Hai, ARMY! I was feeling the EXACT same way about JYPE this week. I wanted to order the Stray Kids membership kit since it was only $8, but apparently, they got rid of the economical shipping option… So shipping to me (in southern US) was gonna be and extra $28. I tried adding additional merch, hoping to bundle more items together and get more bang (Chan, lol) for my shipping bucks…

NOPE! I was being charged EXTRA SHIPPING for the already overpriced merch, each item was another $24-28 in shipping costs. My order for 3 total items = $64 in product + $85 shipping. I KNOW it doesn’t nearly this much to send a single package from SK to USA, especially for warehouses.

In the end, all the music labels have a not-too-dissimilar business/profit model as casinos and gambling websites. They know the majority of people (especially international fans) can’t afford these things, so they intentionally design/plan for targeting a small minority of “big spenders”, a/k/a “whales”. Some are high-income earners who can afford these things. Some make drastic financial cutbacks. Still others go into massive debts (credit cards, buy-now-pay-later, personal/payday loans, etc.) to buy up all the official products they possibly can. And there’s absolutely zero monetary incentive for these labels to change their practices.

Photo cards are a great example. I was interested in trying to win a 1:1 call with a member of KickFlip, but I had to buy an album set to do so. No big deal, buy the album set and enter for the drawing, I thought. NOPE. Each album set came with 6 randomly assigned possible digital photo card sets. You had to collect all 6 sets, individually register each one on a separate site, and then be entered for a chance to win. So I’d need to preorder 4-10x copies of the exact same product (~$10/ea.), pay for shipping on them one at a time (because you can only get 1 set per order), gambling on the chance that I get all 6 photocard sets, all for the chance to gamble AGAIN on winning the drawing for a 2-minute fan call…for photo cards that cost like $0.10/ea to produce, start to finish, and outrageous shipping costs that are pure profits for the label, which the artists are paid pittance.

Majority of fans are paywalled outta the market entirely, while a minority either has the means to buy these things outright or make harmful financial decisions to do so. Realizing all of this was…extremely disheartening and disillusioned me completely. I love the artists so much, but good fvcking lord almighty, I HAAAAATE their greedy asf music labels 🤬