There is a profoundly stupid thing happening in the diecast car world right now. People are actively ruining the fun of hunting for and collecting Hot Wheels cars by scooping up all examples of popular castings and charging oodles of money for them. I’ve had enough of empty shelves and not finding the castings I want, so I took a chance and bought a huge case of 72 Hot Wheels. After the initial thrill wore off, I decided it might not be something I do again.
I’m more or less reliving my childhood. For years, I’ve sort of just stopped collecting diecast cars to collect real cars. But now that I’m pumping the brakes on collecting real cars, I’m back to enjoying toy ones. Every time I go grocery shopping, I go straight to the Hot Wheels display to see what castings I can find. I bought a couple of neat dioramas to display some of my finds. I’m even working on my own custom job.
But I’ve also discovered the dark side of this hobby. I’ve been back into the Hot Wheels hobby for several months now, and I’ve noticed that most of the stores I go to are always cleared out of recent castings. My local Walmart has two pegs for Hot Wheels Premium cars, and there has never been a single time when I’ve seen a single car on those pegs.
The rest of the pegs aren’t great, either. Usually, those are filled with fantasy cars that everyone’s ignoring, or older mainline cars that have been sitting forever. I’ve lost count of how many Fiat 500Es I’ve found in the past few months.
Leeches Ruin Everything
What gives? Sadly, in my absence from collecting Hot Wheels, I missed the rise of a new craze. There are a lot of folks out there who are intentionally wiping out a store’s stock of desirable Hot Wheels cars just so they can resell them for several times their value.
I’ll give you an example. On November 14, 2024, Hot Wheels released a limited-edition Elite 64 series Freightliner Cascadia. I paid just $50 for mine from Mattel before they sold out within 40 minutes of launch. If you missed out, you’re basically screwed:
These flippers are aggressive in their strategies. Some people will buddy up with an employee at their local Walmart to know exactly when the next shipment of Hot Wheels cars comes in. That way, they can snag up all of the hot cars before the public even gets the chance to see them. Some flippers are allegedly even the employees of the stores, so it becomes more or less an “inside job.”
Don’t think you’ll have better luck on Mattel’s websites, either. While Mattel will impose purchase limits on rare castings, flippers have easy ways to get around them. Remember the Hot Wheels x MSCHF Not Wheels special casting that basically every car site reported on?
Mattel imposed a two-car purchase limit, yet that didn’t stop flippers from buying dozens at the same time and then trying to resell them for more than four times their original price.
Some people are still trying to sell the Not Wheels for $60 or more, or at least twice the original price.
That’s not even the worst of it. Some flippers get really scummy by buying up nice Hot Wheels Premiums, taking them out of their cards, and then returning the cards to the store with a car of lesser value inside. The people running the stores don’t know that the cars were switched out, so the flipper essentially gets a car for free that they then sell for multiples of what it’s worth. Some flippers will even make a fake of a premium car and try to sell that as an original for way too much money.
The rampant scalping has sucked a lot of the fun out of collecting Hot Wheels, and it’s not even just the rare cars, either. If there’s a popular basic car out there, it will almost certainly get scalped.
These are supposed to be cheap toys for everyone. The whole idea is that you’re supposed to be able to go through a store and come back home with a haul of your favorite cars. But a huge number of collectors can’t do that anymore because flippers have already taken everything and jacked up prices. It’s basically everything that’s bad about the concert ticket reselling industry, but applied to toy cars.
Now, if there’s a specific car you want, just forget about going to a store. You’re likely going to end up on eBay or some other site full of resellers, and you’re going to pay a lot of money for something the flipper paid $1.18 for.
Alternatives To Resellers
Thankfully, I have had some luck by skipping big box stores and going for local grocery stores not known for selling toys. It looks like flippers don’t go to stores like these, which means you’re going to find lots of cool cars just sitting there. Check out a recent haul (above) I got from one of these stores. They were on sale for 72 cents a car, too, which was awesome!
But there’s a catch-22 here. I was really looking for castings from very recent releases, but didn’t really find many, as the store sat on piles of older stock. If you want something from one of the latest Hot Wheels shipments, you’re sort of back to rolling the dice with Walmart and finding out that you lost the game before you even started playing.
