There is a profoundly stupid thing happening in the diecast car world right now. People are actively ruining the fun of hunting for and collecting Hot Wheels cars by scooping up all examples of popular castings and charging oodles of money for them. I’ve had enough of empty shelves and not finding the castings I want, so I took a chance and bought a huge case of 72 Hot Wheels. After the initial thrill wore off, I decided it might not be something I do again.
I’m more or less reliving my childhood. For years, I’ve sort of just stopped collecting diecast cars to collect real cars. But now that I’m pumping the brakes on collecting real cars, I’m back to enjoying toy ones. Every time I go grocery shopping, I go straight to the Hot Wheels display to see what castings I can find. I bought a couple of neat dioramas to display some of my finds. I’m even working on my own custom job.
But I’ve also discovered the dark side of this hobby. I’ve been back into the Hot Wheels hobby for several months now, and I’ve noticed that most of the stores I go to are always cleared out of recent castings. My local Walmart has two pegs for Hot Wheels Premium cars, and there has never been a single time when I’ve seen a single car on those pegs.
The rest of the pegs aren’t great, either. Usually, those are filled with fantasy cars that everyone’s ignoring, or older mainline cars that have been sitting forever. I’ve lost count of how many Fiat 500Es I’ve found in the past few months.
Leeches Ruin Everything
What gives? Sadly, in my absence from collecting Hot Wheels, I missed the rise of a new craze. There are a lot of folks out there who are intentionally wiping out a store’s stock of desirable Hot Wheels cars just so they can resell them for several times their value.
I’ll give you an example. On November 14, 2024, Hot Wheels released a limited-edition Elite 64 series Freightliner Cascadia. I paid just $50 for mine from Mattel before they sold out within 40 minutes of launch. If you missed out, you’re basically screwed:
These flippers are aggressive in their strategies. Some people will buddy up with an employee at their local Walmart to know exactly when the next shipment of Hot Wheels cars comes in. That way, they can snag up all of the hot cars before the public even gets the chance to see them. Some flippers are allegedly even the employees of the stores, so it becomes more or less an “inside job.”
Don’t think you’ll have better luck on Mattel’s websites, either. While Mattel will impose purchase limits on rare castings, flippers have easy ways to get around them. Remember the Hot Wheels x MSCHF Not Wheels special casting that basically every car site reported on?
Mattel imposed a two-car purchase limit, yet that didn’t stop flippers from buying dozens at the same time and then trying to resell them for more than four times their original price.
Some people are still trying to sell the Not Wheels for $60 or more, or at least twice the original price.
That’s not even the worst of it. Some flippers get really scummy by buying up nice Hot Wheels Premiums, taking them out of their cards, and then returning the cards to the store with a car of lesser value inside. The people running the stores don’t know that the cars were switched out, so the flipper essentially gets a car for free that they then sell for multiples of what it’s worth. Some flippers will even make a fake of a premium car and try to sell that as an original for way too much money.
The rampant scalping has sucked a lot of the fun out of collecting Hot Wheels, and it’s not even just the rare cars, either. If there’s a popular basic car out there, it will almost certainly get scalped.
These are supposed to be cheap toys for everyone. The whole idea is that you’re supposed to be able to go through a store and come back home with a haul of your favorite cars. But a huge number of collectors can’t do that anymore because flippers have already taken everything and jacked up prices. It’s basically everything that’s bad about the concert ticket reselling industry, but applied to toy cars.
Now, if there’s a specific car you want, just forget about going to a store. You’re likely going to end up on eBay or some other site full of resellers, and you’re going to pay a lot of money for something the flipper paid $1.18 for.
Alternatives To Resellers
Thankfully, I have had some luck by skipping big box stores and going for local grocery stores not known for selling toys. It looks like flippers don’t go to stores like these, which means you’re going to find lots of cool cars just sitting there. Check out a recent haul (above) I got from one of these stores. They were on sale for 72 cents a car, too, which was awesome!
