With all the talk of the death of the line going on, as usual, I was just wondering about the GIJCC being the only outlet for new figures at some point down the line and them in comparison to MattyCollector. I checked out the He-Man figs the other day and saw that He-man was $27. That seems like a pretty good deal considering the Club sells Joes for about $30 with a full subscription and $37.50 without. I would have thought a He-Man figure would be more expensive than a Joe. What am I missing here? How can they be cheaper than a Gi Joe figure. They look much larger and they have pretty good articulation and great paint apps. I just don't get it.

If we do get into a situation where the club is the only place to get figures, I would hope the price could be brought down to about $20, otherwise, its gonna get tough on the bank account.

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I'm sure the production runs for the club are smaller, which will up the per figure price, but a fair amount of it is "because they can".

I could have sworn He-Man was $20 or $22 before. I kind of want one, but not really that much.

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With He-Man ( MotU Classics ) the price is reasonable for a single figure, but the new shipping option is not good, they also have a Quarterly shipping option as well.

But HTS.com did have the Only option to get New Joes/Cobras years ago with their DTC ( Direct to Consumer ) failure, i guess it depends on retail stores wanting to carry them or not.

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Also, Matty is part of Mattel so there's no kickback to the parent company that customers have to subsidize.

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Yeah, I'd say if Hasbro needs to start selling direct to consumer via online stores... using HasbroToyShop would probably be the wiser choice.

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If it were to come to that, sign up subscriptions with a real meter and goal would be the way to go. Matty's sign up is all hypothetical and you just have to take their word for it that the amount of people that signed up is true. Hasbro, through hasbrotoyshop, could set goals of so many sign ups and price per is this much, so many more and they are this much, and so on. It could easily work.

As of now, it still looks like they sell ok in stores. As we all know though, most of the issues is lack of Hasbro's promotionals. No cartoons, no commercials, no advertising, no nothing. Yeah there was the movie, but nothing to ride off of it now since it's done ok in theaters. But still without any of that, the figures are still somehow selling in store.

So I figure we are still a little away from seeing them having to go to direct sell only.

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Two very completely different entities with very different business models and objectives.

GIJCC isn't an extension of Hasbro. They have a contract with Hasbro for the fan conventions and exclusive rights to produce product that has to be approved by Hasbro.

MattyCollector is the online store for Mattel.

Hasbro Toy Shop, while owned by Hasbro, might as well be a totally different company. With the exception of the SDCC stuff, they don't get any special product that other online or brick and mortar places get. They don't get the product sooner than other places (for the most part). And their prices are comparable. It isn't set up to be a MattyCollector. not yet anyway.

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When they were doing the DTC figures, I thought that was a great model. It gave us one place to look for new stock, and honestly, I dont see why they dont utilize that format more.

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I wish they would do that, too, but I have a feeling the don't because of the GIJCC.

Really? Why not?

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Yea I'd like to think that Hasbro doesn't give a fig about keeping the 'club' happy. It's more the other way around.

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I think DTC just didn't work well for them and it's left the higher ups not wanting to chance that again. It could probably work done a little bit different but getting the CEOs to green light something sounds like a huge hassle.

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They don't use HTS worth a damn because that would piss off WalMart. The Club's feelings are irrelevant.

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Sorry, I didn't mean because of the Club's feelings or anything like that. I think they just look at how well the Club's typical stuff sells (MOTH, AT, etc.) and decided it wouldn't really be worth it. Granted, cost is a major factor with a lot of the Club's stuff not selling, and if Hasbro brought the exclusives in-house, that should lower cost, but I just don't think Hasbro really wants that sort of hassle for relatively low sales.