that when scalpers are active, I've never had trouble finding a figure. I might not find them immediately, but I would eventually find them all. When scalpers have no interest in the line it also coincides with difficult collecting stretches.

So I for one do not suffer bum hurt when someone flips a figure on Ebay for a few bucks. It's better than the alternative of scalpers thinking the line is radioactive. Also, I'm not stating that there are no scalpers roaming the stores right now, because there are. They just have very little interest in Star Wars.

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