Toy etiquette in the retail stores

Most toys are packaged in a plastic bubble and pasted on a card (mint-on-card, MOC) or packed in a box (mint-in-box, MIB).  MOC toys are usually hung on racks while boxes are stacked on the shelves in the toy shops or the toys sections of departmental stores. 

When buying toys, it is good to practise some ‘toy etiquette’.  Some people are rather ‘rough’ when searching through every piece of toy hanging on the racks or placed on the shelves.  After they have rummaged through the toys, they leave everything in a mess.  That is most irresponsible.  It is basic courtesy to leave the racks and shelves in the original state as much as possible when you are done.

For MOC toys hanging on shorter racks, I usually look over the top of the rack to ’scan’ all the toys behind the front ones, at the top row.  I then scan the toys from both sides of the rack to check out the toys behind the front ones, along the side rows.  For the toys hanging in the middle of the rack, sometimes the individual MOC pieces can be identified by the looking at the pictures on their cards. 

If all the toys have identical cards, then I would I would push the front ones slightly to the side, one by one all the way to the innermost toy, to view part of the subsequent ones behind.  By just glancing the corner of the plastic bubble where the toy is, I could identify which toy it is without taking out the entire piece to check. 

At times, the hook part on the card is damaged and the toy falls off the rack easily when pushed aside, I would unhook the entire toy and put it nearby to prevent it from tumbling down, while I continue to check the rest behind it. 

For boxed toys, there is usually little room on the shelf to shift the front boxes away.  Hence I would remove the front boxes and stack them on a nearby shelf or place them all on the floor to check the ones behind.  After I am done, I would place all the boxes back on the shelf as neatly as possible.  

The above may sound tedious but after a while, you can do it all pretty quickly without much effort.  After all, practice makes perfect and it leaves the store assistants with better impressions of toy collectors.  I know some store assistants have been annoyed by the fact that certain toy collectors/traders/speculators actually make a worse mess than a kid!  Now that is really embarrassing!