An Unfortunate State of (Figurine) Affairs

God is pissed

It would seem that even the powers of moe and PVC is not immune to the recent poor economic outlook as figurine suppliers in Singapore are hit with what seems to be a flood of payment issues…

Here’s a post by the owner of Black Technology on the popular SGcafe forums.

I don’t want to do this but supplier and I are already at our limits with customers taking their own sweet time collecting their orders and dragging others with them.

Suppliers are fed up and have told me to post an ultimatum, and honestly, so am I. We are getting sick of excuses for delaying collection and more than half of the last 2 week’s orders remain uncollected. Times are bad, but errant and slow collection is making things hard for us and the supplier.

With this I have posted the ultimatum they gave. If by this Wednesday orders remain uncollected, I will cease all future orders of Figurines. The deposits alone barely allow us to pay and let supplier break even, and we are NOT the only store being faced with customers who delay their collections.

In the worst case scenario, all future orders will be canceled as well. (Deposits will be refunded) and we will redirect you to other stores who will are able to takeover your preorders (at higher rates in a worse case scenario).

Yup, errant buying and collecting has finally pissed off our supplier both local and overseas. Congratulations my dear Singaporeans, your very actions brought this about.

As for punctual and regular customers who have fulfilled their orders. We thank you, and apologize that if by Wednesday 8/4 the errant ones still refuse to fulfill their orders, we cease all sales of Figurines that are yet to come. Honestly, with the attitudes some are giving, I’m finding selling our other merchandise alot more profitable. That I dare say.

And its not only us, in the next few months, other figure shops will follow the same path.

Source

Sadly, this can only go poorly for the fans here. As it is, getting stuff down here is hard enough and I, for one, am grateful that Singapore has such shops to provide easy access to such goods (though maybe I shouldn’t since they essentially made it too easy for me to spend my money =P).

I would most certainly, however, prefer such shops over online shops where shipping would be something to contend with.

If I were to hazard a possible reason, I would suspect that this is a snowball effect due to one customer placing pre-orders for the same item across multiple shops to maximise the chance of getting a popular item. Quite a few shops here don’t collect deposits so it is no loss to the customer. Now just imagine if that were multiplied by quite a few times. It would be a time bomb waiting to explode (much like a certain recent disaster).

Or it could be a case of buying the pre-ordered item from some other shop that brought it in earlier (which in a way is rather irresponsible imho).

Either way, this is destroying the good will that the shops extend by not collecting deposits.

Hayate is sad that she may not be able to buy Figma Signum in Singapore

So if you are reading this and have stuff to collect, please do so. From what I know, this (the delay in payments) has been happening for quite some months now though the current situation has simply pushed it to the tipping point.

Support the industry! No need to make the lives of figurine collectors down here worse >_>