You ever hear those stories about drug dealers who work at school cafeterias, who salt the french fries with cocaine or speed to get kids addicted, then sell them the product later?<\/p>\n
Well, no, probably not, unless you still haven't managed to explain to your grandmother what Snopes is and how not to forward you every fake email story she gets. But imagine that was a real thing.<\/p>\n
And then, imagine those drug dealers were selling something you could only get from them, and they decided to sell it at a pretty high cost but people wanted it, so paying that high cost was the only way you could get the product you wanted.<\/p>\n
After a couple of years of doing that, they said \"we're jacking up the price,\" but didn't comment on a multitude of problems that their customers had with distribution, delivery, quality, etc.<\/p>\n
When the amount of people buying their product dropped (supposedly), suddenly they went to the internet and started begging people to buy, in that the product would no longer be made if they didn't have more and more customers - but still<\/b> not addressing any of the concerns their customers have regarding actually getting the stuff they want.<\/p>\n
Then they threatened the customers saying that if more and more people didn't get on board, they'd have to continue jacking the price of their already overpriced product just so it could still be made.<\/p>\n
Look, we like Mattel's products. We buy Mattel's products. Poe and Shocka love MotU Classics. Monkey Boy and yo are down with DC. Rustin is into both. Everybody spends their money on Mattel stuff. So when we say that this situation is INSANE, know that we're speaking not from hate, or a desire to cut them down, but just from reality.<\/p>\n
If you look around online, you can find all sort of pleas from people asking you to support the subscriptions, so these lines don't die. Even the Four Horsemen have gotten in on the act, explaining their love for the characters and which ones they dream of seeing brought to life. At this rate, the next Mattel update is going to have a Sarah McLachlan song playing over images of toys lying in the mud.<\/p>\n
There's a lot of commentary online about why the subs are failing and what it means. We're not going to repeat it here, because you already know the score: high prices, bad character choices, insufficient communication from Mattel... pick your poison. Maybe it's just time to admit that there isn't as much interest in these characters as we wish there was.<\/p>\n
There are people on forums who are saying that they're considering buying a second subscription, just to get the numbers up. Do they not realize how stupid that is? It's Mattel's bad practices that are dragging things down, and buying doubles only reinforces them. And if there isn't enough interest to get these figures off the ground in the first place, who are you going to sell those duplicates to, anyway?<\/p>\n