We all knew it would happen shortly after the store launched, and here we go. Â The G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club has officially announced the Figure Subscription Service with full details on pricing and the timeline for signing up for the subscription. Â This news comes via GIJoeClub.com and the G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club Facebook Page.
A VERY SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THEÂ G.I. JOE COLLECTORS’ CLUB. Re: FSS
The launch of the G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club Figure Subscription Service is imminent; we will notify you the link when we make the service active. While we are loading the final details, here are some things to remember:
1. You must be a member of the G.I. Joe Collectors’ Club to take advantage of the Figure Subscription Service.
3. What you do need to be concerned about is the closing date of the subscription service, which ENDS on September 4th at midnight.
4. You can either pay In Full or by Installment. There will be 3 installments. When you subscribe and choose pay by Installment, you will be billed for the first two months’ shipments. Then sometime during the second month, you will be billed for the 3rd and 4th months’ shipments and sometime during the 4th month you will be billed for the final 2 months’ shipments.
5. Your free surprise 13th figure will come with your final shipment during the 6th month.
6. The figures will be shipped in random order. All members receive the same figures each month. The figure pairings will not be preannounced. So if you don’t mind, when you get your shipment each month, PLEASE do not go online and tell what you received. We want each shipment to be a surprise for as many members as possible.
7. The cost is $294 if Paid In Full (plus shipping) or three Installments of $98 (plus shipping). Please note that there is a $3 online processing fee for each billing. We take Visa, Discover or MasterCard. Unfortunately we cannot accept Money Orders or Checks for this offer.
8. If you pick a shipping service that does not include insurance or if you don’t pick the insurance, we do not have any responsibility for replacement of lost or damaged or misdirected orders.
9. If you move or need to change your credit card during the program, you can log into your account and change it there. This will change all of your future FSS billings and shipments. We will also be sending you reminders to check your address and cc before each billing/shipment goes out. We are not responsible for shipments that are lost due to incorrect shipping information on file.
10. We are waiting on the final schedule from China so we don’t know exactly when the first figures will ship. We hope it will be by Christmas. We will announce this as soon as we get the final schedule.
11. Some of the figures (single figures) MAY be available in the Club Store after the subscriber’s figures ship. These will be at a price of $32 per figure. There is no guarantee of availability of any of the figures in the club store. If you want to ensure getting these limited edition figures, you need to subscribe to the service.
F*%& that $22+ shipping per figure and the extra $40+ to be a “member” NO WAY “MATTEL-BRO”
Well, isn’t that clever?
DBAD
I see your point and mostly agree, but this guys are a bussiness and do love Joe. It’s too much for me, but I am not taking it personal .
I see what you did there! Bravo Rev!!
Small runs of figures cost more than larger runs. It should be no surprise that these are more expensive than retail. We’ve known that for a looooooooooooong time. The $40 club membership also gets you a different figure as well as some other things that I’m not sure about. This is a service being offered by the club. It is for club members. This isn’t Hasbro’s venture so don’t blame them for the price.
$22.62 per figure is well within what we were told so I’m okay with it. The shipping I paid for carded Footloose via USPS Priority Mail was $8.65 so I imagine it will be about $10 for 2 figures. I can totally live with that and will be getting 2 subs, 1 MOC 1 to open.
It’s about what I was expecting, and I have to say … too bad I can’t afford to get these. I would love a Big Boa and Covergirl, but not enough to justify the cost of the whole sub for myself. So many mixed emotions regarding this service. On the one hand, I love that it exists for the die-hrad collector. On the other – I can’t be a die-hard collector at these prices, and for so many (about half) completely uninspiring figures. Oh well.
Good luck to them. I hope they succeed. But I would pass on every one of their FSS figures if they were part of Hasbro’s regular releases. I just do not care for the outdated style or the obscure characters.
I’ll be subscribing later this month. Can’t wait for these! Jinx, TNT, Barrel Roll, and especially Cover Girl and Big Boa, will immediately find places in my collection. Tan Grunt as well. Oh and whichever one of Slice/Dice it is, I’m two glasses of wine to the good and can’t remember.
The BAT may well find itself on eBay or up for trade. Sure Fire may as well, depending on how he looks in person.