This month, I decided to try something different. I’ve been watching Hot Wheels YouTubers lately and have found the concept of just buying a whole case to be interesting. Mattel releases 15 cases of 72 basic Hot Wheels cars a year, and those cases are generally distributed every three weeks. The usual recipients of these cases will be your local supermarkets, where the boxes will be opened up and the 72 cars put on the pegs for sale.
But some distributors have found that there is a market in selling Hot Wheels cases directly to consumers. You can buy sealed Hot Wheels cases from hobby shops or even from national dollar store chains. Cases from these retailers will usually cost just around what the cars inside are worth, about $100 plus shipping and tax.
These cases will contain a bunch of randomized cars and also releases specific to those cases. These cases will often have at least one Treasure Hunt or Super Treasure Hunt (limited-edition versions of otherwise basic castings) that are specific to that case. So, if you’re a hardcore collector or a flipper, you’ll likely end up buying multiple cases.
In my case, I just wanted to get a bunch of recent cars without having to fight flippers over them. So, I did what I thought was crazy and bought a case. I chose Case G, a case that’s been around for over a month. I’ve watched a bunch of unboxing videos, and YouTubers have pulled some sweet vehicles out of G Cases like a fuchsia and green GMC Syclone, a rad Optimus Prime casting, some great American muscle, some classic off-roaders, and a possible Super Treasure Hunt of a Porsche 911 Rallye.
72 Cars In A Box
My case arrived this week, and I was thrilled to tear into it. For a brief moment, I felt like one of those Hot Wheels YouTubers, and I was discovering a fresh box of excitement. I know, I know, they’re just cheap toy cars. But the purported magic of buying a case is that you don’t really know what you’re going to get, so you get surprised as you dig through the 72 cars.
I think I got a decent haul here. Sadly, I didn’t get a single Treasure Hunt or a Super Treasure Hunt, but I decided that about half of the cars were worth adding to my collection.
It’s hard to pick a favorite here because there are so many great cars in this pack. I love the Honda CB750 Café, the BMW 2002, the Chevy Blazer, the Chevy C10, and the Chevy Silverado. I dig the cute DeLorean, the McLaren W1, and the lifted Mazda Miata.
I’ve never seen a single one of these vehicles in the wild except at a local flea market, where someone was trying to sell them for ten times their original price.
So, I’m quite happy about all of these cars! I can’t wait to display them on my bedroom wall.
Lots Of Unwanted Cars
Then I realized that I still had half of a case of cars I didn’t want. This pile of cars consisted of duplicates like two extra Datsun 240Zs and the two extra Shelby GT500s.
I also don’t really care for the fantasy cars. Don’t get me wrong, the artists who designed these cars are brilliant and creative. The fantasy cars are great, too! But I’ve never been into fantasy cars, even when I was a kid.
So, my plan is to sell off half of the case I don’t want. I’ve bundled the fantasy cars together and hope to send those off to a new home. I figure if I price them similar to what you’ll find in a store, maybe someone will take them away.
But I’m also reconsidering that. Maybe the real winning strategy here would be to give the unwanted cars away. There’s a whole summer’s worth of car shows ahead. Maybe I’ll just place the cars on the windshield of my Honda Life and give them away to any interested party. That could be a ton of fun!
I’m also feeling conflicted. Buying the case was fun, but I’m not sure it’s something I’d do again. When I really think about it, I pretty much paid $120 for the 36 cars that I really wanted, which comes out to $3.33 a car. That’s much cheaper than what flippers charge, but still more than they’re worth. I also didn’t get to enjoy the hunt of actually finding these cars. Or, maybe I should just reframe it. I paid $120 for some cool cars I want and for other cars to give away.
But one thing I’m sure about is that scalping has made this hobby so annoying sometimes. So, if you’ve ever wondered why on Earth your local store always has the Hot Wheels cars you don’t want or maybe the store just never has any in stock, there’s your answer. Someone has snatched up all of the coolest cars. Maybe buying a case is the answer, but be expected to pay for it.
Top grapic images: eBay seller; eBay Seller; eBay seller; Mercedes Streeter
My own weird hobby has gotten a LOT cheaper. I restore and collect vintage radios, TVs and other stuff like that from the 1930’s-60’s. Its an old man hobby and as more of them die off, their huge collections gets sold. The market is now flooded with these things and some radios that used to go for $100 or even $1000’s are now at very cheap, or sometimes free.
