Last night I had an interesting dream and since I am presently in vacation mode… and doing a pretty poor job of actually daily blogging I thought I would talk about it a bit. In the dream my wife and I were roaming around and drove past this massive line of people waiting to get into a building. I stopped to try and figure out what was going on, and someone said it was a “book sale” which piqued my wife’s interests. We stood in the long line and as we were getting close to the front we noticed that all of the products on the store were covered in wrapping to where you couldn’t tell what any one product actually was.
Everything in the store was extremely cheap, but the one rule is that you had no idea exactly what you were buying. So for example in the book section it would be a book securely wrapped that said something like “Sci-Fi Book” and then a very vague synopsis of what the book was about. They a pretty wide variety of things that were not books as well. So you might find a box that said “Computer Monitor” and it listed some general specifications of the monitor like that it was capable of 1080p or 1440p. However the books were like a dollar or cheaper and the electronics were like $50 for one of those monitors.
The staff scurried around the tables constantly restocking items as it slowly trickled out of what had to be a massive stock of things. The end result was that it did not feel like those who were late getting there were at a significant disadvantage to those who got there first. We loaded up a cart of things that we were willing to take a gamble on and made our way to the checkout. It turns out one of the people who I went to High School was working the register and she filled in some other details about the store. It seems like every time they held one of these events they sold out completely, and that a lot of the things were assorted factory overstock that would not sell normally, but because of the cheap price and the mystery box conceit that it all went every single time.
It was around this time that I woke up and told my wife about the dream. She immediately grasped the concept and I think a lot of the visuals were drawn from my own experiences going to one of these big sales. Half priced books is a chain that you may or may not have near you, and the store itself is phenomenal. However once or twice a year they rent out a convention center and have a big “everything must go” sale where they haul out box after box of things that were not moving in the stores for some reason. The above image is from one of these sales in Arlington Texas, and while we personally did not buy much I could absolutely see the appeal.
It does make me wonder how well a mystery box store would do. We seem to have this inherit desire to gamble on getting something really good from an unknown loot box. The assorted subscription box services like Loot Crate seem to still be doing really well for themselves. I know I personally have enjoyed when a store makes up grab bags just because there is some element of surprise to the process. The main difference with the store from my dreams though is that the items they were selling really were more valuable than the price they were selling them for. So often with mystery boxes you technically get more value on paper than what you paid, but it isn’t actually stuff that you would have wanted. Loot Crates seem to have a higher percentage of dollar store kitsch like stickers… than they do actual things that you would have spent money on in the first place.
I know Gamestop does this on the regular for anything that is not selling in their stores, and you can purchase a mystery box filled with toys. Far as I can tell these sell out pretty much every time they offer these. However from the various videos I have watched about them… they really are not worth the time or money spent on trying to get one. This leads me to believe that yes… a Mystery Box store would do exceptionally well. However it also leads me to believe that it would be a horrible value proposition for the actual consumer.
I’ve been to a couple of those Half-Price Books everything-must-go-sales and they really are a lot of fun. I’m only able to visit a half-price books nowadays about twice a year. Used to be a twice a week thing for us.
The local TCG/Tabletop/Boardgame/Comic Books store has blind bags of MtG that I buy occasionally. I’m sure it’s stuff that they would never sell and isn’t worth anything. But my wife and I have built a giant box of MtG cards and we use it to make impromptu decks to play against each other. It’s a lot of fun and keep the cardboard from being landfill fodder.
My first job after college was working in a comics store and one of the things I used to do was make up grab bags of comic books. Each bag had six comics inside but you could only see two of them, each facing outwards with the other four sandwiched between them. The whole point of the bags was to get rid of overstock we otherwise couldn’t shift. I took great pleasure in finding the most attractive items out of the stack to use as the come-on face-outs. Pretty much any recognized mainstream supehero title would be likely to get some attention. Customers would then, not unaturally, assume the rest of the comics inside would also be superhero titles rather than the mystery, war, western or funny books they really were. We sold quite a lot of those bags and no-one ever complained so it probably worked for both the store and the customers.
Our city library has done several batches of “Mystery books”, where they try to encourage readers to move out of their comfort zone and read something they wouldn’t normally read. I don’t know how well it works for them but a few years back we tried it in the boostore where I work and it was a complete flop. It seems very few people want to risk paying for a book they may not like when they find out what it is.
I think for the concept to work, people have to believe there’s a chance they’ll get more than their money’s worth. The comic bags gave you six comics for the price of maybe two or three so you had a decent chance of coming out ahead. The library books, of course, cost nothing, so any time you got one you liked you’d feel it was an experiment worth doing and if not, you’d lost nothing. The books we sold, though, we were asking full price for. I can see why almost no-one wanted to buy one.