‘Tis the season for giving and we may have just stumbled on one more gift from the Combiner Wars toy line. Spotted at a Walmart in Orangevale, California, TFW2005 member smf2045 has reported finding Combiner Wars Deluxe Groove on store pegs.
The immediate thought is this is a case of someone returning Groove to the store from an online purchase, but smf2045 mentions there were six Groove figures on the pegs.
We’ll treat this as a rumor for now until more sightings come in. Either way, if you need this figure it might be worth taking a trip to local retail stores!
RKillian
Not once you did the math it wouldn't.
Chillyn
Great, now I'm bummed I didn't check walhell while I was out today. $10 shiiiit. It would be hard not being a dick and buying all of them
Chillyn
Ha. More like $16 for a deluxe or $20 at TRU.
Nemesis Scott
Turns out the Target sighting was the Legends Class Groove…
Autovolt 127
Now the plot thickens.
Starfire22
This is a weird situation.
T-Hybrid
Just a heads up, a spotter in MN just saw Groove at a Target in Richfield.
So something is definitely…up?
Link here.
RKillian
eBay also seriously manipulates search results.
They punish you mightily for not offering free shipping. Nobody can take a $7 hit on a $20 item and still make a buck. The Chinese can only price that way because they have free shipping into the US subsidized by US sellers.
They also only show listings to specific regions. I can price 20% below the going rate but not break double digit views because only FL and NJ see those listings. Meanwhile, another seller will plow through a dozen cases at a much higher price.
And scalping, scalping is just weird. You can put a ML Deadpool up for $70 and it'll be gone the next day. Pair him with another figure for $40 altogether and you'll be relisting them for months. It's actually better, in the short _and_ long run, to scalp individuals from Walmart than to try to break even on a case.
GoLion
I found a G2 Menasor and G2 Aerielbot set at my local walmart the other day. They both had that white sticker with orange outline indicating that they had been bought online and returned to the store. That's what happened with these Grooves.
GizmoTron
I'm certain there's tons of loss for many of these scalpers, a lot of these eBay listings are made by people who really are extraordinarily bad at making real money.
MartyFeeb
I like math. You ever get the sense that most eBay re-sellers don't?
Thanks for the reply! I'm certain the majority of scalps are very short term and mostly losses. Think about the time and effort involved, plus competition, and the crazy fees…
All true…
But there are plenty of eBay listings that are higher than that. I get the feeling some of those go international, where overseas folks are generally used to paying higher prices. Otherwise, I have no idea how some of these (general TF) listings even exist. FOR EXAMPLE, the majority of the advertised eBay listings on TFW2005 are crazy high list prices. I don't know how any of those sell at all, but TFW somehow keeps plugging them.
BenjaminXavier
Current eBay value for Groove is $20 with shipping. Absolute cost value for deluxe figures is $12-13. Shipping is at least $4 for a deluxe now which means $20 on eBay is barely breaking even.
That said, this is most likely a case sent to Walmart by mistake, just like the case of Brainstorms that went to Walmart a few months ago.
GizmoTron
Unlikely, since places like eBay would eat what little profit you'd make alive thanks to final value fees.
Nevermore
Comics are standard in the United States, Austalia, New Zealand and Asia. However, the wave 1 Deluxe were released in multilingual Canadian/Latin American packaging without comics in those markets, and of those, only Dragstrip was later re-released including a comic book.
Nobody ever reported finding Skydive, Alpha Bravo or Firefly including a comic book at retail.
Autovolt 127
It's a shame it's probably a one time thing.
It'd be amazing if more sighting were found.
MartyFeeb
Why would anyone return Groove to WALMART? It's worth much more on eBay or the like…
But one case in CA is hardly reason to go out and look. A lot of stuff ends up on CA shelves and barely elsewhere.
On the bright side, it's amazing to see Hasbro make more of these. The distribution (online) was so bad in May, I figured they botched up the "May Mayhem" launch… but then they made a lot more, it seems. Kudos to them.
But yeah, I think people would be more excited over a proper BLAST OFF than this. Soon….
batfan007
The comics were just standard in some territories. Here in OZ for example (and I guess Euro?) I have a big pile of them in the corner that I ignore.
Robogeek28
Well that's interesting.
GizmoTron
He would get back whatever price he paid for them on his receipt if they were ordered from Walmart.com if he returned them or cancelled the order.
It's also possible that he ordered a bunch on Walmart.com and never picked them up and the order was cancelled. You only get something like a week to pick up your dot com orders. Cancelled orders are also usually not able to be sent back to the warehouse because it would cost the individual store more money for the return shipping, so the store that is stuck with them just puts them out on the pegs to sell them off.
Robogeek28
Possibly, but I would think that someone doing that would wait until Deluxes were back up to full price before returning them.