HA! My father has a bunch he’s collected over the years, along with a lot of tubes, that he wants to start off loading. Of course since he’s had most of them for at least 30 years and gotten exactly zero working that I know of I’m not optimistic about the pace he’s going to go at.
I’ve thought about taking a stab at one of them myself.
Its not hard. Mostly what happens is that the old capacitors fail and once you replace those they generally will work.
And infrequently it’s the tubes that are bad. If not electrolytic capacitors in power supply circuits, then resistors are the next “goes bad” thing.
Some of those old radios are beautiful. I just have a small ’60s Mid Century Magnavox that was being tossed after a neighbor died. Found out it was essentially worthless and wouldn’t have been worth much even if it had been mint with operational internals (it was just the cabinet and kind of beat up). Ended up customizing it, building a whole new backside, new speaker cloth, modern bluetooth stereo, and so on. It was a fun project that I felt free to do anything with as it had no market value and everyone that sees it comments positively on it.
I really love the Art Deco radios, but it wouldn’t really go with anything and I wouldn’t really use it. Cool stuff, though.
Did a few of those back in the 90’s. Simple electronics and beautiful well built boxes with fantastic veneers.
Oh man, this is dangerous information for me to have. I saw a collection of a dozen or so transistor radios on FB Marketplace a few months ago for a really low price; I was sure it was a scam, but more likely someone having to liquidate their parent’s belongings.
I feel like that will start happening with a lot of muscle car and hotrod builds from the 90s when the owners pass them down.
That’s been happening for a while now. Nobody wants those 90’s era old guy builds right now except other old guys. My hope is that you start to see actual hot rodders buying those up and ripping out the 350’s and air ride and whatever other nonsense.
So much billet.
I am into old radios so this intrigues me. Transistor though.
Well… if you ever want to waste lots of time and watch some poorly edited videos of mine here’s all you might ever need to know on how to restore these.
Here is one restoring a 1949 plymouth car radio
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GB7my6tVlz8&t=1159s
If the W1 and GT350 need to be rehomed, I know someone.
It’s me. I’m the someone.
Ah, so you discovered baseball cards.
try collecting Lego Sets – yikes!
I saw the Lego V-22 Osprey the other day at a toy fair. £560. Funnily enough the old Lego in the white boxes doesn’t seem to hold much value at all.
I’ve had my eye on that Lego set before it was “released”. Which never really happened. It was sent out to stores with a release date but Lego decided that it was too “militant” at the last second and asked for retailers to send all of the sets back. So there are only a few real sets out there. I’ve heard most sets are fakes. So without knowing what to look for I’ve given up getting one. I would gladly pay £560 for a verified set.
It’s too expensive to build, and too expensive to just own sitting on a shelf.
How on earth do you fake a Lego set?
For me it’s my holy grail set. It combines my love of legos and working on V-22s for 20 years. I heard Bell helicopter got a bunch of the recalled sets but they were stamped all over the box “Not for retail” or something to that effect. Basically because the cost of faking the set to what they sell for makes it lucrative for the forgings. Basically they buy up real legos and fake the boxes to put the fake sets together. At least that’s what I read awhile ago.
i’m sure you could make your own. The instructions and piece list are probably on BrickLink.
I’m so glad I saved a few sets from the year I worked at LEGO Brand Retail. I’ve got a set that I paid $6 for that sells on eBay for $100+.
Watch, scalpers will start scalping these cases too.
If you think the flippers are bad now, just wait until the Hot Wheels Ferrari stuff comes out.
Half the fun of collecting these cars is the hunt. I’m guilty of it myself, but buying them on ebay or Amazon is kinda cheating, anyway. My best find recently was an Alfa GTV that I had been looking for for some time… not at a grocery store or toy store… but at Advance Auto Parts. Struck up a great conversation with the guy at the counter about our mutual hobby, too. They also had a Fiat 124 I was looking for, but that guy had already snagged it!
Had I decided to buy that part on Amazon rather than at the local store, I would never have found my Alfa!
If someone had been walking by the huge Hot Wheels display at a local Kroger a few years ago they would have heard a man old enough to have grandchildren say “Ooooo!” when I found three red Alfa GTV-6s in the bin. I didn’t even put them in the cart, I held them in my hand like I was 8 while I finished my shopping.
