Dollar Store Toy Box

I decided to post more of the old video footage I have had sitting around for literally years. I used to think it was simple to update content, but that also depends on what you need to update.

It takes the better part, if not all, of an evening if I start from scratch in prepping a toy post. I need to take the pictures, transfer them over to my computer, size them how I want and then write the content to go along with the post.

That in itself takes quite a bit of time and doesn’t include making a video with the post. I’m really trying to get a video to go along with the toy post if the toy has some action or sound to it, but with school and work it’s hard to find time and/or energy.

This old footage was done in a night or two when all I did was record a bunch of toys in action. I posted the battle tops one separately because I hadn’t done the review for it yet, but the following videos already have their associated reviews up.

Click the heading for the video if you want to see the original post.

Boxing Glove Gun

It’s a little blurry, but I’ve seen much worse on Youtube.com. I try it out on a couple of test targets.

Dart Board

This is the only non-artillery video in the bunch. It actually works pretty well, but it’s a mini dart board so it’s like having to go for the bullseye every time unless you’re close.

Mini Disc Blaster

Here is a double feature on the mini disc blaster. One of them is supposed to be a bad trial while the other is a good trial, but they both seemed to go ok except the one didn’t want to fire the last few shots.

Mini SWAT Gun

This was testing one of the targets from the SWAT gun packs with the mini SWAT gun. It was a good test and the toy actually works.

Hope you enjoyed them.

Posted on December 23rd, 2011 by Mike
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I know some collectors and one of the worst things you can force a collector to do is sell their collection. They spend a lot of time, energy and money to acquire items and products on a theme, only to have them get rid of it for one reason or another.

This is what happened to Shane Fenton when his wife stepped in and insisted he sell his £200,000 Transformers collection to help pay off his mortgage, and of course, free up some space where they live since collections like this tend to take up plenty of room.

He states needing more room but in order to get a bigger place he would need the money from selling them, but fortunately for him, he sees it as necessary for the future.

His only stipulation is that someone buys the entire thing and appreciates them because he doesn’t want them opened and played with. Once they are opened, they would no longer be collectibles. I’m sure it would be tough to find a buyer though, not a lot of people would have that kind of money to spend.

I never liked trying to build any sort of collection. I never wanted to shell out the amounts of money needed to make a worthy collection. That and I don’t have the desire to put up with the frustration in trying to find the missing items of my collection.

Read the details of the sale story here.

Posted on July 5th, 2011 by Mike
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New terms of legislation took effect Monday that allows Ottawa to remove bad products from stores where before they could only request that those products be removed by the manufacturers.

The new legislation is called the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act and it covers certain household items, sporting goods, cribs and, naturally, bad toys. However, it doesn’t cover the recall of food, drugs, vehicles or the parts included with them as they have other legislation handling them.

This also lets them stop the import of dangerous products and keep them from getting on the shelves in the first place.

I’m surprised it has taken this long for this sort of legislation to be passed considering how long recalls and other bad products have been an ongoing issue.

When you look at the number of hazards that toys have been recalled for, you’d think they would have added legislation sooner than an incident in 2009 involving cribs.

Well, whatever the exact reason they started it and why it took so long to pass the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act, it’s here now and hopefully they will put it to good use.

Only time will tell if they act on it and we see a decline in unsafe products on our store shelves.

CTV has a news report on it here.

Posted on June 21st, 2011 by Mike
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Dollar Stores have been getting a lot of slack over the pricing of their merchandise. Larger dollar and discount stores have a wide variety of inventory that costs only a dollar while many smaller dollar and discount stores price their merchandise at several bucks or more, but even bigger chains like Buck or Two and Dollarama have larger items costing more than a dollar. Dollarama has even raised some of those prices by 25, 50 cents to even a dollar more.

This has prompted complaints that these stores aren’t true dollar stores because everything isn’t priced a dollar. I think people are just taking things a little too literally in those respects.

Dollar and discount stores were most likely set up merely to offload inventory standard department stores couldn’t get rid of at a price that would most likely clear them out. With that in mind, it’s hard to believe they would price larger items at only a dollar just to clear them out. I mention this because I have seen printers for 10 dollars at a Buck or Two store. My initial thought wasn’t, those jerks, their store is Buck or Two, it should be no more than two bucks.

From the idea that dollar stores should sell everything for a dollar, or they shouldn’t be called dollar stores, comes Dollar Mountain. The owner, Glen Witter, insists on keeping everything to a dollar and wants people to know the inventory is not made up of closeout items, but rather merchandise from companies that supply items specifically to dollar and discount stores.

It’s also mentioned they will have lots of toys. Too bad for me they are in Wausau.

You can read the article here.

