Is the weekend after Thanksgiving and is now officially flea market season in Florida. During the winter season we get a massive influx of "snow birds" (people that live in the northern states that migrate to Florida during the coldest parts of the year) who migrate to our state. This massive migrations mostly brings a lot retired people to our state but it also brings down vendors that can't setup up north due to the harsh cold weather.
This new influx of fresh vendors bring new stuff down to the state and it makes the flea market a very interesting fun place to explore. Along with fresh vendors you also get a large influx of garage sales , church garage sales and estate sales raising money for the holidays. Here you can find all kinds of stuff from grandma’s old wedding dress to her sons old toys from their childhood.On our way towards the flea market, we stopped at one of these church garage sale. They mainly had a lot of donated products from local stores such as medical gauze, old vitamin bottles, and some toys. To our amazement among all the stuff that we found there was an entire tote full of mini blind bags. This had main brands such as My Little Pony, Halo, Marvel Comics just to name a few. When we asked the church member how much she wanted for each bag she said .25 cents each. At that price we grabbed what we wanted and went on our way with 25 blind bags as gifts for our friends. In the end we got a better deal. Because we grabbed so many they sold us $6.25 worth of toys for $5 (around .20 cents a pop).
While is always great to find a great bargain, this really made us think about what we just bought. I will be the first person to tell you that I have a pretty good understanding of why things cost what they do, but is the markup that blows my mind away. Recently I did a video called “Why are toys so expensive” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPsykKyDVQI) where I talk about how companies calculate the cost of these toys you see on the shelves. For a company, mark ups are necessary from whole sale prices in order to make profit to be able to continue business operations such as paying for employee wages and maybe benefits, real estate or location space, utilities, so on and so forth. However the mark ups seem a little excessive at times.
Take the My Little Pony blind bags. These are recently being sold at stores a whopping prices of around $4 per bag. The sets series comes with 21 different characters plus 3 bonus special edition figurines to collect. At the current price of $4 x 24 ponies you are looking at spending a minimum of $96 plus tax. Lets not forget these are blind bags, so you will have some repeats in order for you to get a full set. So I say the average hard core collectors of these pony blind bags will spend around $150 to $200 for a full set buying a blind bag at a time. Normally I would say go to EBay and buy the full set since it might be cheaper, but these things are so popular that is about the same price, plus shipping and in some states plus taxes with online purchases.
For more pictures of these ponies figures check out RNG's flickr at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ragingnerdgasm/sets/72157638264939536/
Lets take a closer look at these little figures. For what I could gather from the pile of ponies we got they have 4 basic molds with minor alterations such as added horn and wings with different paint apps. So automatically, Hasbro is saving a bundle by simply generating 24 variations of ponies out of 4 main different molds. Add to the fact that they are producing these by the millions with machines and is literally costing them around maybe at the most .10 - .20 cents per packet including figure, printed materials and packaging. So when you think about it at $4 a pop retail stores are selling these at a significant markups.To me these blind bags markups are like equivalent markup on popcorn and soda a at a movie theater or restaurant. While these may be popular now, I wonder if these little bind bags with meet the fate of other popular collectibles such as beanie babies leaving people feeling cheated out something they thought will retain their value. I personally can’t see myself buying these little plastic figurines at $4 when they look like the toys I could get a gumball machine as a kid. Just seems like a big waste of money. So bottom line is, if you collect these make sure you really like them because chances are you will never get that money back if you are ever in a jam.
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