Chameleon (Animated version)
Kaine ('90s Clone Saga)
Electro (Francine Frye)
Spider-Boy (teased at SDCC)
Spider-Man Unlimited (possibly teased at SDCC)
Agent Venom
Spider-Boy has now been officially revealed, so we'll probably get the rest of that assortment shown off at the end of the year livestream.
https://twitter.com/DanYunIsTrying/status/1861517620186345506
I'd bet a good amount that the promised 60% tariff will go into the same bin that Mexico paying to build our wall went into.
Now Trump is saying he'll impose a 10% tariff on Chinese goods on day one of his new presidency instead of the 60% number he was saying during his campaign. If that holds over the next few weeks I'm guessing Hasbro will be announcing a price increase rather soon.
What I read was an additional 10% increase on top of existing tariffs (that he passed during his first term) for China and new 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Trump said it was punishment for allowing fentanyl across our borders.
Another toy thread I belong to on another site had a couple of different people saying to expect around a 50% increase in cost of toys imported from Asia. I didn't follow how they came to that conclusion. I hope that's all very wrong and that it's nowhere near that bad. I'm just going to chalk it up to sensationalism and them trying to get others worked up, at least for now.
Tariffs only make sense to me if you have manufacturing up and running domestically to replace what you're importing and you're just trying to wean the country off cheaper foreign goods. No matter what happens I can never see manufacturing being what it once was in the United States again. We simply don't have the labor pool to do the work (not to mention what they'd have to be paid here), especially if Trump also follows through with his promise of mass deportations. If that indeed comes to pass, there goes a large percentage of our blue collar work force. The people that I know who own blue collar businesses tell me that they can't find the help that they need now because no one wants to work hard. They hire guys that show up for 1 day and never come back. Again, I don't know how much of that is truth vs exaggeration.
What I read was an additional 10% increase on top of existing tariffs (that he passed during his first term) for China and new 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Trump said it was punishment for allowing fentanyl across our borders.
Another toy thread I belong to on another site had a couple of different people saying to expect around a 50% increase in cost of toys imported from Asia. I didn't follow how they came to that conclusion. I hope that's all very wrong and that it's nowhere near that bad. I'm just going to chalk it up to sensationalism and them trying to get others worked up, at least for now.
Tariffs only make sense to me if you have manufacturing up and running domestically to replace what you're importing and you're just trying to wean the country off cheaper foreign goods. No matter what happens I can never see manufacturing being what it once was in the United States again. We simply don't have the labor pool to do the work (not to mention what they'd have to be paid here), especially if Trump also follows through with his promise of mass deportations. If that indeed comes to pass, there goes a large percentage of our blue collar work force. The people that I know who own blue collar businesses tell me that they can't find the help that they need even today because no one wants to work hard.
It's an additional 10% so long as the fentanyl continues to flow, as it was revealed years ago that China had been providing the cartels with the materials to manufacture the substance. Now, how they'll have proved that the flow has stopped from their end in anyone's guess.
Certain states are more capable of being manufacturing hubs again, as we've seen certain towns around the country built entirely around a military base, a prison, some sort of mine, etc. Years ago many of these towns would have been factory towns. How long it would take to convert back to manufacturing would vary by locale obviously. While in the interim we may feel the pinch it's important to recognize that the sanctions we placed on Russia essentially had the opposite affect of what we intended. We limited their ability to do global commerce and get materials to the extent that we could. Now we've created an adversary that has spent the last decade sourcing and producing products domestically and it's much harder to penalize them financially given their increased self sufficiency. In addition, we've told most other adversarial nations they "can't sit at our table" for one reason or another to the point where we find those we put outside our circle now fraternizing with each other to get around the penalties we've place on them.
Overall, I see the tariffs more as a means to spook other nations to the negotiating table. Mexico's new female president has already said she intends to place her own tariffs on products coming from the U.S. into Mexico. Given Mexico's financial state, this would be a massive hit to the average citizen living there. So it may just be bluster in kind. What would truly hurt them would be targeting the remittances (money sent back) from the U.S. as at one point in the last decade that actually outpaced the Mexican oil industry which had previously been their #1 industry.
TLDR: I see it mostly as a negotiation tactic to amend deals on the current status quo. The Russians have a saying regarding negotiations; "if you want a tree ask for a forest."
