Since the beginning of June, the Mcdougals in Singapore has been selling a limited edition Hello Kitty plushie with every value meal bought. I don’t know exactly how many are distributed for each though, but I guess they are about 6 k for each branch? I may be wrong though.
Anyway, here are the pussies :
From top to bottom : The singing bone, the mcdelivery witch special and then the ugly duckling, the frog prince, the lion from the wizard of oz and little red riding hood.
To be honest, I don’t really find them special. I even saw some on someone’s dashboard while walking around in my Roman neighbourhood.
I’m not that crazy over Hello Kitty, but if I really had to make a choice of the one I like the best between this edition, I guess I’d pick the frog prince on account that I like frogs and I like green. Moreover, my mum has been trying to collect them for me and my sister – which I think is such a sweet gesture considering all the queuing madness!
It’s bound to make the most rational person all bothered and angry. Just check out this video below.
It’s interesting to see people queuing, uniting. If only this energy was used for something more worthwhile, perhaps we’d still have our National Library.
By the way, I don’t believe that Mcdougals staff has an upper hand in collecting the kitties. My mum works there and she herself couldn’t get them all.
What I really don’t support is when there are people who throws away their untouched meals in the trash straight after getting their plushies. So lets say that someone got their maximum of 4 plushies, that’s 4 burgers, 4 fries and 4 drinks all in the trash! What a horrible waste of food! I know they are unhealthy and all, but it makes so much more sense to at least offer it to someone who does want/need it.
And another sad thing is that there are a lot of people who are profiteering from this, selling the kitties at at least 4 times the original value. What’s even crazier is when sellers start to put an insane price like this :
Whether the bidders are genuine or fake so as to inflate the price, to combat this situation, I think it’s a matter of simple economics. Prices are determined by the level of demand, and if there is a sucker who’d pay that amount, till then prices will continue to be high. So we have to collectively not support these rip-offs. Less support and prices will go down.
So don’t buy pets from pet stores if you don’t support puppy mills, don’t buy ivory products if you don’t support poaching, don’t buy NDP tickets … those things are supposed to be free anyway!
But think about it, if they were really limited editions, shouldn’t they come with a serial number on each packaging? They would announce that there will only be X amount in production, and you are currently holding number Y.
Instead, you could buy them online for even less the price that Mcdougals asked for.
Somehow, I feel that this is heading towards the same path as the beanie babies phenomenon, where it started off as something that sounds valuable as a collectable, but ended with production being so high that hardly any of them are worth much now.
In the end, I don’t think that these collectibles have so much monetary value for selling in the long run. Take a look at the Hello Kitty collectibles that Mcdougals did in 2000 – it was all the rage, with probably the same amount of queuing and madness. I remember that there were people selling them online for hundreds of dollars.
13 years has passed by and you could get a set for about 25 SGD. Seems pointless. So if you’re thinking of profiteering, I’d advice you to think twice.