I have the GTV6 in just about every color available. I think I’m missing one or two. I fucking love that car. I have also noticed that I have seen way more middle aged men like me hanging around the hot wheels sections than kids. I think that means something.
I recently found a mid 1960s Jeep Wagoneer, and white, exactly like the one I grew up with. I just happened to walk past it in Walmart, if they had more, I would’ve bought them all, but they only had one.
There are a *ton* of those GTVs in my not to be named regional grocer’s big hot wheels bins, kinda interesting how there is a scarcity of them where you live. I scored a 300zx and a 240z at O’ Reillys a little bit ago- both of which I had been looking for forever.
My apologies, especially to the true Alfisti out there. The car in question was not a GTV or GTV6, which are plentiful. It’s the Giulia Sprint GTA, Spettacolare Edition that I found at my FLAPS.
https://www.amazon.com/Hot-Wheels-Giulai-Culture-Spettacolare/dp/B0CGMSLF1Q/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2YXPNBE0H8I56&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.HiYl8Kg5ChVA92AMro9aD9sNUzZUNsR1DH6Lv8ojHNUpHvbwyqwXxgqG_ydgbkRaeKzfq_1VEPLlkY7NGMu_ggpaHVgHyjdc4tkWAMNdXy1Mf1A1Ir-t52ZelpxG9qusBiqq_3VQSFmPFLubX6H5bGDDa_f9PAOakV81PWfTjALgofj6YFG1kZDGNig3LxxGSnZdyUkIeWHqx5hGzkT2sCEWBcgkid1PmHQg29Cf7w_e_ZhfgoL-FC6dFLaq-gyJherFO7-kbcfGICt5DRem9daN-EnSog6V6mSDLgg7eG8.O1vYEAjizZMegdyShOrnZdNit6z0sQGsI2E79IahDHU&dib_tag=se&keywords=hot+wheels+alfa+romeo&qid=1744813868&sprefix=hot+wheels+alfa%2Caps%2C191&sr=8-2
Ah, the grocery stores do not carry the specialty lines like Car Culture.
Ah, I haven’t seen a single one of those.
My local grocery store had about ten of the Alfas and a couple of the 124s just recently.
Ain’t capitalism grand?
For me, it’s thrift shops that have been ruined. You used to be able to get neat stuff for cheap money, until the flippers came along. Nowadays, they’re picked clean the moment the stuff hits the shelves, or they’ve jacked up the prices close to retail, or the good stuff never hits the shelves and goes directly to an auction website.
Used to pick up nice old guitars and amps to restore in pawn shops. That died out in the early 90’s.
Nah that got ruined when eBay became a thing.
This is one of the infinite examples of how irrational products support irrational profits. The original producer of the product/service has an incentive to grow their market and interest in the product/service to grow their audience. However, if a significant amount of profit is left on the table, a third party will always be willing to grab it.
Collecting anything will have this issue because it is all very irrational. There is no inherent economic force that puts guard rails on the prices. My mother-in-law collected Snow Village houses, and when she passed away, we had to empty her basement of over a hundred of these ceramic houses, for which she had often paid hundreds of dollars over their original price. We sold them in bulk to a junk shop for about $8 a piece on average. Over twenty years of ownership, they had been out of their boxes for maybe an average of 30 days when set up in an unused room so she could show people who visited for Christmas.
Collecting is the obsessive endgame of capitalism more than it is a hobby. Creating dioramas and custom cars is a hobby that can be enjoyed fully with any diecast car without getting involved in the artificial rat race. Collecting is just competitive shopping.
For a while I was considering starting a collection of the filler figures from Star Wars (the characters that only have a name so it could go on a figure) as a sort of anti-collection collection. Then I woke up and realized how much of a waste of space it would be.
On a side note, am I correct in assuming the scalpers are why I can’t find a single F1 Hot Wheels car in any store? I’d like to have a little F1 grid on my desk at work, but we just can’t have nice things…
A bit of a rant but this seems to be the general trend of all hobbies now. As someone who struggles to find a passion hobby I explore all sorts of things and I have dived down a lot of rabbit holes all over the spectrum. It used to be that people had unique hobbies that few others may participate in or even know about and that rarity was part of the enjoyment. With the internet it allowed those people to connect and help build great communities but of course the great hand of capitalism comes in and they start monetizing everything. They start creating cooler, newer, “limited”, expensive stuff for hobbies or as you’re highlighting, start scalping. Then those things keep evolving and then that starts the snowballing and now you can’t have a cheap”er” hobby anymore. While there are still many great hobbies, communities, and members out there at least for me when they get to a certain point it takes a lot of the allure out of them.
