So when are my LEGO Kingdoms knights in shining new armor coming to me?  The wait for them continues on…

The month of July is finally here!  I have been waiting patiently for the July 2010 release of LEGO Kingdoms sets for the past few months.  While many fans and collectors have bought their sets as early as last weekend, I have to wait for a few days more because the regular toy shop that I patronize hasn’t received their July LEGO stocks yet.  What a downer! 

And so I continue to wait and with each passing day, I feel myself going ‘crazy’ from over anticipation of getting new toys.  The uncomfortable feeling of wanting those toys so badly gets rather intense when I admire online photos of other fans and collectors showing off their toy conquests for the weekend.  And some of them pull no stops when it comes to their most passionate toy collecting hobby - they buy multiple sets!  I envy their deep pockets and toy harvests, while I still have none of them in my nets…

Sometimes I wonder why I go through this agony of waiting for new toys when I know that soon after acquiring them, they will eventually be stored away after a few days or up to a week on display.  Then I will repeat the vicious cycle all over again when online and hardcopy catalogs of new toy sets are released to entice and excite fans and collectors once more.  When I meet non-toy collectors, I tend to advise them not to get into a collecting hobby, because it’s really a bottomless pit that you can’t get out of anymore, not in your lifetime!   

Happy waiting to everyone for their new toys!

Our local news scene was recently hit by an unexpected and unprecedented island wide breakdown of NETS and credit card network.  This undoubtedly caused great inconvenience to countless customers of that bank involved when people realised that they could not withdraw cash at the ATMs, log on to their online bank accounts, and use their credit cards etc., during those harrowing 7 hours of breakdown.

For me, I was one of those who were affected as I wanted to buy something at a supermarket on that morning.  Fortunately I had enough cash with me then.  That was when I first became aware that such a thing happened that day, before hearing the media report it on tv or radio. 

The upside is that the inconvenience period happened from 3am to around 10am on the same day, whereby many retailers were not opened for business yet.  The repercussions could had been far worse.  Anyway to cut a long story short, the network was restored by noon on that day.  The bank had apologised and would report the findings of their investigations soon.

The above incident led me to think - If I were at a departmental store or at a toy shop where I wanted to buy some toys but I could not use my NETS or credit cards to pay for them, that would have been such a terrible downer for me!  It would especially be so if I had wanted to get those toys for the longest time and that they were on sale or rather hard to come by for me.  I don’t know how else I would react, other than being very sorely disappointed.

How about you?  If you were put in that inconvenient position when you have some very coveted toys to buy, what would your reaction be?  Give up buying the toys, or ask the store to reserve for you till the network is restored or till you come back with the cash etc.,?  Do share your comments here! 

Recently there was an article which I read with interest.  It was about the growing local trends of more and more people renting secure and air-conditioned self storage space for reasonable sums per month, to store their excess possessions that could not fit into their homes.

The original use for such space rental facilities was mainly for people to store their furniture etc., while their homes were being renovated, and while they stayed at smaller and temporary premises elsewhere.  Gradually when people started home based businesses and needed more space to store their goods and equipment, this storage solution worked well with them too. 

Then over the years as hobbies that involve collecting physical items became more widespread, people even rented space to house and store their precious collectible items!  This is also compounded by the lack of land in Singapore to build bigger average homes for all of us. 

It has indeed become a growing trend, though I first heard of this kind of external storage method for collectibles more than 10 years.  Back then a toy collector that I knew was already using a similar concept storage service, but the ‘warehouse’ back then wasn’t as sophisticated as the ones we have today.

Although I don’t use the above kind of self storage service for my toys collection, I do however treat my rental toy lockers at Toy Outpost as a kind of external storage facility for my toys that I don’t mind selling away.  In a way it’s better than keeping them at home where they are not seen and do nothing useful for me.

While the self storage may seem to be the solution for collectors in general, it ultimately does not address the root causes of such phenomena.  And that is, people are basically buying too many things for them to store at home.  Perhaps it’s true that our homes in Singapore are getting smaller, so some people feel that it’s out of their control.  Like it or not, land scarcity in Singapore is here to stay.  We can’t further expand our territories by a lot more.

However, our minds and how we manage our shopaholic emotions are flexible and not as rigid as physical space.  Hence, there is a pressing need for hardcore toy collectors to be focused in their toy collecting hobbies, instead of collecting nearly every fad toyline that comes along every year, collecting every toy in a toyline so as to “complete the sets”.  

