Collectible scalpers are the worst.
There are people who literally just go into hobbies to buy a thing and screw someone else out of their money. These ant-licking doorknobs just walk into comic shops, toy stores, video game retailers, etc., and buy up all the copies of a thing just to turn around and sell it for an artificially inflated profit on eBay.
This is awful behavior, and it’s literally what led to the comic book industry crash of 1996, which caused Marvel to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy before the year was over. 50% of the comic stores in the United States went out of business, leaving thousands of people unemployed. And to this day, the comic industry has STILL not recovered all of its lost customers from that time period. It’s 2020 when I’m writing this. Over two decades later.
And, there are scum-kissing mouth breathers who do this in every hobby that is even remotely collectible – They don’t enjoy the thing for its intended purpose, these brain-melting eyeball pluckers treat their collectible like a piece of stock.
We’d get these toad-breathing fungoid speculators into the comic store all the time, and I’ve seen people who want to start being these pus-sucking scab-lickers in plenty of online message boards and social media sites.
Below is one of my responses to a foot-huffing grunge bag who asked about such behavior:
I used to work in a comic store, so I’m going to tell you the same thing I would tell comic collectors that asked about value:
It’s all bullshit made up by greedy people who care more about money than other peoples’ enjoyment of a hobby.
Do not get into comics/toys as a way to make money. Do it because you like collecting stories/artifacts of brightly-colored heroes and villains.
If anybody knew what comics/figures would definitely be the valuable ones, we’d all already be buying those ones, and then they wouldn’t be valuable because we’d all already have them.
The only way to guarantee profit on any single item is to buy one of everything, and even then, your best-case scenario is breaking even. You may get $300 for one item, but how much did you spend on everything else?
Get into this hobby for fun, and don’t feed the scalpers.