I still hate that there’s only an option for carded figures. An alternative there would likely have gotten my money. Now… not so much.
and now the vultures strike
http://toynewsi.com/news.php?catid=9&itemid=19027
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As for the prices, Hasbro has slowly increased the price with each new wave (same with Transformers, Star Wars and now Marvel) to a *BS* MSRP of 9.99 for a carded figure.
The club is not doing ANYBODY a favor producing this set, other then themselves. I have said this time and time again, and been BANNED (on facebook by Mattel) for it;
But how can Hasbro, (and Mattel) sell an item that the TOOLING cost have already been recouped for such a high price point WHEN THEIR THE COMPANY SELLING IT? There is no Middle-Man in this sales structure. The middle-man mark-up is eliminated with this sales structure leaving you with the
Producer cost plus the Club mark-up = $$$$$.
The “Club” uses the excuse that they have to LICENSE the GIJoe product, but if thats the case, Why Do the GIJoe Brand Mangers show off the product? You dont see APPLE showing off a licensed Apple product at a trade show, no way cause they dont care because they were paid a fee to use the name. Sure they insure that their name is associated with a quality product but thats the extent of it.
The Botcon and club, JoeCon and the club and Mattel have been taking advantage of nostalgic adults and pushing them in to “generational collectors”, adult collectors who inturn buy the brand for their kids.
Look at it this way, Hasbro charged $16 for Kim Arashikage at the summer cons.
thats an extra $6.01 above the MSRP of a retail figure.
Now the FSS is going to $22.62 a figure so thats $12.63 above the MSRP of a figure at retail
and then they have the B@**S to charge you to an extra $3 to use the credit card merchant services?
Shipping. I love this one. Ok if you go to mail an item like a carded figure via USPS or UPS, YOU “might” pay $8.65 to ship ONE item.
Now if I’m a company and I am shipping 5,000 items all the same size, shape and weight, as a company theres NO WAY I would negotiate to ship 5,000 units for a total cost of $43,250 And if someone in my company negotiated that deal I would have to let them go.
to ship 5,000 items all the same size, shape and weight Via USPS is $0.443 a unit (6,013.125 total)
add $1.00 for the custom printed box and the total shipping per unit is $1.443
*******5000 items shipped at 14oz each using the DNDC Destination Entry
http://dbcalc.usps.com/CalculatorSetPage.aspx*****
Any way you look at it, your getting ****** to be a fan of a brand.
These brands are a DRUG and we are the ADDICTS and I for one am going to ReHab
I can’t speak for Mattel, but the Club IS a licensee of Hasbro. Where did you ever see Hasbro Brand Managers showing off their product? Any time the Club has displayed the FSS figures it was a Club employee doing it at a Club event, separate and apart from the official Hasbro product. It happened at NYCC last year, it happened at JoeCon, and it happened at SDCC.
The Club IS NOT Hasbro. They license the rights, and costs for the figures has way more to do with limited production runs than it does with licensing costs anyway.
Feel free not to listen, though, I’m sure you’re correct, and every single toy manufacturer who says this is somehow lying.
Did he just say, “Ah wahnt ma fre toyz!” ???
Yes, along with a lot of, “I don’t know how stuff works or care to learn.”
show me WHERE I alluded to “I don’t know how stuff works or care to learn.”, after reading YOUR diatribes on your site to the woos of collecting I would think you would understand my breakdown.
Show you where? Okay. Read everything you wrote above and below my comment. That’s where. You don’t understand how manufacturing, licensing, or distribution work, and you’re far too invested in complaining to pay attention to anyone who wastes his/her time explaining it to you.
Hope that helps!
I made no such statement. what i showed is this is pricing structure is disrespectfully and down right greedy to the GIJOE collector. These clubs were supposed to be about the love of a brand and getting cool product, but all of them have turned in to is cash cows bleeding the “fans”.
and to be honest, I have every-f-ing right to say how i feel about the matter, feel free to show me WHERE I alluded to wanting “fre toyz”, or were you just trying to cute? or did my little economic lesson go over your head?
so don’t friggin’ buy them. yes you have the right to say how you feel and now you have. now move the hell on. seriously. you’ve hammered home exactly how you feel about it.