But there’s a catch-22 here. I was really looking for castings from very recent releases, but didn’t really find many, as the store sat on piles of older stock. If you want something from one of the latest Hot Wheels shipments, you’re sort of back to rolling the dice with Walmart and finding out that you lost the game before you even started playing.
This month, I decided to try something different. I’ve been watching Hot Wheels YouTubers lately and have found the concept of just buying a whole case to be interesting. Mattel releases 15 cases of 72 basic Hot Wheels cars a year, and those cases are generally distributed every three weeks. The usual recipients of these cases will be your local supermarkets, where the boxes will be opened up and the 72 cars put on the pegs for sale.
But some distributors have found that there is a market in selling Hot Wheels cases directly to consumers. You can buy sealed Hot Wheels cases from hobby shops or even from national dollar store chains. Cases from these retailers will usually cost just around what the cars inside are worth, about $100 plus shipping and tax.
These cases will contain a bunch of randomized cars and also releases specific to those cases. These cases will often have at least one Treasure Hunt or Super Treasure Hunt (limited-edition versions of otherwise basic castings) that are specific to that case. So, if you’re a hardcore collector or a flipper, you’ll likely end up buying multiple cases.
In my case, I just wanted to get a bunch of recent cars without having to fight flippers over them. So, I did what I thought was crazy and bought a case. I chose Case G, a case that’s been around for over a month. I’ve watched a bunch of unboxing videos, and YouTubers have pulled some sweet vehicles out of G Cases like a fuchsia and green GMC Syclone, a rad Optimus Prime casting, some great American muscle, some classic off-roaders, and a possible Super Treasure Hunt of a Porsche 911 Rallye.
72 Cars In A Box
My case arrived this week, and I was thrilled to tear into it. For a brief moment, I felt like one of those Hot Wheels YouTubers, and I was discovering a fresh box of excitement. I know, I know, they’re just cheap toy cars. But the purported magic of buying a case is that you don’t really know what you’re going to get, so you get surprised as you dig through the 72 cars.
I think I got a decent haul here. Sadly, I didn’t get a single Treasure Hunt or a Super Treasure Hunt, but I decided that about half of the cars were worth adding to my collection.
It’s hard to pick a favorite here because there are so many great cars in this pack. I love the Honda CB750 Café, the BMW 2002, the Chevy Blazer, the Chevy C10, and the Chevy Silverado. I dig the cute DeLorean, the McLaren W1, and the lifted Mazda Miata.
I’ve never seen a single one of these vehicles in the wild except at a local flea market, where someone was trying to sell them for ten times their original price.
So, I’m quite happy about all of these cars! I can’t wait to display them on my bedroom wall.
Lots Of Unwanted Cars
Then I realized that I still had half of a case of cars I didn’t want. This pile of cars consisted of duplicates like two extra Datsun 240Zs and the two extra Shelby GT500s.
I also don’t really care for the fantasy cars. Don’t get me wrong, the artists who designed these cars are brilliant and creative. The fantasy cars are great, too! But I’ve never been into fantasy cars, even when I was a kid.
So, my plan is to sell off half of the case I don’t want. I’ve bundled the fantasy cars together and hope to send those off to a new home. I figure if I price them similar to what you’ll find in a store, maybe someone will take them away.
But I’m also reconsidering that. Maybe the real winning strategy here would be to give the unwanted cars away. There’s a whole summer’s worth of car shows ahead. Maybe I’ll just place the cars on the windshield of my Honda Life and give them away to any interested party. That could be a ton of fun!
I’m also feeling conflicted. Buying the case was fun, but I’m not sure it’s something I’d do again. When I really think about it, I pretty much paid $120 for the 36 cars that I really wanted, which comes out to $3.33 a car. That’s much cheaper than what flippers charge, but still more than they’re worth. I also didn’t get to enjoy the hunt of actually finding these cars. Or, maybe I should just reframe it. I paid $120 for some cool cars I want and for other cars to give away.
