But it's often not that low. Trent is right in that you're often paying the same price to get toys much later. I find there's usually no cost advantage with using PC. Sometimes they may be cheaper than overseas sources, sometimes they're dearer, but when I average them out it works out to be about level overall.
This is not meant as a criticism towards PC - there's nothing wrong with matching your competitor's prices. Sure beats TRU's model of being far above anyone else's prices. :rolleyes: And PC would be a much smaller business than say HLJ or a multinational corporation like Amazon, so to be able to match prices with some of these heavy hitters is still pretty good.
Most of my MPs have been pre-ordered through PC, so I am still giving them the bulk of my business. But occasionally I will order through competitors, and this is often because I was too late to jump on PC's pre-order. e.g. I was initially not planning on pre-ordering MP Beast Convoy, but only recently decided that I wanted one when high quality in hand photos of the toy appeared. PC were already sold out as were HLJ, but Amazon JP still had pre-orders available. Price-wise there's not a huge difference, but Amazon was the only one that still had pre-orders available, so I went with them.
If I can hop onto a PC pre-order for MP36 then that'd be great, but at the same time I'm not going to stress over it if I miss the boat because there are other boats that I can catch. ;) We're actually really spoiled for choice nowadays when it comes to sourcing toys from Japan. In the 90s and early 00s I always got my Japanese imports by trading/dealing with individual fans in Japan, which is not nearly as convenient as purchasing online from an e-store (it's a hassle for the person on the other end who has to physically hunt for the toys in store, package it, post it etc.). So yeah, whenever I see people whinge about all these options that we have now, I can't help but wonder how the hell they survived being a TF collector 15 years ago. (-_-)