We need to be aware of that modern media is throwing all kinds marketing tactics at us everyday, to entice us to part with our hard earned income more readily and buy things that we may and may not really need.  Be especially aware of “addiction” products and services, such as collectible toys and gaming.  “Addiction” businesses thrive on our addiction to what they offer. 

Older generations tend to save up much more than the younger ones do because there were much lesser entertainment and addiction distractions in the old days.  Today many people like to visit shopping malls when they are bored.  There is even a term called “shopping therapy” to relieve stress!

So the next time you decide to make your next purchase of anything, do be more aware of what factors are  influencing you to spend, and to consider very carefully whether you really need to.  We need take charge of our spending habits as early in our lives as possible.  Using self storage may seem like a solution, but if our uncontrolled spending and collecting habits persist, we’ll just end up renting more space to ’solve’ a space constraint problem that isn’t really getting solved.

But we don’t have to totally give up our toys collecting hobby.  Collecting in moderation and culling periodically will help to keep our toys population in check and manageable for us to enjoy the hobby.  I hope that you find this article useful.  Happy toys collecting!

Yup, the post title says it all! 

For toy collectors who build armies of the repeated or similar (usually) soldier toys, do you have a target on how big your toy soldier armies are going to be?  If not, you will just keep pumping in more money to buy the same soldier character toys over and over again. 

In a way, won’t it become like a sort of extreme obsession?  Some collectors have army toys that are more than enough to cover the entire floor of their bedrooms! 

What about you?  Are you an army builder toy collector too?  How do you manage your rapidly expanding army toys, in terms of storage or display space, money and your emotions etc.?  Do feel free to share your thoughts, comments and suggestions here!

Well, this usually happens for toylines that you are really into collecting.  But sometimes so many purchases of these “too fantastic to miss out” goodies all happening at around the same time, you suddenly feel kind of remorseful for spending quite a sum of $$. 

However, you know that if you don’t strike while the iron is hot and secure those toys at the special prices before you, you’ll regret it even more when they are sold out.  So in way, both buying and not buying the toys make you feel bad, but you can’t help it.

Has this kind of “guilty of spending too much on toys” feeling happened to you before?  Feel free to share your toy buying experiences here!

This blog post is a follow up from an earlier one that I posted a few days ago - “Did you ever regret from delayed buying of toys?”

What I mean is that at some stages of your toy collecting hobby, you tell yourself that you want to take a break or stop collecting a toyline altogether.  Then some months or years later, you suddenly feel that you really want those toys (that you had intentionally skipped) after all.

This happened to me for the San Diego Comic Con (SDCC) 2007 Exclusive Super Hero My Little Pony (left).  She was available for sale at a local toy shop for a reasonable price that year but I skipped her, thinking that I didn’t wish to collect so many ponies anymore. Then I regretted my decision in the following year and I had to import her myself for a slightly higher price, and with some hassle.

Another scenario is when you see the toys you want at great abundance in every retail store you go, that you feel no hurry to get them.  You assume that the toys will still be there when you have the time to go back and buy them, or perhaps after you clear some space at home first before buying it.  You even procrastinate for months and even years, or forgot about it.

Then the inevitable happens - the toys you wanted were sold out or no longer available in all the retail stores, except in the resale market for much higher prices.  But you want those toys so badly that you put in last ditch efforts to hunt for them, and hopefully find them in some isolated store at the original retail prices or less.  If not, you’ve got to buy them at resale prices for $x more, but you will get them, at last.

So do you catch up on missed toy purchases too?  Or are you able to really totally forget them and just move on, never to ever turn back and hunt for them at all?  Do feel free to share your comments here!

Following my first blog post on “toy collecting peeves - 1″ yesterday, let’s move on to another one - unkind remarks from the non-collectors or laymen.  The first typical response they tend to give you is that toys are for kids only, and they also wear that kind of expressions on their faces, as if to say that toy collectors are weirdos. 

Hey, it’s my life and I am responsible for making myself happy, not them.  If I spent my lifetime pursuing interests conforming to other people’s standards and if I regret it when it’s time for me to go, will those people be responsible for my regrets?  No they won’t!  They will claim that it was my choice.  So it is, I make my choices now while I still can.  Those people can beat off, and go do what they like and don’t bother to influence me to being like them.  Why should I?

I guess that’s one reason why many toy collectors here feel more at home at the Sunday Toy Market (at China Square Central), or online at forums and blogs with other like-minded people to discuss about this hobby.  For most of us, our immediate circle of friends and people we meet nearly everyday aren’t collectors.  So this hobby can get kinda lonely, if not for the internet that lets you know that you are actually not alone and there are in fact many of us around.  All hail to the internet!  LOL!