I’ve been a hobbyist photographer for ages. Seeing the way things cycle is deeply weird. For a while, when digital SLRs were getting big, I passed on some very affordable medium format film cameras (and ended up buying later when they got expensive again). Old crappy compact digitals are somehow valuable for some reason I don’t understand. I specifically chose my digital SLR platform for legacy lens compatibility because I like finding weird manual lenses at thrift stores and pawn shops for cheap. Late stage capitalism is a hell of a drug.
I think there are two intertwined threads. One is the hobby of photography, and the other is collecting cameras. They can overlap but are driven by different interests—like audiophiles and music lovers. One is focused on the creation, and the other is focused on the objects integral to that creation.
Oh, for sure… I get in years long creative slumps where collecting equipment drives me more than actual photography. But it’s nice to use weird 60s TLRs (and I’ve gotten fantastic results from my thrift store lenses from time to time)
Yeah, there is often a lot of overlap between a creative hobby and the tools involved. A friend is a professional musician and owns around 25 trumpets and 10 keyboards, along with a host of other items. Each has a specific use and personality for him.
It diverges from pure collecting because the desire for an object is based on what it can do for the hobby, not just the object itself.
I have a collection of about 15 electric and acoustic guitars and half as many amps. I know ‘collectors’ who have dozens of each and and constantly flipping and trading. I keep mine to play. Some are quite rare and the ‘collectors’ are always bugging me to sell them a couple of the rarer ones. Nopes.
My car collection is that way. They all feel like children, or perhaps pets.
There are a couple of dozen Rock Auto refrigerator magnets on the side of my fridge. Now I’m wondering if anyone collects them, and if they would have any value on Ebay? Maybe I should give them away to random kids, in order to plant the seed for a future hobby that doesn’t involve video games.
The price of old lenses from the 70s have gone up with the advent of mirrorless digital cameras. There are lots of cheap mount adapters, and the focus-peaking tool on mirrorless cameras makes manually focusing easier.
I think influencers have something to do with it. People want to copy the look of influencers’ videos and pics, so you have a bunch of people trying to buy the same gear. For example, the various editions of Canon PowerShot G7X. I could sell mine now for more than I paid for it.
If you’re looking for a non-car hobby, I recommend Photography, and disc golf. Photography has a large initial cost, and very little continuing cost, it also has an enjoyable and approachable learning curve. Disc golf’s initial cost can be as little $30, and you’ll be good to go. Courses are usually free too.
I have actually spent some reasonable amount of money on photography in the years past. I should dust it off and give it another try but I just never got really passionate about it, or better at it.
I’ve not tried disc golf though.
I have two disc golf courses within walking distance, which is great fun. Especially if you can go on weekdays when there aren’t many other people taking the course.
Hobbies are always too close to expensive rabbit holes. For me, my main hobby (as I imagine most people here on The Autopian) is cars, but more specifically modifying my car for performance. The secondary hobby I have found within this is collecting tools. I justify so much money spent on tools that may only get used once every couple of years, but they do get used, and there is the joy of owning them in itself.
I used to have that collector mentality, especially as a kid/teen. Had some bad experiences and lost a good deal of money. When I got back into collecting vinyl records back in the 90’s, I set a couple grounds rules for myself:
1. Never by anything that I wouldn’t take out of the packaging
2. Never fall for first, limited, etc. pressings. If a cheaper “less” valuable pressing is available, then buy the cheaper one.
3. Never buy anything that was so expensive I would be afraid to play it.
Those rules have served me pretty well…except the rise in popularity of vinyl means I buy a lot less. Late 90’s/early 2000’s, I could walk into a record store with a $100, and come out with 10-20 records. Now it’s like 2-4 records for $100. Yeah inflation, blah blah blah; but there hasn’t been that much inflation.
