Vacation Fozzie

[Luke]

scrub that - i've just seen that they don't ship internationally !

 

[grail]

you could always get them to send it to one of us americans. then we can forward it on. it's gonna mean horrible shipping costs, though

 

[Luke]

Yup - i know - thats probably what i'll have to do. So the figure will probably end up being $17 and also about $7 shipping on top too (and thats like slow 2 month shipping) - i love the figure but it may not be worth it, i might just settle for the regular Bear !

You guys are all very lucky living in the states - although why the heck do Toyfair charge so much for their exclusives when EB were charging a lot less for Exclusive Piggy ? It's a rip-off - do Ken and Co actully get more money for each exclusive unit or is it just Toyfair keeping more profit for themselves ????

 

[kansasteen14]

well EB and toys R us charge same for exclusives so 10 to 1 it's just they are greedy.

 

[Satcapricorn]

17 bucks???why????

 

[Luke]

Yeah i am slightly p*ssed at this one. I view that red Vacation Fozzie and the Swedish Chef as the two best ones produced yet - so the fact that one of the best has gone to the most rip-off sites/magazines is slightly depressing. Although i guess the figure will get a nice write up in Toyfare for this so it'll help publicity wise more than if they gave them a crappy one.

 

[Satcapricorn]

How much is media play selling it for?

 

[grail]

i have a theory as to why Toyfare charges more.

toyfare is not a toySTORE. they are a magazine. as such, they have a wharehouse, or trucks to ship figures back and forth from. so instead, they have to rent storage, trucks, and everything else on a case by case basis. then they have to pay a whole new staff just to send the things out to people. it's not like they make all their money this way, and at the end of the day, i'm guessing they're making about as much as EB or TRU does on the exclusives, but it costs them more to get them.

did that make any sense? or did i butcher it when i wrote it out?

 

[Louis Kazagger]

Hey Luke,

I know that for all of the Toyfare magazine Simpsons exclusives, Forbidden Planet (formerly Scifi warehouse) in the UK used to get an allotment of all of the exclusives. I know this for a fact because that's how I wound up getting my Pin Pal Burns when my remittance coupon was rejected by Toyfare because they'd sold out of Burnsy so quickly. They may be doing the same thing with the Muppet exclusives. It might be worth a call for you to find out. If you're not familiar with the chain, send me an email and I'll tell you what cities they're located in and can provide you with the phone number. Or you an email them at sales@scifiwarehouse.com .

Just to give you an idea of their prices, I got out one of their old catalogs, and they charged 25 pounds sterling for the Boxing Homer exclusive, which I believe was $17.00 U.S on the Toyfare website. But shipping would be much cheaper I'm sure and you wouldn't have to worry about customs duty charges.

Sigh, while flipping through the old catalogs I came across the Igel Muppet plush.

 

[Louis Kazagger]

Toyfare's full of a bunch of hacks who think up homophobic jokes and toilet humor gags all day. And the man who runs the show let his brother pre-scalp the Simpsons exclusives off his website before they were ever released. See that ToyWiz.com ad in their mags, that's him (Toyfare - Wizard = ToyWiz, get it?)

At the same time, Toyfare has the power to make or break a toy line and they know it. Palisades is smart to get in bed with them, as you can be sure that Toyfare will make sure the Muppet line is hot as long as they have a vested interest in it (exclusives). Toyfare doesn't want to get stuck with exclusives, as they had a glut of past failed exclusives in storage.

Toyfare had a habit of putting high after market prices in their price guide for their Simpsons exclusives before they'd even been mailed out, which helped fuel the frenzy for their future exclusives and the line in general. It's a conflict of interests for Toyfare to be sure, but since their name isn't Martha Stewart and we're just talking about a bunch of kiddie toys and not insider stock trading, it's very low on anyone's radar.

The exclusive toys are a cash cow for Toyfare so they could care less about their journalistic integrity. It's all about the money. Don't believe that? Think how many extra magazines they sell to the casual buyers when they have a hot exclusive offered in the mag. With the Simpsons line, they had an offer that if you bought a one year subscription to their mag, they'd guarantee that you'd be able to buy the next exclusive (and they sold many subs since lots of people got burned over the Pin Pal Burns exclusive because they got their coupons returned as sold out).

Then a few months later, they "found" more Pin Pal Burns and wound up bundling them together with all their old exclusive garbage that they couldn't sell from the past four years and selling the bundles on the website. "You want a Burns? Well, you gotta buy this four year old micro machine Dagobah X-Wing that we couldn't give away for $25.00 on top of the Burns to get it." They wound up selling anything and everything under the sun that they'd gotten stuck with (like two year old convention t-shirts) by making people pay for it alongside their exclusive.

They're shysters plain and simple. People became so outraged with the way Toyfare handled the Simpsons exclusives that they formed a petition against granting any future exclusives to Toyfare and submitted it to Playmates. Playmates has taken the Simpsons B-Sharps exclusive that were to be Toyfare's 2002 exclusives away because of the public uproar and is going to distribute the exclusives themselves. Now the Simpsons are cold according to Toyfare and the Muppet Show figs are the next Simpsons. Coincidence? You decide.

Don't believe that Toyfare is making mad cash with their exclusive figures and comics and the increase of mag sales from folks trying to get them? Well, how many other industry magazines are buying the rights to run and slapping their names on industry conventions? I'll bet that you didn't even know that there were two other toy mags in the business and that they've both been around longer than Toyfare, did you?

Okay, okay, my history lesson and my rant are over.