But one thing I’m sure about is that scalping has made this hobby so annoying sometimes. So, if you’ve ever wondered why on Earth your local store always has the Hot Wheels cars you don’t want or maybe the store just never has any in stock, there’s your answer. Someone has snatched up all of the coolest cars. Maybe buying a case is the answer, but be expected to pay for it.
Top grapic images: eBay seller; eBay Seller; eBay seller; Mercedes Streeter
Yeah, I’ve been trying to find Optimus Prime, Ultra Magnus and Snoopy for months. I know for a fact that all of the local hobby shop guys are raiding the big box stores and then charging 500% mark up on them because I’ve seen them at their stores. Don’t even get me started on Treasure Hunts being raided at any and every store.
I get the rationale but it’s going to kill the hobby if kids only see the same 10 cars on shelves that no one else wants. This almost happened with the Transformers fandom.
Hot Wheels needs to find out what’s selling and flood the market with it. The only way to stop scalpers is to not make it profitable for them.
This practice of flipping hot wheels has been going on since the late 2000s. I had a buddy that was big into collecting and he was always hunting. He did make friends with a few store clerks to find out when shipments would come in. Nothing new and until the market dries out, scammers will scam and flippers will flip.
I joined a 3dbotmaker Facebook group for a bit a few years ago, and left in disgust after a couple of months because all of the posts were either people sadly saying they couldn’t find anything at the store, or people crowing about how they’d bought out the stock with no recrimination. Two topics and people weren’t connecting the dots.
As a fairly serious collector of Hot Wheels for many years now (helping my Dad maintain his collection mostly, since he’s been at it since the mid 90’s when this modern collecting stuff all started), we have maybe only missed out on less than 10 models due to them not being available at the store. Everything else has appeared one time or another. There are plenty of instances where I’ve only seen a car once or twice, but older case restocks are usually easier to find at less traveled stores since they don’t move as much product and they’re sitting on older cases in the back.
I do agree that resellers are ruining the hobby for others, but this has ALWAYS been the case. Door warmers, pallet raiders, etc. I know I’ve been one of those occasionally if opportunity arose. We’ve done the case buying thing two a couple of times, but luckily we were/are after one of each model and color. I am glad that we aren’t after any of the online premiums that Mattel sells, though.
When they were small, my nephews always made beeline to the toy sections at the grocery stores every time. My brother was frustrated with frequent mushroom clouds coming out of them when told “no”.
I came up with the clever strategy: I asked them the same question, “how many cars do you have at home?” (at least 200 or so). I knew they couldn’t count past twenty so I repeated the same question again and again every time they insisted on me buying those cars. Then, they just got the idea that I would not budge and gave up. That ended their hoarding streak for good.
These are toys with no inherent value or utility beyond being toys for children to play with. “Collecting” them is just a participation in the fiction that they hold some kind of value.
This is nothing but a speculative asset bubble, no different than beanie babies or tulips. The only winning move is to not play the game. If you actually genuinely care to build a collection of these – again – children’s toys, then just wait a year or two for Trump to finish his economy destruction speed run. There will be no discretionary spending anymore to fuel stupid bubbles like this and you’ll be able to scoop up “”””desirable”””” models for pennies from some crying bag-holding scalper assholes that thought they were going to become millionaires buying and selling toys that have no legitimate value over $3.99.
“a year or two for Trump to finish his economy destruction speed run”
So, you have no problem with Biden Administration and crooked Democrat politicians ruining the economy from 20 January 2021 to 19 January 2025? Lot of deindustrialisation, escalating energy cost and cost of living, and so forth.