Like I’ve said before- class warfare.All I wanted really was Big Boa and Covergirl and maybe a couple of others.This is highway robbery, pure and simple. To think, at one time Joes had a MSRP of 2.99.The only way I could justify the cost of this is if I had an $80,000 IT job.This hobby started out fun and affordable with the debut of the 25th line, and it’s turned into an expensive nightmare! This was never the case during the vintage era. Hasbro preys upon nostalgic adults.The club owner is an ego maniac-I mean who the hell wanted a SureFire figure? Now if the club instead had offered charcters like Psyche-Out, Pathfinder, Frostbite and other in demand figures with new tooling-then maybe I could justify the cost and pull the trigger. Sorry, I’d rather buy beer, go to metal shows and buy steak, then buy figures I can’t even take out of the package due to their collectability. What a shame. Honestly, within an hour of receiving the figures, they’d just sit there collecting dust. You know what they say boys have toys and men have tools. Time for me to grow up.
I hope they do not make Psyche-Out, Pathfinder or Frostbite. Part of what the Club should be doing is exploring the lesser know areas of the Joe universe.
Lets slow down there. There are still people out there that would love to see those figures. Another FSS or a Con set might be our only chance.
If it makes you feel better, I have no more pull in the Club than any other member. Although I did as for them to produce the Nano BAT a few months before he was announced as being part of the FSS… ; )
I know there are people who want those figures, I am just not one of them. I never cared for the 25th (or 30th) figures that were re-dos of the o-ring figures. I was much more excited over the RoC stuff than I was most of the 25th. Iceberg will be the 3rd 3 3/4 figure in a row I will pass on. I got the sub for Nano BAT, Iron Claw and the 13th figure. I was rebutting, in part, the ‘who the hell wants SureFire’ comment.
I will not be surprised at all if the Club does offer the characters troublemagnet mention though. I think they are trying to find the balance between doing new stuff and doing ‘re-dos.’
At one time Joes had a MSRP of 2.99? You lost me there. How long has that been? Did you crank up your tin lizzie and drive 40 miles to the nearest Piggly Wiggly to buy them? Was Myrna Loy an up and coming starlet? I understand that these aren’t cheap. But there is also no need for anyone to start waving their Hoover flags. I don’t think anyone is going after these because they are such a steal. It is about something else entirely.
I don’t have anywhere near an 80k job either, but I am happy to cough up the cash not just to get these figures but to also build an outlet for figures that we would otherwise not get. FSS figures don’t have to fit into a story as the con set figures do. And they don’t have to meet with the many demands of retail. This is an opportunity to build a place where we can get tons of great looking figures.
This did start cheap with the 25th line. But that was 5 years ago and there have been considerable changes in the world since then….and especially since the MSRP was 2.99. When Joes were 2.99, could you buy two joes and sell one to cover the cost of both? Not really. The world changes. And by that logic, it just got 2.99 cheaper. 🙂
Not buying them doesn’t mean you have to be out of Joe collecting. There are still other Joes to buy, all of which are tools for the imagination.
Well said.
Maybe you could afford steak, beer, AND a hobby if you’d spend your complaining time on something worthwhile and profitable. But hey, don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
HIGHWAY ROBBERY!?
are you for real?
This a good price for what you’re getting. I just might go in on this.
I’ll believe it when you place your order. 😉
quite a shocking change of tune for the Chuckdawg… will he follow through?
The only thing I don’t really like is paying for the figures in August, and MAYBE getting the first two by Christmas, MAYBE. Seems like a long time to wait for something after I have paid for it. Especially since the club has had a year to take care of this. You would’ve thought that they would have had this stuff ready to ship by now. Heck, I’m still waiting on my IG 2-pack to be come from the convention that they supposedly “forgot” to bring.
I run a business, and bottom-line for me is that the club is not a very good business. If I weren’t so passionate about GI Joe then there’s no way I’d still be spending money for them. On one hand I’m appreciative that a GI Joe Collector’s Club even exists, but on the other, it sure is starting to not be worth being a part of. They really should hire a business-person to run the Club, it’s highly inefficient.
My impression is that they are waiting to order until the signup is closed so that (a) they know how many to order and can do it in one batch for the cheapest price and (b) they can use the funds collected for the first payment as a down payment to the manufacturer. I doubt it’s that they’re lazy and just haven’t bothered to order them yet…
Though I agree with your comment about waiting so long before actually receiving product. It’s a bit disturbing. But this is a very specialized model, and I think if we want in we have to be willing to have patience and even take a bit of risk (like if the club went bankrupt or something, though I am certainly not suggesting that is a likely possibility… just one of the potential issues that is always there with a long preorder).