It’s good to see that at least they’re still cheap. I also never liked the fantasy series stuff, especially the really goofy ones. It looks like they’ve gotten better about scale consistency, but when I was a kid, the close relative size of cars that were very different in real life bothered me and I started collecting 1:87 cars meant for HO scale railroading. Weren’t as cheap, but the detail was much better, they sometimes had working features (the cab on the cabover semi I have tilts forward and the crane does crane stuff), the variety was still good, and the sets for display were varied (I have a parking garage, a Euro-style MB dealership, and something else I forget). My most prized one is a MB C111 I got from an old hobby shop that was closing down and had probably been sitting there for years. Prized is relative, though, as they’ve all been sitting in a box for about 30 years. I was hoping my nephews or someone would be into this stuff to give it to them, but no such luck.
I got hooked on 1/87 cars too when I was a kid. A lot of the books in the floor to ceiling bookshelf in my office are getting covered up by little cars. I picked up about a dozen Alfa Romeo Alfetta sedans and GTV-6s when a distributer was liquidating them a while back and just recently added several Lancia Fulvias, Alfa 75s and some Alfetta GTs. My plan is to build an HO scale Alfa dealer for them out of some Walthers kits.
I always thought I’d do something with them, but that hasn’t happened. I have models from Herpa, Praline, Monogram, and Wiking IIRC.
Discovering Wiking and Herpa cars changed my world, I became less interested in the trains and more focused on cars. I scratch built a Mercedes-Benz dealership and have enough cars to fill out the new car and used car lot from when it was on my old layout.
PCX87 has come out with some really interesting cars lately, they did the Alfetta GTs and Alfa 75s but also made some 164s. I’ve only got one 164 so far, they seem to have sold out quickly. They also made a very nice early 80s Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham that is sitting on top of a Norev Citroen SM and under a PCX87 Alfetta GT.
Just looked some up and they’re a lot more expensive than they were in the early ’90s. Nice selection of models, so I’m glad I stopped collecting stuff!
10x the price but I get to avoid a Walmart?
Sold.
It’s the same curse in my other hobby (besides cars) of model railroading. *Everything* is a “special limited run” today. So if you don’t pre-order and get lucky enough to actually GET a pre-order for a new locomotive or whatnot, you are screwed and at the mercy of the flippers. And prices are insane to start with. When I was a kid you could buy an entirely adequate Athearn locomotive for $20. Now they start at $200 and go way up from there. They are definitely BETTER today in every way, but it’s a whole lot harder to get started in the hobby when a single box car can be $40-50 rather than a shake-the-box kit for $4. And people want $10-15 for those old $4 kits now. Sigh.
The Internet will be the death of us all. The very definition of “blessing and curse” – makes so many things easier, yet so many things harder too.
I miss the old blue box Athern freight cars but the detailing on the newer stuff is pretty amazing.
It really is! But on the other hand, they are so incredibly fragile that as an operator with a VERY small switching layout where cars are getting constantly handled, I think it would be a real problem.
My most recent acquisition is one of the Rapido GE 44T’s – what an absolute jewel of an engine. Runs great, wish the sound was a little better. In B&M paint, perfect for my layout that is a slice of a New England mill town. Wish they had offered MEC, but close enough!
I always go through the Hot Wheels display at my local Fred Meyer when I’m in there (it’s our PNW version of Mall Wart). They also have giant cardboard tubs of Hot Wheels by the registers.
Like you, I’ve never liked the fantasy cars. I’m partial to 80s and 90s “everyday” vehicles, and the odd exotic. I tear mine out of the card immediately, I don’t care about resale. One of these days I want to create a giant pixel mural by arranging my collection by color on a piece of plywood.
I got both the 2002 and Bentley GT3 the other day from my local B&M (a sort of upscale British Dollar Tree). But yeah, buy what you see and don’t play the game. Mattel encrouages this sort of behaviour as well.If they just released Mainlines without any of the other crap that would be a start, but limited releases and collaborations are straight out of the Millenial/Zoomer Pokemon/sneakerhead playbook, and plays straight into the wallets of infantile gown ups.
It took me months to find the Lotus 49. I finally got one off the shelf at Halfords, but by then I had already had to buy three from a reseller at £8 each.
Collectors are ruining everything. My hard earned advice is, buy it when it’s available and stick on the car if you can’t afford it. I’m weeping at the cost of some of the Metal Gear Solid figures I want because I didn’t get them new.
