Text/Sanming
Last week, Bandai released the latest product in the "Figure-rise Standard (FRS)" product line, a assembled model of the protagonist of the East Sea Emperor in "The Horse Racing Lady".
If you are not a glue, only know the head products such as HG, MG, PG and have not heard of Bandai and a FRS product line, then about the actual quality of FRS East Sea Emperor, there is a very widely circulated comparison chart on the Internet, which should be able to tell you the answer.
Enough color is the heart, and the heart will be paid for
Thanks to the maturity of prototype polishing and multi-color injection molding technology, some people say that the recent progress of Bandai humanoid assembly models has become more and more obvious. However, Bandai's fire is still much worse than that of Shouya, which has been deeply cultivated in the field of machine girls for many years, and FRS, whether it is face shape restoration or the joint details of characters, is not as good as "F.A.G", "Goddess Device" and other veteran players.
This also leads to the "movable + restored" as the selling point of the FRS series in the Bandai assembly product line positioning is somewhat awkward, there are many popular IP plus but it is difficult to carry the banner, many Digimon and Kamen Rider related FRS models will quickly fall below the issue price after listing.
With similar assembly difficulty and number of plates, FRS's pricing of nearly 4,000 yen is more cost-effective than HG in its early 1,000s
Even so, there are many scalpers eyeing this model.
I think this is probably due to the inspirational story of the three fractures and three climbs of the prototype in the reality of the East Sea Emperor that touched many non-horse racing enthusiasts, and she is also a popular protagonist in the animation of "Horse Racing Lady", coupled with the fact that the first shipments of this model are not large, the above objective factors finally laid the foundation for the popularity of this model.
In order to prevent the emperor of the East China Sea from falling into the hands of scalpers, and let the horse racing lady who should have brought hope and happiness to people be tarnished by the original intention, soon some merchants found a way to cope.
A model shop in Osaka, "hobby root", was very fortunate to get a box of FRS Tokai Emperor, and in order to allow customers who really love Ma Niang to get this only box of models, the store manager set a special rule - buyers who want to buy models need to participate in a custom competition held in the store in the "Horse Racing Girl" mobile game, and use the East Sea Emperor to win the first place in the "Arima Memorial".
If the store manager wins the first place, the right to purchase is extended to the second place, and the result of this game is that the store manager's classic East Sea Emperor is inferior to the Immortal Bird Emperor of a contestant, and the box model finally gets its place.
The phenomenon of scalpers frying "glue" is not only happening in Japan, where the toy market is more mature.
Around the Spring Festival this year, thanks to a wave of publicity of the Spring Festival Gala, the thick and cute ice pier in the eyes of many people has become a hot product, and there is a long queue outside the store, not to mention, after the "operation" of the scalper, the price of many plush toys and ornaments has increased several times;
In the middle of this year, a KFC 69 package free toy up to duck, in the "seafood market" was even fried to hundreds of yuan or even thousands of yuan high price.
People even have some nostalgia for the "speculation and sin of the past" that has a certain limitation of the times.
This is not the first time I have written a story of the confrontation between scalpers and merchants, just as the so-called magic is one foot high and one foot high, what level of fierce people are the model shops in Japan?
That is the "Golden Saint Seiya" who has been fighting scalpers and even yellow calves in a free-market economy for decades! The endless routines and anti-routines between merchants and scalpers have been intertwined into many "comedy stories" full of tragic cores, these strange and amazing ideas, and always let people look at the new, and every once in a while can find a lot of fun.
First of all, we need to understand, what is the most important thing to fight scalpers?
In "The Theory of Scalpers", the core idea is to find evidence that the other party is a scalper through clues, and the solution is to determine the necessity of the product for the customer.
For example, there is a very peculiar phenomenon in China, when Bandai opened the Gundam base to Shanghai and launched many Chinese-limited steel pra, it was not only the young people who liked the Gundam, but also many uncles and aunts who bought glue in groups, watching their excited appearance of returning home with a full load, and somewhat traveling through time and space to see their own sense of déjà vu in the future.
