To non collectors looking in from the outside the whole thing must seem ludicrous. They walk into a store and see this figure in a cabinet, they think it looks good, then they see a three figure price tag and are dumbfounded and then they probably leave. The poor retailer has had to get the figure from a distributor, who wants their cut over and above any other cost, so they have to mark up the figure accordingly to try to recoup. The thing is, they can't. A retailer near me has several grand's worth of HT in a cabinet, and if I go back in 3 months, they will still have several grand's worth in there, mostly the same figures! In a city population in the UK only a very small handful willl know what these figures are, and if they do, they won't get them from a bricks and mortar retailer, because the prices are so grossly inflated.