Oh yeah, one collaboration is annoying me right now. Matchbox has a line of cars co-branded with different candies. Nobody is buying these candy cars at one big-box store I shop at. They take up several pegs on the shelf, so there are fewer of the regular Matchbox cars available.
The British car club I belong to asks members to be on the lookout for models of British marques. They donate them to the club and then they are handed out to kids who attend our annual car show and fill in a kid’s choice ballot. Lots of smiles!
On the one hand, some people have to hustle to make a living.On the other, there’s a sucker born every minute of people are paying over the top dollar for a 99 cent toy.On the third hand, this is the nature of the marketplace, the market obviously can bare this pricing, as this is a secondary market loopholes and tricks to acquire product abound.On the fourth hand, how many children are going without the joy of a Hot Wheel?I mean you describe it as a “toy” several times, but do 99% of the kids out there know that the Porsche Baja edition is? Or a BMW 2002? The marketing for the product has obviously shifted to adults. You and other collector’s joy is being stymied by this process, not the kids. I’ll say this, good for Mattel selling all the cars for the same low price, despite the true intended market of adults with disposable income.
Yes and no. Hotwheels does a lot more real cars now and have expanded their premium lines significantly, but they’re still very much kid-focused, IMO. They still produce tons of kid-oriented fantasy models and always have some new playset. Hotwheels has just gotten so big they’re able to cater to both kids and adults quite well.
Yeah, sorry, I should have said that at least some of it is marketed to adults.
A kid will play with a Hot wheel whether it’s a 1 of 1 or a 1 of 1,000,000. As my Matchboxes show, I obviously didn’t care it was a GT40 Mk1, based on its condition.
More just the nature of the massive wealth inequalities we face; one really rich kid can spend a year of my income on this shit without even noticing it leave their bank account. This distorts all marketplaces and seems to really be felt in niche hobbies like these.
This is also true, I’ve never been one to say the market was fair or free. Despite massive propaganda to the contrary. People are also not generally mentally healthy.
I was (briefly) friends with a financially successful couple here in Phoenix. One time while at their house for dinner, he showed me his toy collection. In a storage room were all the toys from his childhood. Not his childhood toys mind you, the toys he always wanted and was now, in his 40s purchasing on that new thing called the internet. Years later on a trip to San Diego (the trip that ended the friendship) our boys were building Lego and he complimented his boy on “always being a good dooby” because he assembled the kit exactly as instructed, and never mixed and matched parts. This man as well as his wife were psychologists..
You could sell the remaining stock to The Autopian and they can be member giveaways in some sort of contest.
I had a reminder on my phone to buy the MSCHF Not Wheels when they came out, but I set it to 2am not 2pm. Whoopsie!
You usually start to have better luck once the cases have been on the market for a while. The flippers have usually gotten what they’ve wanted by that time, and it gets easier to find certain cars.
Grocery stores are definitely the best option, too – I’ve found the green and pink Roxie 911s, and a total of 3 STHs at Kroger. Walmart, Target, etc. are almost always picked clean. And I have seen, with my own eyes, people picking through the Hotwheels one by one, searching them on eBay, and either buying them or hanging them back up. It’s pathetic, and the people who do it at stores don’t even have any idea what they’re doing. There’s a 1/1,000 chance you’ll find an STH or something and maybe make like $50. May as well have just worked a shift at Burger King.
There is a particular Jewel in Chicago that always has tons of Hot Wheels in stock, like hundreds on display at all times. I found some pretty good ones for my kids for Easter, including an Aston Martin DB4GT High-Speed Edition. IYKYK, but happy to share privately with you, Mercedes. Scalpers might be lurking here.
Hey it is pronounced as my dad says “Jewels” (even if you are referring to a single Jewel location) haha
Run to Da Jewels, it’s Cheep Chicken Monday!
Da Bears!
My high school girlfriend’s dad used to like to shop at K-Marts.
I keep a small collection on my desk of fun cars I’ve owned or would like to own someday. I usually go to my local grocery store as well to find the good cars since Target doesn’t seem to care that its employees make sure the rare cars never even make it to the shelves.
I also buy cars to give away to my nephews (2-10yrs old). I usually try to find rare or new castings for them. They are too young to know they are receiving rare cars. But someday maybe they will notice. haha
This type of crap seems to be happening in a lot of different things. I got a new video card recently for my computer but the only way I got it for MSRP is I had my dad stop at a microcenter by him. (Thanks dad) I also watched some videos recently with this same thing happening with trading cards especially Pokemon cards for some reason I still have mine from when I was a kid and never thought they would be worth anything.
