Collecting and the falling dollar

[Empirion]

Just wondering how the falling aussie dollar will affect your collecting .What if it keeps dropping past the 80c mark?
For me it will mean if retail isn't carrying it I'm probably not getting it.
What are your thoughts? Interested to hear from veteran collectors who have been through this before.

[Trent]

Meh. I generally don't factor the dollar into my collecting. If I wants, I gets. What has had a MUCH bigger impact is becoming parents and dropping to one wage. Its an interesting experience, financially

[Paulbot]

It used to be 70c and it was still worth it for some things to buy online, but for a lot retail sale prices were better.

[Sinnertwin]

0.80 or thereabouts is where i expect it to be. We've been spoilt these last few years when it has been a lot higher, but tend to forget what is was like in 1998/9/00/01/02 & 03.

There were only two years in the last 24 where the average exchange rates of the AuD has been on parity or above; 2011 when it was 1.033853 & 2012 when it was 1.035937. The average over the aforementioned 24 years has been 0.765751, so when i hear talk of the falling Australian dollar... well, 0.80 is normal to me

The one thing that i've learnt is patience. I don't need that shiny new toy today. actually, i don't need any new toys. Collecting plastic trinkets is a luxury i'm grateful to be able to spend money on and all i'm doing, if i think about it, is taking money and parking it on a shelf in a room and closing the door on it. Be patient and you'll find what you're looking for eventually at the right price. And if you can't, well life goes on

[Zommael]

I actually care more about the exchange rate with the pound, as I have to keep repaying my British loan even though I am in Aus. That can have a severe impact on my spending ability either from the US or at Aussie retail. So I'd actually rather we were stronger against the pound, and if that for some reason means a worse exchange rate with the dollar then so be it.

(At the moment we are still just above parity with GBP... parity is considered to be GBP2 to AUD1, because of course our wonderful British pound is better than your colonial currency... )

[Starscream77]

Meh. I generally don't factor the dollar into my collecting. If I wants, I gets. What has had a MUCH bigger impact is becoming parents and dropping to one wage. Its an interesting experience, financially

Very similar for me, the impact of having two kids very close together and being single wage for over 3 years now (and the wife was on a good wicket before) is more of an effect than the dollar.
In saying that if it crashes too far it may end up concerning

[Empirion]

True this hobby can get expensive with 2 kids as I know lol but I did read once compared to other hobbies with collecting transformers you can "cash in" if you need to getting your money back plus a bit more if lucky not many hobbies you can do that in

[ILikeSoundwave]

As a 'teen' with a part-time job, it's disastrous, especially seeing Masterpiece Magnus & various new Generations stuff coming out.

[GoktimusPrime]

Most toys don't appreciate well in value. It's recommended that you collect toys because you enjoy them rather than seeing them as "investment." As for the original question, hopefully it won't affect me too much, and this will depend on one key factor: how well Hasbro Australia will be importing toys in 2015 and beyond. In 2013-14 Australia miss out on a lot of toys, forcing even die-hard brick-and-mortar store collectors like me to go online to make my purchases (which is something I truly dislike; I'd much rather buy from locals like Kmart, Target, Big W, TRU etc.).

Hasbro AU has said that Combiner Wars will hit Australia prior to Easter, and hopefully other 2015 toys, including RiD2015, will hit Aussie shores too. The main thing that might affect would be Japanese stuff, like Masterpiece. But consider the following:
+ The JPY is also falling.
+ Australian RRPs for MPs is approx. double the cost of pre-ordering the toys from Japan. The AUD would have to drop a LOT against the JPY to make the cost of importing pre-ordered Japanese MPs match or exceed the cost of purchasing these toys locally from Toys R Us! And this seems unlikely.

As Paulbot pointed out, even at US70c, the cost of imports isn't too bad, and as Sinnertwin has pointed out, we have weathered far worse. 2000 was the worst year that I remember, with the AUD dropping down to as low as about 45 US cents. And considering that I was still a student at the time, it made it relatively dearer for me to import toys like:

• Transformers Car Robot; I initially only got the leaders and skipped the rest. I managed to collect the rest later when Hasbro released RiD, and some CR stuff did shelfwarm on some online stores... plus Korean Brave Maximus.

• Transformers Beast Machines Battle For The Spark. I only focused on show characters and skipped other figures like Battle Unicorn and Hammerstrike.

• This was also the year that Takara started reissuing G1 toys. I got reissue Convoy and Hot Rodimus, but skipped Ultra Magnus. I later got the Hasbro reissue (with the lame lengthened missiles and shortened smoke stacks ).

So yeah, I can't imagine things getting as bad for me as 2000 when the AUD was around the forty-something US cent mark and I was still studying.

[griffin]

Keep in mind, as the dollar drops, the retail prices here will go up to offset the cost of Hasbro Australia importing the toys.
So ultimately, even if the dollar drops to make importing more expensive, it will still be cheaper than buying domestically, because domestic prices will be more expensive as well.

During the last dollar plunge (the mid 90s to 2001 when it reached its record low of about US49c), our toy price-points went up. For example, the Deluxe class price point in America stayed solid at US$10 from the mid 90s (Beast Wars) for almost 15 years, but here during that plunge it went up 50% from AU$20 in most stores to AU$30 in most stores... and many stayed at $30 since then (Target, Myer, DJs, TRU, Toyworld). Only Kmart and BigW had a "price war", that went down to about $25 for Deluxes a couple years, but is back on the rise again.

So expect more price-point increases next year, and then staying that way even if the dollar suddenly improves again... making it still worthwhile to import.

(it never really stopped us during the last plunge - if anything, the stronger dollar in the last few years just meant those of us who got back into collecting during the expensive US50-70c Beast Wars to Cybertron era, were more likely to splurge because the weak dollar was "normal" for us for so many years - those who came in later during the US90-110c era are going to feel the pain more though, because that was the "normal" rate to them)