Of course, Gundam culture is a minority in China, and these aunts are most likely not the old two-dimensional elements who entered the pit after retirement at the invitation of the little sisters, they may be scalpers, or cheap labor invited by scalpers.
Grab a box of models and send a box of eggs or something like that (laughs)
In Japan, this trick is completely unworkable, I think even if a 60-year-old grandmother who speaks Japanese with a taste of ballast insists that she is Asuka true love, to buy the Bandai metal build EVA II machine in front of her, the clerk may let her recite the "Bible" first.
In Japanese television programs, foreign scalpers, especially Chinese scalpers, are also the first targets of criticism
Proving your "true love powder" attribute has become a very useful method that many stores are using.
If you want to buy a new Pokémon card, you have to say exactly the name of 2 of the following 4 not rare Pokémon, in order to prevent the test questions from being revealed, sometimes the store will also ask the buyer to show their personal card deck to prove their identity, but this practice also has obvious shortcomings - the new people who want to enter the pit are turned away, and the higher threshold is not conducive to the future development of the Pokémon card.
There will also be many merchants who choose to draw purchase qualifications for the sale of goods, which is a very random way to seem more fair, and there is no guarantee that all who want it will be available, at least scalpers cannot rely on cleverness (such as scripts) to grab the goods.
In fact, this mode of trafficking has instead spawned the prosperity of the lower market.
Customers who have needs but are not met will often choose to buy goods from those who are eligible for the lottery at a higher price, and the cost of participating in the qualification lottery does not need to be high, which leads to many ordinary people who are not interested in scalper business can also make some small money by "eating by the sky".
Some stores will ask the buyer's consent to split the model and cut a part of the runner on the board, which can destroy the value of the model in the second-hand market, thereby reducing scalpers, but it also ignores the collection attribute of the model toy, and few buyers agree in practical applications.
There are also stores that mix newly released models with old models at the same counter to increase scalpers' workload, which also increases the time cost of clerks placing goods and real buyers looking for goods.
It now seems that people have come up with a number of practical ways to fight scalpers, but their respective limitations have also led to their short-livedness. In many free, unregulated and out-of-supply markets, with more than 100% or even 300% of profits, the triangular war between scalpers, merchants and customers continues.
"A good news that is not entirely good news" is that the continuity of the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world has far exceeded most people's expectations, and the global economic downturn has finally punctured the bubble of high demand, and the fourth- and fifth-tier markets have begun to cool.
After the release of IPhone 14 this year, many scalpers held the path of previous years to rely on the entry, they thought that this time they could also give fruit powder a "knife", they increased the price of the mobile phone, but finally was harvested by "leeks", in many photos circulating on the Internet, scalpers shrugged their heads at the door of Apple stores, piled in front of them is one after another waiting for low-cost mobile phones, with people's laughter to eat "hell" effect is better.
Knowing that the graphics card market is still hot in the first half of this year, and after Ethereum announced that it will no longer announce the computing power of graphics cards, this once scalper amusement park is now gradually becoming a crematorium, and now buying the original price graphics card is no longer a dream. Of course, the shortage of supply leads to commodity price increases is the basic law of the market, and there are fewer scalpers in the graphics card market, replaced by the general price increase of 40 series graphics cards this year.
Wouldn't anyone really buy a 4080 that is 200 knives more expensive than 3080? No, no, no, no
I had to turn myself in, and in this era when the threshold for scalpers was getting lower and lower, I had also moved my mind.
But I thought that I would soon be able to make a small profit of "machine battle Kaizi", I have been hanging in the seafood market for nearly 2 months but almost no one is interested in the real case of the thousand-value training robot SRX, which can make people feel that the epidemic has brought indelible scars to the economy and life - and even do not need businesses to update and optimize the middle and lower strategies that cure the symptoms and do not cure the cause, and the economic foundation has made the real way to eliminate scalpers begin to emerge gradually.
If you don't buy it, I don't buy it, tomorrow the price will definitely fall by another 200.
I declare this short but great victory to all the calm and so on parties.