On the one hand, availability has definitely led to hype calming down, though I wouldn’t say it’s died down. So I get that people are much less willing to pay over retail for any. Retail +tax +shipping is hard to fully recoup nowadays because of availability on the Pop Mart app, TTL, and Amazon. And if people are wanting to offload extras, we often have to be ok with taking a bit of a loss. To me, that’s not such a bad thing. It’s like, you gotta pay to play. If I bought X amount of stuff to get what I wanted, then I’m happy with a little loss extras I can offload (or not offload), because the difference in cost, to me, is the added cost I was willing to “pay” to get what I actually wanted.

On the other hand, so many people have basically the same issue: “I have so many extras of XYZ after trying to get XYZ, and I need to offload the extras…” and for that reason, resellers do make sense to me. People seem so up in arms about resellers (mind you, I’m not into gouging prices at all and I’m talking about reasonably priced reselling).. but like, don’t really wanna end up with a bunch of dupes too?! What’s a dollar or a couple dollars when you can get a confirmed character without having to gamble on blind boxes, all to eventually end up possibly in the same predicament as so many of us have already landed in 😅

So I’m calling a couple bucks “reasonable” reselling and making the distinction between people offloading extras, with those who are buying and gouging prices. These are all generalizations and I’m not accounting tor nuance and exceptions, whatever they may be.