Typical Democrat having Trump Derangement Syndrome. How sad…
What’s it like, living in a weird alternate reality where successfully pulling a nation from the brink of a great depression back to health can be spun as “ruining the economy”? Do you look at your cratering 401K and think “yeah, we’re pwn’ing the libs”?
https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/economy/
Specifically what deindustrialization are you referring to?
You even have a High Value Man podcast handle. Pure comedy.
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It’s too bad there is no thumbs-down button so we all could tell you how much we disagree with your incredibly lame comment.
All of you adults buying dozens or hundreds of these toys are ruining it for the children. Collecting brand new, store bought is just barely a hobby anyway.
Exactly! If kids don’t see the cool ones on the shelf, they may never get into the hobby. I never take the last of anything unless it’s for my own kid and even then, I’ll see if I can’t just order it online.
Baruth made a point of this in an article about watch “collecting” in the Free Press a while back. It’s just “oh I have this much money, I can purchase a brand new Rolex” and it’s just wildly uninteresting
I’ll skim the Hot Wheels sections, but I have also never been much for the fantasy cars either, so I don’t spend a lot of time in them. The Matchbox displays are always half the size or even smaller, but I get a little disillusioned sifting through the die casts of Citroen Amis and other overseas models that have piled up.
I should have browsed more often at flea markets in the past, before the trend started to pick up again and it all got bigger and more muddled, and I don’t have as much patience to sift through. Always hoped to find some of the ‘regular’ Matchbox cars that would now fall into rad categories (ex. original Dodge Caravan), so they probably get snatched up quick. A bin of Majorette cars I’d spend some time in though, but have yet to see them around.
> I’ve lost count of how many Fiat 500Es I’ve found in the past few months.
Even fake Stellantis cars don’t sell!
I collected Hot Wheels as kid. I also collected Maisto’s and other larger diecast cars.
I went on the prowl for some of the favorites from my youth. Some easily exceeding $500.00.
I didn’t spend that much… But I’m not proud either.
Yeah, this is a sorry thing to hear about. Jerks ruining it for everyone. Glad you got some good ones…that DeLorean and Squarebody are so awesome!
Mattel is the most to blame here though. This is manufactured scarcity. This isn’t trying to collect an item that has been out of production for decades, Mattel is choosing to manufacture cars in differing quantities to cause just the sort of hype that attracts people looking to profit off collectors. Same for all the current in-production collectibles that others have referenced; Pokémon cards, baseball cards, NFTs, etc. Mattel makes more money from playing this game than if they just made and offered as many of a type of car as everybody wanted and sold them directly.
This is called “De Beer Effect”. Despite diamonds being very abundant in the nature, De Beer packaged the diamonds with clever marketing in the 1960s and 1970s that lent the supposed scarcity.
Yup. This is basically ruining every hobby that even tangentially involves collecting because corporations don’t care that scalpers are buying up everything, they make their money either way. As a longtime magic player it’s absolutely infecting that hobby as well (although I’m mostly off that train and just play occasionally with friends now). FOMO marketing is in basically every hobby now and wherever scalpers can take advantage of it, they will. They’re scum.
Do the corporations not realize that they don’t see that scalped money? They’d do better to find out what sells and ramp up production. Or make the ones that sell the $5-$7 collector editions
They make money off the hype. For example, selling a whole case to someone really just looking for 1-2 special cars. They could sell those cars direct, but why sell 1 at market price when you can sell 75?
People do the same thing with baseball and Pokemon cards. I remember things were so bad during COVID that stores would have to lock their cards away and have a two per customer limit.
I have enjoyed how the flippers here are trying to charge twice as much for cars that are still very easy to find in local stores. I don’t even know if there’s a huge market here, but damn they’re really going for it.
I also know there’s a second-gen Riviera in the line now and hopefully it doesn’t take too long before I find it in the wild.