How about you?  Did you face the above toy collecting peeves before?  How did you, or would you deal with them?  Please feel free to share them here!

So far I’ve blogged about many technical aspects about toy collecting (e.g. what to collect, how to collect, toy budget, toy storage, etc.).  I decide to blog a series of posts about some toy collecting peeves that I’m sure many collectors have encountered before.  Let’s start with this one: 

Have you ever painstakingly chosen a mint-on-card (MOC) or mint-in-box (MIB) toy at a departmental store with the best packaging, and then brought it to the cashier, only to have the cashier manhandle your precious purchase in front of you?

In Singapore, some of our departmental stores use clear tape to stick a piece of white plastic bar code tab onto the the toy packaging.  When you pay for the toy at the cashier, they will remove it.  It is very disheartening, and sometimes heart wrenching to see the cashier flip over your toy and ’smacking’ it roughly onto the counter table. 

Then as they use the scissors to cut out the tab in a non-chalant manner, you cringe when you see the blade scrap against the box or card packaging.  If you weren’t living in a law abiding nation, you would have felt like reaching over and personally strangling the person for doing those heinous deeds before you!

As a finale, your newly purchased toys get tossed like garbage into a large plastic bag, without effort or common sense to pack them in properly.  The bag ends up looking so bulky to carry like Santa’s sack, when a little re-arranging of the contents will do the trick.  Don’t retail stores ever train their staff do simple packing of customers’ purchases into the shopping bags.  It projects a good image on their part if they do, but no they don’t care. 

The whole experience is likened to having a fishmonger at the wet market slaughter your selected live crabs or live fish, and then toss the slaughtered or dying seafood into a plastic bag for you to bring home.  OMG!

The laymen will tell you to get over it, for those are only toys.  You were likely to open them anyway so what’s the issue.  And then you wonder if you are really going nuts to feel so upset, and perhaps it’s time to get a new hobby and move on with your life. 

Overall, life as a toy collector, like everything else in this world, can have its peeves as well.  How about you?  Have you encountered such incidents of the cashier manhandling your toy and other purchases?  How did you feel and react?  Feel free to share them here!

An observation I’ve made about some toys collectors’ buying patterns is that when there is some sort of toys clearance sale, they will first do the usual of buying all the pieces that they have wanted all along. 

Then the sale items are sold out or they get restocked at much lower rock bottom clearance prices.  Those who had held back at the previous sale now enter the buying frenzy.  These are the patient yet very lucky ones who took the right “gamble” by waiting for further price reductions.  Most importantly, they are able to be at the right places at the right times. 

Among this round of buyers are those who had bought at original retail prices during the hype of the toy fad, and those who already bought at the higher clearance prices at the earlier sale.  Seeing how much cheaper the toys have become tempts them to buy some more of the same toys to keep unopened, or to open up for play and display.  Sometimes it’s to replace faulty or imperfect pieces that they already own.  Maybe there’s this fear that the toys may deteriorate over time, so it’s good to have another piece, or multiple pieces on stand by.

Once a clearance toys buying frenzy starts, it can get out of hand in the minds of some toy collectors.  It’s like some sort of rare opportunity not to be missed, even if you have those toys already.  This feeling is very similar to the emotions felt during the “rapid growth” stage of toy collecting.  Logic thinking flies out the window while emotions rule the head.

The other resulting type of toys buying frenzy happens to the toy collectors who for some reason, are always on the tail ends of the clearance toys hunting parties.  This is one very anxious, stressed and frustrated lot of buyers.  Everywhere they go, the clearance toys they want are all sold out.  Tough luck.  At the end of the clearance sale, they wonder why they acted like that.  I have no clear answer to that except for a sudden unexplanable wave of obsession that swept into their minds then.  Again, emotions win over logic.

Some of them end up buying loads of toylines that they didn’t think of collecting in the first place, but the attractive toys clearance sales gave them the opportunities at the right prices.  These are the lucky ones who scored a bargain.  For others, it is simply “impulse buying” and “herd mentality”.

There is no right or wrong in these emotions.  Many of us go through them at some stages of our lives.  Even if it is not toys, it can be other items that we use in our everyday lives.  All consumer goods go through clearance sales eventually, and our buying frenzy gets activated into bargain hunting modes.  It’s just that for some people, there is “after impulse purchase regret”.  Good luck on clearing those impulse items!  Humans are ruled by emotions much more than logic.  Life’s just like that!