I’m not really trying to say they are lazy or anything and that’s why they don’t have them. I’m just trying to point out that they’ve had a REALLY long time to take care of this because of the delays with their credit card systems. For me the dilemma is that I’ll be paying $300 now and maybe getting them by Christmas. But everything that I have seen from the club over the past 12 months indicates that there will likely be a delay which will increase the amount of time before I receive my first figures.
I just would’ve thought that with the long delay the club would have had the FSS figures in stock and waiting to ship. I mean think about it, this was supposed to launch last winter/spring right? Now they’re telling us that it might be Christmas before we start getting them. I just can’t really think of any other business that I would give $300 to with such a tentative timeline of 4 months later and a track record of dropping the ball over the past 12 months. I want to get the figures, I’m just really nervous about the situation. What if the club experiences problems again…
They’ve long established that the FSS is going to be “build to order” meaning they open subscriptions, they measure orders, and the produce the figures to match the subscription orders. For that very reason they can’t just produce some and leave them in stock, it kind of defeats the whole purpose.
It has absolutely nothing to do with not being efficient, this has been the stated business plan all along.
As for the long delays and dropping the ball, it all just goes back to the credit card issues impacting the online store. That’s been the crux of the entire problem. That problem is apparently resolved, so I would not foresee other delays coming down the pipe.
Do you truly think the club is going to pass up a chance to sell Singles at $32 a pop plus “membership”?
Yes. You don’t see them selling extra Con sets do you? They could well put them up on the site and make more money but that would defeat the purpose of those sets. It’s no different here.
If this was the business plan all along, I don’t feel it was communicated very clearly. I went back through my old issues of the club magazine and didn’t see anything about a 4 month wait, and saw a little more than just issues with the CC system as well. Going back to last September they hadn’t announced the price yet but were experiencing problems the “online subscription code.” The club magazine updates in October and November said they were still working the bugs out and finalizing the code. By January the news was that we were to be in the middle of the order process which ended Jan. 31 and that the first figures would ship in the Spring. February brought the same news and then March we got the news about the hacked CCs. There never was a mention of the full details of how the FSS would work because of the issues that arose.
I really didn’t mean to get into this so far, just wanted to voice my opinion. You may be right that the FSS is/has always been a “build to order” system, I’m just really surprised that the waiting period is so long after the numerous delays, that’s all I’m really trying to say. I guess since they never really announced the finite details of the service originally I was just surprised/disappointed there would be more waiting.
It has been 11 months since the first initial problems with the FSS. If I were running the club I would have arranged for a different plan for the first run of figures and already had them made and ready to ship so that my members wouldn’t have to wait any additional time. If the first figures don’t ship until Christmas then it will be May of 2013 before the last figures arrive to each member. That will be 21 months behind the club’s original schedule – seems pretty inefficient to me.
I think a better idea for the club for the first run would have been to sell it as a set, and then do the full 6 month service on the second FSS run. Why make the members wait any longer than they’ve already waited? Just go ahead and chalk this up as a loss and learning process, and move on to the next. That’s the least you can do for your customers. I’m sure they could have guesstimated the number of figures to make based on club membership + extras and already had them ready. I really can’t envision a scenario where they wouldn’t sell out.
Going back to my comment about the inefficiency of the club, I still feel it could be better managed. Perhaps someone with more formal business training would be able to improve its operations. Maybe I’m thinking too much like a manager though.
I respect your opinion Justin, we just happen to disagree. I want to support the club and be excited about things they do, I’m just frustrated that there is more waiting involved with the FSS that I feel like could’ve been avoided.
I was under the impression that the figures would be more or less made to order too. If there is no mention of that in the news letter, perhaps it was mentioned at a Joe Con.
Which do you think would upset people more? Doing it the way they have so that everyone has a chance to get them or doing it your way and not have enough to fill demand and have to listen to a lot of people complain about how much they wanted them but couldn’t because they sold out too fast?
Exactly… I feel like there are a number of people in this thread who believe if the club had done it the exact way they wanted it almost everyone would have been satisfied. I don’t think that’s the case at all… there are so many people that are hyper-critical of the club and every move they make is unsatisfactory. I really do feel like there are reasons for every choice they have made here… I may wish some of the decisions had gone differently, but I do think they though this through pretty well, and simply took their time implementing it so that they could “do it right” in their own eyes. I certainly don’t have a problem waiting a few more months than having an insane 10 minute preorder where they sell out and then have to be bought for $75 a piece on eBay (and $150 for Big Boa).