I’m not averse to people reselling things like this on Ebay, it’s the crazy price gouging they do that gets me. I’ve bought a few off Ebay that I couldn’t find around town(and I check Walmart/Target/Hobby Lobby when I’m there)
For the convenience of browsing online and having it shipped to my house, if it’s one I really want, $12-$15 I feel is totally reasonable, but $60?? Are they high? Well probably, I’m guessing drugs of some sort are involved, but dang, that’s crazy.
Like there’s 1 90s style Cavalier I’d like to get as that’s what my wife had when we met(trying to collect mainly cars we’ve owned), and they’re usually over $40. I have a 3d printed one I need to paint and add real wheels to but figured getting a nice diecast one would be, well, nicer, but not $40 nicer! For a few of those I can get my own 3D printer and just make as many as I want.
There are people ready and willing to ruin absolutely anything.
Hey a great idea add a Autopian section for trading hot wheels. It’s the internet so no cost just require membership to join. If you have a Vehicross I am interested
There’s only one Hot Wheels to own, and it’s this one :
https://www.theautopian.com/heres-why-hot-wheels-is-finally-introducing-a-1985-proton-saga-hot-wheels-car/
I managed to get one from Aldi for £1.50 and was so happy
I have two of them! One came from a Target, the other from a regional grocery store chain that I will not name. 😉
They’ve added a white version now too.
Just bought one from a regional not to be named grocery store, in appliance white! Only a dollar and some change too.
Bah! I heard that people were lining up around the block in front of my local Trader Joe’s for limited release “Easter” shopping bags, their canvas shopping bags with Easter colors instead of the typical red. Flippers were selling for 3x online. It seemed to be hyper regional because I was out of town at the time and there were tons on the shelf of the TJ I went into. What a waste of time.
I implore everyone not to contribute to the artificial scarcity trend.
Is that why there was a line at my local TJ’s before opening this Sunday??
lol, my buddy bought one for my daughter just for fun.
“The fantasy cars are great, too! But I’ve never been into fantasy cars, even when I was a kid.”
Personally I like the fantasy cars and I’m collecting the ‘Fast Foodies’ because they appeal to me. I find them amusing.
For the 2024 fast foodie series, I have all of them except for 3/5… Car-de-Asada.
https://hotwheels.fandom.com/wiki/Car-de-Asada
If you have that one, let me know. I’ll buy it off of you.
I would also consider other Fast Foodie Hot Wheels.
This sucks. If you think this is bad for Hot Wheels, don’t even take a look at watches. Especially Rolex. Personally they’re not my style, but the lengths people will go to obtaining one is insane. All of the new drop/collab/limited edition shit ruins everything.
What a sad life hot wheels flippers must live…
What a sad life
hot wheelsflippers must liveTrue.
This is a really interesting article, Mercedes, gauging by the number of comments, others agree.
I have stayed clear of collecting like this for a number of reasons, one being people being really aggressive and greedy. Back in the 90s, before the Star Wars prequels, the kids were collecting SW figures, and I watched some teenagers badgering and abusing the guy at Toys R Us to get him to bring out a new case from they back so they could rifle through it. At the time, Boba Fett was super rare, like one per case… I found out later that once he was in demand, they started adding more per case, so eventually he wasn’t rare any more. It was a lose lose situation for all.
The Target near work rarely has anything good. Pretty much stopped hunting, aside from randomly running into a bin at Longs.
I’m running out of shoeboxes anyway.
This seems like a good time to confess that I ran a similar scam in Forza Horizon 4. There were special cars in the game that could only be obtained with a “backstage pass” after completing a difficult series of challenges. One of them was a Toyota 86 painted burnt orange. In the marketplace, these backstage cars could fetch millions of credits due to their rarity. I noticed though that the identical Subaru BRZ (with the exception of being painted Subaru blue) could be obtained from the “autoshow” for a mere 24,000 credits. So I bought a BRZ for 24,000 credits, repainted it from Subaru blue to burnt orange to disguise it as the 86 and put it in the marketplace for somewhere around 300,000 credits. Someone bought it. I have no remorse.