Fakes Crackdown, Mario's Billion & A Bit More

 Some good news for the week!
Amazon is apparently hiring tons of people and spending big dollars to crack down and rid their site of fakes and bootleggers. And, as any fan would probably say by now "It's about time!" So what happened? What changed? Well first, here's nice article to read about it so you can see what's up:

https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2023/04/26/amazon-counterfeit-report/?utm_campaign=IRN-2023&utm_medium=Email&_hsmi=256716348&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8jvWAJDhJj9eprOzsuhXDIruQYGGsMnKXwpdGi6tr82gTqYf9mr5z6B44DSItUuURdcoR0NSzreR-65VWeQoTmcxVebQ&utm_source=IRN

Basically, from it, and other articles the story seems to be:
Amazon opened up the shop to individual sellers making itself more like ebay (anyone could open a 'store' on Amazon) but then China got in there with all their un-policed products and filled up niches with phony items. What then didn't help was their "warehousing policy" where the warehouse has huuuuge bins of items (ex. memory stick) and then when a customer buys one, the person pulls it out of the bin. But, they'd like mix different seller's stuffs around in the bin and then legit people would get blamed when fake things were pulled raffle-style from the bin. For an exact clone item, like a t shirt, it's not a big deal, but when hard drive x doesn't work........it's a huge deal. 

Why didn't they do anything?
Because it didn't bite their bottom line hard enough. Doing refunds, consumer complains, tons of returns...it didn't matter to them because it wasn't costing them enough money/making them lose. It costs money to hire fake hunters and they just didn't care about their consumers and badmouthing and all that that they invited. 

So why now?
Because more and more large brands are pulling all their goods off. Like Nike and other costly clothing brands. By saying "we don't sell anything on Amazon ever" on their websites, they show that Amazon is full of phonies/not trust them/anything you buy on there. It finally hurt them enough to make them care that goons are basically out there robbing.

Does it mean much for Sonic collectors?
Maybe. As you (probably) experienced, reporting fake merch to Amazon does nothing. They just ignore you because they still get a cut when it sells. But, with a team in place, maybe some of the utter garbage will get ripped down. It remains to be seen.

Mario movie makes 1 billion dollars:
It's a-me...and that's a-lot! I guess respecting the source material AND the look of the character AND the fantasy world really DID amount to something, didn't it? It's too bad how obvious this is isn't it. Depressingly so now that we have movie-gremlin on speed dial apparently.

In site news...
Next week's update will be double size to make up for the missed update.

Good2Grow- I don't get it
Oddly costly plastic widgets that kind of look like the characters and aren't really good for much? Like the 'bowl' topper on cookies or the heads with spouts on them for the costly juices. It just feels very package plastic overloading to me. Like the item isn't play-with-able later on like a pez and it doesn't do anything else or be like a great representation of the character. 

Zak- It seems like a quality brand...they're doing good designs so far, it's nice to see something else with the license.

Upcoming:
Turn-arounds for the opened/loose and posed figures that have come along so far. Demonstrating them for the site & review purposes is important and that was neglected for a while so each week probably another figure (or more) will be added.