Quote Originally Posted by aching878 View Post
Not if you want low low low prices
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. 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. (-_-)