I'm not going to freak out just yet, as the U.S. may not implement any of these, or if they do, it may be short lived if the other side capitulates. If I'm wrong, I'll just have to scale back my purchasing. If manufacturing returns domestically, we'll likely see prices come down eventually, but it will be a rough couple of years for some in the interim. Hopefully the products we produce again would be of the fixable variety and not just much of the "trash it and buy a new one" quality we've become accustomed to.
We can debate the larger merits and challenges of onshoring manufacturing, deglobalization, etc, but from a purely toy collector point of view, there is absolutely no outcome where the US is going to manufacture figures in the ways and at the price points we've grown accustomed to collecting them these past several decades. Who's ready to pay $75 for a regular Marvel Legend?
Announcing tariffs like this may indeed be bluster in service of some larger scheme, but inflation expectations are a very real thing. Even a credible threat can and will impact pricing and consumer behavior.
Even a credible threat can and will impact pricing and consumer behavior.
The last time Trump threatened this Hasbro raised prices shortly after he said it from $19.99 to $21.49 which was the exact amount of the proposed 15% tariff. I just assume a 10% hike will be coming if Trump is still talking about the same numbers in late December. That would put Legends at a $27.50 MSRP.
I think it's more than likely just how Hasbro will justify raising prices even further. Snap decision price increase, whether the tariffs actually take place or are implemented and then done away with. "Sorry everyone, this is just the state of toy manufacturing today." Here's your "new normal" prices. They already bilk the consumer where they're able to. I'm just glad I'm largely done with Black Series Star Wars. No more "deluxe" figures that come with a gun and a cup. Why exactly don't Star Wars figures come with extra swappable hands again?
IF Hasbro loses their license these are the characters that need to be done before that for me:
Phoenix Rachel
Feral
Raza and Hepzibah
green Banshee
Outback Psylocke, Colossus and Storm
updated Jim Lee Psylocke on the super articulated body
Shana
If they release these ones and lose the license I would feel my collection is complete. Otherwise...frustration.
Labor is too expensive here for manufacturing to return en masse. Consumers and companies would rather outsource or automate jobs than pay Americans to make stuff. Funny enough, between computer chips and green energy technology, Biden did more to return manufacturing to the U.S. than any president in recent history.
I fail to see how making U.S. consumers pay more for goods will force China to stop exporting fentanyl, but I never claimed to be as smart as Donald Trump.
Labor is too expensive here for manufacturing to return en masse. Consumers and companies would rather outsource or automate jobs than pay Americans to make stuff. Funny enough, between computer chips and green energy technology, Biden did more to return manufacturing to the U.S. than any president in recent history.
I fail to see how making U.S. consumers pay more for goods will force China to stop exporting fentanyl, but I never claimed to be as smart as Donald Trump.
Yeah, I've yet to hear that the incoming administration has big plans to subsidize or otherwise incentivize the return of manufacturing to the U.S. I suppose the usual corporate tax cuts might be part of that, but there's a lot of conflicting and concerning talk about whether or not the CHIPS Act will be repealed. That's something that came up in Trump's campaign rhetoric that even his party seems to be walking back or pushing back against; as one of the unambiguous bipartisan successes of the past four years, I'd imagine an attempt to repeal or weaken it will probably be a fight at the very least. My district's outgoing Republican Rep may have lost his seat for supporting a repeal when it's been about the only good thing to happen to Central/Upstate NY in years.
But that's a pretty specialized thing, chip manufacturing being such skilled labor and its output having so many potential governmental buyers. That kind of manufacturing is somehwat resistant to consumer behavior when you can just make chips directly for the DoD or whoever. When you're talking about bringing manufacturing of consumer goods back, it seems like it would be tough to find markets for those goods, either here or abroad. Even with widespread wage stagnation, the labor's still going to make the goods more expensive than what our consumers can or will afford. Action figures aren't magically going to be cheaper if Marvel Legends are being made in your town, unless you personally steal from the factory and call it a doorbuster deal. There's a pretty relevant thread about this here.
Tariffs only make sense to me if you have manufacturing up and running domestically to replace what you're importing and you're just trying to wean the country off cheaper foreign goods.
And that weaning feels like an impossible task. I think we've been overrun with cheap goods for so long that our consumers would have trouble discerning a well-made product from a cheap one. Even a lot of higher-end brands are releasing shoddier or less complicated stuff now to keep up with the market. We come here to talk about a market segment we love, we have a discerning eye and care about condition, we know this stuff, and still probably 15-20% of the posts here are about quality issues in things we've bought.