I cannot believe the furious rage being directed at this. Really, so sick of people bitching about how everything the club does is wrong somehow. They’ve made some mistakes but they’re not the devil as so many seem to accuse them of.
Reasonable prices considering the limited run and what they have to do to get them produced and carded. Very tempting indeed. I paid $50 for the SDCC figures on Ebay and I often see those going for much higher rates. I expect to see the same happen with these, but in much smaller numbers.
Actually more of a bargain to get them direct, and more fun too.
It’s a bit more than I was hoping for but still under their estimated high of $25 ea.(though not by much). My main complaint is they’ve been fumbling around with this for a year and I don’t know about you guys, but I didn’t save $300 from last year. And I just gave them $400 last month. So I’m not sure I’ll get even the $100 for the first payment. A month to come up with a Benjamin is asking alot. We’ve all got bills. I wish I had a C-Note just laying around every couple paychecks. They should have told us the price as they worked out the details. Why do they hate revealing prices(i.e. Con Exclusives)?
With recent collecting disappointments(terrible distribution of the end of PoC and 30th, an extra $50 for the JoeCon Set, not giving everybody a chance at supplimental figs from Con, another SDCC fiasco, don’t get me started on Retaliation) I’m really not sure I’m going to care if I don’t get the money in time. My collecting is starting to get bitter.
Like most of you guys are saying, only half of this figs are interesting at best. And if you don’t subscribe they’re $32 individually? So, you steal my wallet, give my info to other criminals, then spit in my face as you walk away with my money? Fun.
Ok, that last bit was a little offsides, but it made me feel better.
Wow… so far off base.
First of all, you agree that the pricing is in line with what they told you before. Then you say they took a year to get this off the ground. Then you complain that they didn’t give you more than a month to save the money? Someone needs to re-evaluate their own logic here… sounds to me like you knew pretty much exactly what you needed to save, and you’ve had a year to do it.
All of the other complaints sounds like things you should have expected as well:
The last wave of any line is always terribly distributed. Retailers have the previous waves worth of peg warmers to work through and often don’t have them on shelf long enough to get to the last waver. Count on it and order online. (Noting to do with the club of course.)
Con set prices go up almost every year, don’t they? They never give everyone a chance at the extra con figs… they are exclusive to the con. Though I agree with you that they shouldn’t be, as I said, this should simply be expected. HTS never orders anywhere near enough product from SDCC… it’s pretty clear they don’t really want to sell these online. Again, happens every year.
Also sounds like you are setting yourself up to expect to be able to order the figs individually at $32… that will not end well for you.
Stealing your wallet, giving to criminals, and spitting in your face is just ludicrous.
Anyway… why not just stick to the real reason? They’re damn expensive and you’re not sure you want to buy them because you may not have enough money and you’re not crazy about half the figures. I think we can all understand that, and most of us would completely agree with it and say we are in the same boat. All this other crazy venting is really just burying your point.
Ok, I’ll give you a little off base, but not far. They told us the HIGH end of cost would be $25. Which I thought was very high. Which leaves a lot of room under $20. So maybe I set myself up for failure because I was hoping for more along the $15 range.
And it seemed like they would never get this stuff off the ground. So why would I save $300 for over a year in case this plan of theirs worked? Its not like the cost went up every week they didn’t get it going. They easily could have told us the price months ago. These manufacturing costs have been negotiated long ago.
I know that the Hasbro’s distribution and SDCC actions has nothing to do with the Club. But Collecting Joes is collecting Joes regardless of the source. If my ability to do that gets soured by the actions of those supplying that hobby then my desire to continue to collect will deminish. I was simply saying that its getting harder and harder to be a collector and this is just another brick in the wall. Around here we went from PoC Wave 4 straight to 30th Wave 1. So if they had all these PoC peg warmers they wouldn’t have ordered 30th, right? I mean, they flooded the pegs with the 30th Wave 2, then had to clearance them out to make room for Retaliation stuff. Stores, for the most part, seem to know what they’re doing. But in the central parts of the country we can be 2 months behind. So when you cut off a line before it even gets to all of the country then yeah, I’m going to complain.