It’s so frustrating. Buying a case takes away more than just the value–part of the fun is browsing and picking a couple that you want. Just buying a blind box full of them has its own bit of thrill, but it will never replicate that experience.
While I fully blame the flippers, the toymakers are also in on this. When you make rare castings and do only limited runs of any particular casting, you are encouraging this behavior. These go from fun toy to special collector item, and that means people are going to compete for them and try to profit. But it also means more money for the company, as they know this is clearing stock. They could easily wreck the value of flipping by making more of the hot commodities, but they’d probably sit on stock, since some collectors would likely no longer be excited about cars that end up becoming common.
It sucks. I just want to go buy a tiny version of a car I have owned, wanted, or think is neat. I don’t want to hoard things in hopes of making a profit or just to have something rare.
I am a music nerd. Concert tickets and vinyl releases suffer the same fate. It really bugs me. Exactly one show I’ve been to in the past couple of years strictly enforced a ban on reselling (digital tickets only, non-transferable, you could only resell on the AXS platform, and they capped resell price at face value). I really wish they would do that more often. I spent Saturday in a huge line for Record Store Day to find the three things I wanted were sold out. I’m not looking up what they’re selling for on Discogs.
Yeah, I love a cool multicolored pressing or whatever else, but I am not willing to fight for the one they put on the shelf or spend the money on one of the ones online. And the concert ticket issue feels so easy to solve. Like your example! It doesn’t make it oppressively difficult to sell if something comes up, but it stops scalpers. Super simple, effective, and convenient.
Oh God ugh concert tickets. I wanted to see Ghost again, saw them pre-rona and tickets were all standing room only and were under 100 bucks back then. I checked their ticket prices for their upcoming concert at the Allstate arena outside Chicago and if you want anything that is decent seating it is all 200+ per ticket. Tickets in the pit were 600+ just ridiculous.
The worst part about the whole system is it’s giving money to greasy scalpers ruining fan experiences, where as if you paid those prices as the face (because clearly that’s what the market is willing to bear) but the money actually went to artists and venues, maybe they could afford to you know, add some venues and tours would make enough money that you could see shows you’re interested in by making if financially tenable to run a tour
It may not make people happy because it’s “unaffordable” but it’s unaffordable now for most, so it doesn’t change much from the end user experience
That’s an interesting thought experiment. I do wonder if there’s an upper limit, though. I guess there’s always somebody with more disposable income than me who just wants things more. I do try to make a point of hitting the merch table at every show because touring ain’t profitable, generally.
I’ll be seeing Ghost for the 7th time in August in TX. I have seen them in a number of different types of venues (from bar-clubs to symphony auditoriums to outdoor amphitheatres)… the tickets at Moody Center weren’t too bad this time around (about $85 each, including fees + parking), but location-wise, they’re a little more nosebleed than I usually prefer.
I miss the $20-40 tickets from the 90’s and early ’00’s. *Get off my lawn LOL*
Shame that flippers ruin everything, I’ll always take a minute or two to thumb through the bin at my local grocery store, I can usually find 1 or 2 I like. They are just for me to have in my home office. I now have maybe 30 but getting to the point where cars I like at the grocery store are usually duplicates.
I’ve noticed that too. I don’t really collect them but can’t help but look for certain cars I’ve seen exist. And will buy some for my nephews or throw them at kids around the neighborhood. I still have never seen a cyber truck in the store but you see ads for them crazy people that want $100. I had a hard time for a while finding a Rivian but finally found alot of them. I’ve found the grocery stores are the cheapest for some reason. They are normally $1 or under where Walmart and dollar store are around $1.25.
I think grocery stores use them as loss leaders so parents will buy them to shut the kids up while they are shopping. Certainly used to work for me when I was a kid!
I’m picturing you literally throwing little metal cars at full force at kids, and them crying, parents whisking them away, and it makes me laugh… I may not be a nice person.
Only when they actively screaming. I have a neighbor with way too many kids that they ignore. My daughter often finds them wondering around loose. She give them annoying noise toys from the dollar store before returning them to their yard jail.