One of the things I find so frustrating about the tariffs is that the talk always focuses only on the state of our manufacturing and misses that we do major agricultural exporting, much of it to China. The last time the tariffs happened, they didn't help the industry we don't have, they hurt the one we do! Just unhinged conceptually. Tariffs as the weapon in a drug war against the countries who make all our goods. It reads like the opening crawl to a Star Wars prequel.
I think it's more than likely just how Hasbro will justify raising prices even further. Snap decision price increase, whether the tariffs actually take place or are implemented and then done away with.
As I noted a few pages back when Trump threatened a 15% tariff in 2019 for about 4-5 months Hasbro raised prices by the exact amount of the tariff, but then when Trump ended up not putting it in they also lowered prices back. They have to directly pay that money to the US government, so I'm not sure why you'd blame them for an increase that affects thousands of manufacturers.
A year or so later after 6+ months of Covid inflation they raised prices again from $19.99 to $22.99. That $21.49 price point only affected items that went up for sale in mid-to-late 2019. I remember the Black Widow wave with the Crimson Dynamo BAF was $21.49, but beyond that not many figures were ever at that price point.
Same reason SW in general has a dearth of accessories, there's almost no reuse of sculpts except for Imperials.
I think you mean a "Darth" of accessories! 🤣
I'll see myself out.....
Labor is too expensive here for manufacturing to return en masse. Consumers and companies would rather outsource or automate jobs than pay Americans to make stuff. Funny enough, between computer chips and green energy technology, Biden did more to return manufacturing to the U.S. than any president in recent history.
You could tariff everything to the point where everything costs as much to make overseas as it does here. I'm sure some short-sighted politician will eventually try that like Trump proposed during his campaign if we're indeed headed towards something like Mike Judge's idea of an "idiocracy" because the idea of bringing crappy jobs back to America sounds good if you don't think through how bad those jobs are or you don't know who ends up paying tariffs. But long-term that's a HUGE competitive disadvantage. Everything costs more, and you can't do as much. It would erode America's strength to a dramatic degree that would eventually lead other nations who are willing to use cheap Third World labor to catch up to America's competitive advantage. So I'm certainly not suggesting that we do it. We're far more competitive using cheaper labor in foreign nations to our own advantage--but we COULD bring manufacturing back here. But nobody would buy those goods besides us because they'd be among the most expensive goods in the world that almost every other country could easily undercut in cost.
I fail to see how making U.S. consumers pay more for goods will force China to stop exporting fentanyl, but I never claimed to be as smart as Donald Trump.
I never assume anything he does or says is because he actually thinks it's a good idea. He mostly acts and speaks in ways his base will THINK is a good idea, so most things he does are to gain political capital that he can cash in later. Very few people really know what he actually believes himself these days beyond the few bits we get from people he's close to. If you want to know what he actually believes you'd have to go back to his public comments from 40+ years ago before he had political aspirations that were first widely revealed when he was going to run as a Reform Party candidate in 2000:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential_campaign
But even in the 1980s and 1990s much of what Trump used to say publicly was what he thought make for good PR so I can't really tell when he was fully honest about his own thinking in public--if ever. Even if you can pull some of his actual beliefs from early public comments he's almost certainly changed his real ideas over those decades so who knows what he actually believes now.
Now that he's a lame duck I wonder if he'll be more open and honest about his real beliefs over the next four years, or more likely after that. I doubt it, but it's possible.
Now that he's a lame duck I wonder if he'll be more open and honest about his real beliefs over the next four years, or more likely after that. I doubt it, but it's possible.
I think the trick is he doesn't have any actual beliefs. He doesn't think big government is good, or small government either. He doesn't have an opinion on prayer in schools, or minimum wage, or anything else that doesn't directly interact with his life. The only things he actually believes are that he should get what he wants when he wants it, and people should adore and respect him for getting it. I think that's the only belief he's ever had and as far as I can tell, he's never hidden it at all.
Nothing he's ever said or done in decades has lead me to any other conclusion than that. The man is an island. If it's not happening to him, he can take whatever opinion he thinks you will love him for having. Even then, you can tell he doesn't put any effort into these outside opinions. It's not like he's actually come up with an alternative to ACA or even has an idea of why he thinks it doesn't work . He just keeps saying it's bad and he'll fix it. He has no idea how, he doesn't care to learn. It's not like he's on that system of healthcare anyway. He's not actually worried about the border, nor does he have any real notion how to fix it. He just knows it's a hot button and so he parrots the shibboleth.
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