My daughter is into blind bags… I’m sure you know the ones. They exist on endcaps of every toy department, and often next to the cash registers for that last minute impulse by when your kids have been good (or when they’ve been bad and you want to keep the tantrum from becoming an embarrassment.)
There are even some mixed in with the packs and boxes of collectible cards, under the watchful eyes of some camera or another. Funny how some things don’t change… cards, collector stickers and pins, dog tags, key chains and toy blind bags. The old standards don’t go away; we simply keep adding to it.
When I was a kid, we collected mostly baseball cards and Star Wars cards, where my little sisters collected Garbage Pail Kids and Pogs. They did have one thing in common; they all came with checklists so you could mark off what you had and didn’t have. And boy were they needed! Back in those days, cards were inexpensive and well within a common kid’s allowance budget, so it didn’t take long at all before we had stacks and stacks of them. Despite that, they were often pretty hard to fill.
I only know one kid who had the Star Wars Red Set completed… Remember when I told you about that one kid who got all the premiere Star Wars toys on one of my other blogs? Yep, it was that kid. I had a mishmash of different sets and never got close to completing any of them, but I did my fair share of sorting by number and checking the cards like everyone else did.
My daughter inherited the collectible bug, as evidenced by any box set and every blind bag she receives in her stockings and Easter baskets. She will open the blind bag, glance at the toy for five seconds, then spend five to ten minutes matching it to the list before declaring to me whether it’s a duplicate or not. It’s a lot simpler for her than getting into her cloth cube filled with so many of them that I cringe to think of the dollar value hidden in that one toy cubicle. Afterwards, I’ll find those lists everywhere over the living room, listening to her panic every time I throw one away. Seriously, just how many lists do you need anyway? It’s the same list as the other five! Still, there’s always a chance that I threw away the last list… which meant, of course, the only solution in her mind is getting another toy in the same set with the same list, because having to turn on the computer, find the right google page, and writing down what she’s missing is just not the same thing.
It’s too much work.
It’s just not the same.
The list is part of the fun.
Knowing what you have, knowing what you need, planning what to get next… it’s what collecting is all about.
This week, while everyone else was having a meltdown about the functionality of the app, flipping, and going for drops, I felt like I was the only one standing up and saying, “Hey! Where’s my gold ribbon?”
I went to my set list. All it said was “Sold out” Not what I had. Not what I didn’t have. “Sold out” or “Buy now.”
Two windows in… Aha! 2 out of 4! Open it up… still no indication of what I had, what I didn’t have. Hm.
Three windows in… and I discover a teeny tiny itty bitty little grey nondescript box that said “Owned.” It’s as if all of the sudden, owning a collectible is so much of an embarrassment that it needs to be hidden.
What happened to collectors at heart? That’s what I want to know. Why take the most gamified aspect of collecting and stuff it so far back?
Several times I have accidentally bought the same collectible I already owned not realizing I already have it… and now I have no hope at all of figuring it out, unless I want to make my own list. Or go to another app that’s not VeVe to find out what I own and what I’m missing.
It’s too much work.
It’s not the same.
The list is part of the fun.
And to be perfectly honest, it’s totally put me off trying to complete any more sets. Especially when I can go to practically ANY other digital collecting app, touch a button, and it shows me what I have and what I don’t have in a click without having to do a lot of digging. Even the P-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named shows me what cards I have and hints at what I’m missing!
I don’t care if it’s sold out or not. I care whether I own it or not. And a simple checkmark on the thumbnail whether it's in the store, the market, or the supposed set list would go a long way to fix it.
So on behalf of all of the other collectibles who are running into the same problem, I have a simple request:
Check, please?