Yes, Con prices go up every year. But I did the math earlier this year.
2009=$280
2010=$295 +5%
2011=$305 +3%
2012=$345 +13%
Does that seem like an expected jump to you?
And I should have be more specific about availablity. People AT the Con have been complaining about the ability to get stuff at the Con. If I don’t get some Annihilators then so be it, I wasn’t there and that’s too bad for me. But I know people that went and were extremely upset about how the Con went on the distribution side.
The offsides point? I admitted it was offsides. Sometimes when you’re losing a game you get frustrated and commit a penalty. Not cause you think it’ll help any, but just cause you want to get a blow in. Sounds like you’re telling me that this is the game and I should just play by the rules. And I’m just saying, when the cards are stacked against you, maybe you should try and make the rules fair for everybody. Or maybe I should find a new game.
I didn’t mean for anything I said to be taken so hard. It seems like you got a bit offended by my words and for that I do appologize. I can see that since your comment got some likes and mine didn’t, perhaps I wasn’t voicing the opinions of anyone unspoken. If I could delete the original post I would. It was a long week and that news got on my nerves and I let it out here. In fact I’ll give this post a day or two for you to read and probably go back and delete both of these.
I’m not angry or taking it personal. I just feel like you are being a bit unreasonable with your criticisms of the club.
I seem to remember the wording the club used was that these would be “under $25”. I’m not sure how anyone would guess $15 out of that… I think most of us guessed $25. I could see how someone would hope for $20.
I wouldn’t say a 13% jump was expected, but I also wouldn’t say it was surprising. With the increases we’ve been seeing all over, it quite clear that costs to manufacture these things have been going up quite a bit. Retaliation figures have less paint apps, less articulation, less accessories, and junior intern designed packaging and still cost $3 more than the 30th figures did. Pretty much all of Hasbro’s lines have jumped in price, lost features, or done both lately. So I would suggest that it may be unreasonable to not expect a heftier price increase from an entity making very small quantities.
Couldn’t agree more with you about availability of sets and extras at the con… I don’t understand why they wouldn’t make them available to everyone going at least. As I said before, I personally think they should make all the stuff available to all club members with a preorder system. Why being able to attend a local event should have anything to do with which exclusives you can get when you are a paying member is beyond me… I would think they would want the largest membership and sales they can get. We don’t all want to live, breathe, and take out vacations with GI Joe. Some of us have families we would like to spend time with, and they usually do not share our GI Joe enthusiasm. But that doesn’t make us any less of a fan, and I fail to see why we should be treated as third class citizens with the exclusives. Anyway, got off topic there…
I think one of the big reasons this deal is raising people’s ire is that there are two “must have” figures in this set that lot of people want. It’s kind of poor form that Hasbro is allowing them to have Cover Girl and Big Boa imo… these are pieces that many of us would like to have in a relatively complete collection. But now if we want them, we not only have to pay the high prices for them, but twelve others as well. And that does feel like kind of a rip.
what the hell does the GIJCC FSS have to do with Retaliation or the SDCC exclusives?
I understand why some people are disgruntled about the prices, but they fit into the range we were told ($20-25) and the shipping price seems reasonable to me. If I’m not mistaken, their shipping prices have actually come down. I want about half the figures for sure (Cover Girl, Barrel Roll, Jinx, Topside, Quarrel, and Dice), and am on the fence about 3 more (Big Boa, Iron Klaw, and the Nano-Bat), so for me it’s worth it.
Really looking forward to this. It should be all paid for by the time the Retaliation stuff hits shelves again; if ever.
I think the club is due some criticism for this service and their general handling of this. For the sake of anyone willing to listen I’ll get straight to my point.
The prices are fair, although forcing you to join the club is not. Past that, most of the figures are not of highly impressive quality to me. A lot of the tooling used hasn’t aged well, and while a handful of the figures look great, the lot of them use too much 25th era tooling that just doesn’t compare to newer post-ROC figures and even older o-ring figures. Big Boa, Dice, and Barrel Roll look worth the money, but in no way could I justify Quarrel, TNT or Grunt, and the Sure Fire figure was just in poor taste. I could give a rundown of how I felt about all of the figures, but my point is that the quality is just too unbalanced.
Maybe they can’t help using the old tooling, actually, I imagine they can’t. But I am the would-be buyer and I wouldn’t pay for inferior figures, even if they can’t help it. I know it sounds crappy, but there’s plenty of room for the club to step up their game.
