>>11167828>This is why prices are higher: competition.LOL, did you even go to school or were even born before 2010?
Competition drives prices DOWN. The more competitors, the lower the prices, especially since more companies out there would drive prices down because of a whole slew of avalanche affects (not in order: more factories competing against each other by offering lower prices, more retailers who lower prices to get customers going to their store, etc).
OP talks about Toy Biz making cheap toys and TB generally sold their toys for CHEAPER too, because their model wasn't maximizing every penny like Hasbro did. TB wasn't a giant company, so a tactic they did was offer MORE at a cheaper price, in order to get consumers and retailers to buy more Toy Biz products. You can see how Hasbro immediately cut the budget the Marvel figures when they got the Marvel license, especially when Hasbro inherited ML's last couple of waves from Toy Biz. Despite the sculpts and molds already being made, they cut the budget on the paint and even cut the engineering on the figures that still weren't molded yet.
Nevermind Toy Biz was a Hasbro competitor, so Marvel leaving the toy industry meant there was 1 less company vying for your shelf space and limited budget kids/adults had to spend on toys. By the late 00s, a lot of toy companies were struggling & going out of business (SOTA, KidRobot, Palisades, etc).
Nevermind a shit load of stores that sold toys went out of business: KB Toys, TRU, KMart, Suncoast, and dozens of others. So surviving stores like Walmart don't need to keep prices low and it's easier to collude.
>they still have to make up for that loss somehow so they raise the prices on everything.Retarded. The amount of Figmas sold is negligible to what Hasbro sells, since the consumer base is way different & the fact that online collector stores make up an fraction of the fraction of the total sales where Hasbro makes their money from (physical shops like walmart).