How is ‘forcing’ you to join the Club unfair? The FSS is a service of a semi private Club, they are under no obligation to serve the public, and they can set up their service and sell their product how ever they like.
For all I know, the membership fees could be slightly lowering the prices on what they do offer.
It’s unfair because if I only wanted to do the FSS, I have to pay into another service I may not want. Also, when I say it’s unfair, I mean that it’s a bad deal, not that I’m entitled to a buying plan from a private business.
It’s dumbfounding to me how you twisted such a simple statement into such a knot.
‘Unfair’ and ‘bad deal’ have different meanings. If you mean ‘bad deal’ say ‘bad deal.’ I did not make a knot out of any thing.
Would it have been fine if I had said “unfair deal”? My original comment stated my views plainly and you rushed to misinterpret my point as your own stereotype of a typical club hater.
I misinterpreted nothing, and I only brought up your use of ‘unfair’, which is not the same as ‘bad deal.’
I never took issue with your statements that the quality of the figures is not to your liking, just with your accusation that the Club was being unfair.
If you think the quality of what they are offering is poor, if you think it is a ‘bad deal’ those are your own conclusions and nothing I am really interested in commenting on. I myself do not like many of the figures offered, but that does not mean the Club has been unfair or is committing any misdeed.
How is it a “bad deal” to join the Club when they’ll send you a membership figure you can turn around and resell for more than your cost? Even after selling more through the Club store for $25 each, bagged Footloose figures are still fetching $65-$100 on the secondary market. It’s dumbfounding to me how anyone could twist such an obviously good deal into a “bad deal.”
It’s true you can do that, but this has only been the case for the past two exclusives. A lot of their older exclusives haven’t held much value at all, so you can’t say it will always be that way. Besides, if I have to deal with all that, then to me it’s really not a good deal.
If the figures were better I probably wouldn’t care, but as they are there’s too many strings attached.
I ultimately decided to pass on the subscription. I’m already a member of the club so that isn’t the issue. What it comes down to is the fact that I just don’t like the selection of figures. I also agree with you about the molds. Many of these parts have not aged well. The price was not the deal breaker for me but I can see how it will be for a lot of people. MOTUC probably uses 5 times the plastic with new parts and the price is similar. Every figure in this group reuses previous parts.
I really don’t get the complaining. We’ve known for a looooooong time that they would cost between $20 – $25, so it’s no surprise.
It’s just simple priorities, either they are worth that price to you or they aren’t. Done. Why get all upset?
In all honesty if it’s become an expense thing (as in it’s no longer within your price range) then I assume other things have taken priorities (other hobbies, other toys) which is every persons choice.
But why give the Club crap about it? They offer their product. We buy it or we don’t. Dependent on our response it will be a success or a failure. Don’t like it, don’t buy it. Period.
Sadly I don’t have the money for the FSS & I only want about half of them. I would like it if they made extra FSS figures to sell in the store, instead of having to buy all when you don’t want 1/2 or less.
I’m in a similar pattern of thought. I only want about 1/4 of them, but I bet we both want the same ones the most!
Actually. I’ve been wondering if it would be worthwhile to see if someone is out there who wants to go half and half or some such arrangement. I only want some and looking at the individual feedback each figure got I only really wanted the ones everyone trashed (Clutch, Barrel Roll, etc) and don’t want the ones people were praising (Iron Klaw, Nano Bat, etc)
I’ll probably end up using them as trade fodder. I’d be happier helping someone get the figures the want but couldn’t but we’ll see. The problem with Joe figures is they usually are cooler in hand than in pictures…..well except for Justin’s pictures, those make me want to buy most figures.
Sorry. I meant Grunt. Not Clutch.
I assume there will be some sort of spoiler alert here at GeneralsJoes so that those of us who want to play along with the rule 6 surprise can.
Well, I love them and I am planning on getting FSS, I have been waiting a year for this. the price are what I expected
WOO HOO! I’m in for 2 sets!
I think a lot of these figures will end up on eBay. That’s what I’m considering doing to justify the purchase. I definitely want some of the figures, but not all. Also, here’s a question: should I buy the mailing insurance for the figures? Has the club lost orders in the past? I think adding an extra $21 for insurance is kind of steep, but I want to be sure I get what I order!