Posted on February 25th, 2011 by Mike
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With Halloween over for the year, you can usually get leftover Halloween candy for cheap because stores want that stuff off their shelves and not taking up precious backroom space that can be used for storing upcoming December holiday candy and other products.

Although I usually refer to it as cheap candy, what I really mean to say is that it’s inexpensive. It’s good candy that has been reduced in price as opposed to poorly made candy that doesn’t cost much to make and isn’t that great.

It’s just like the cheap toys you can get. There are the inexpensive good toys you can get for less money and the poorly made, fall apart when you touch them, cheap toys.

There are actually quite a bit of familiar candy products you can get for less at dollar and discount stores, but these merchandised candy products give you very little candy and more packaging. You can also get these at various other stores as well, such as department stores or even video game specialty stores.

The candy included isn’t exactly cheap, since you could get much more candy with other choices, but you can keep the containers and even play with them. They’re a cheap toy with a treat inside like a reverse Kinder Surprise which has the toy inside the candy.

They are made by Au’Some, which is probably supposed to be mean ‘awesome’, but it looks French so I translated it using Babelfish and it came back ‘with the nap’ in English and that just makes no sense at all.

1.) Mario Barrel Candy Container
Didn’t Mario die when landing on a barrel?
This is Nintendo’s Mario standing on a barrel full of candy. I’m not up on all my Mario games, but the only game that I can recall off the top of my head that included both Mario and barrels was Donkey Kong. Mario had to make it to the top of a building while dodging barrels that Donkey Kong was throwing from the top.

The candy inside is brightly colored and is most likely crunchy.

2.) Wiimote Candy Dispenser
Hazard: It doesn’t have a wrist strap
This is a really well done replica of an actual Wiimote only smaller in size. The candy goes in on the wrist strap side and you use the trigger to dispense them.

The pack includes two packs of the Rockets-like candy. You could probably find similarly sized and shaped candy as refills or if the candy is all gone, give it to a kid so they think they are playing the Wii while you are actually playing.

3.) Marvel Character Yo Yo’s
The string is made from real Spiderman Web
Many containers like this don’t even have candy in them and you are supposed to just play with them. They are in fact Yo Yo’s with stickers on the side of Marvel Characters. No DC character versions found.

They include bubblegum most likely in the form of Bubbletape. I just wonder if it fits six feet of chewing gum for you, not them.

4.) Optimus Prime Candy Dispenser
Autobots Transform
One of the lesser known products riding on the Revenge of the Fallen popularity, this is the movie Optimus Prime resting on the top of this Pez-like candy dispenser. I also found a Bumblebee version that I didn’t really care to pick up, but no Decepticon versions.

The candy is the same Rockets pack candy like the Wiimote.

Posted on November 7th, 2010 by Mike
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From my “I wish I thought of that” list comes a funny, but true, article/list from Cracked.com about the plastic army men. It’s called “The 5 Plastic Army Men Least Useful in Combat”.

Take a look.

In the one plastic army men set, there is a second set I haven’t posted yet, I only have the mine sweeper guy and the gun holding binocular guy in a more flattering pose. I’m surprised I didn’t get either of the two variations of the just binocular guys.

There are a couple of pretty useless army men that probably could have been included from my set had the list been longer.

Communications Army Man

This guy is almost posing while talking on his cell phone. This is the classic annoying guy you see who is always answering his phone at the most inopportune times. He would stop whatever he was doing, like shooting if he actually had a gun, to take that call that will only last a “minute” with the giant antenna allowing him to have good signal strength anywhere on the planet.

Oh, and the phone ringing would likely would alert everyone to his position because he forgot to set it to vibrate.

Crawling Army Man

This is a view the enemy helicopters have of the guy when flying overhead. He’s still making his way to his designated shooting spot and the crawling is probably taking longer because he is trying to hold his gun while he crawls.

Without aiming their gun like their smarter colleagues, the best they can do when they are spotted is to play and hope the enemy doesn’t decide to make sure they aren’t just playing.

The guy can’t stand up and leaning him up against something is just really dumb looking. Pretty useless.

Cracked’s rules of the game are quite humorous to. What? You didn’t know they had rules? That’s because there are no rules.

They even have a link to a stop motion video using plastic army men. It’s almost ten minutes long and it must have taken a long time to make.

Posted on September 29th, 2010 by Mike
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It’s one thing to get a bootleg Optimus Prime action figure where the head comes off instead of transforms or a bootleg Spiderman action figure with different name and a light installed in his chest, those are the cheap toy knock offs you’d expect to see at a dollar or discount store, but it’s another to get a bootleg of something meant to be patriotic.

Tim Childress got a plastic American flag at a Dollar Tree dollar store in Dallas, but was surprised to find out there was something slightly wrong with his Old Glory purchase. Instead of the standard 50 stars you expect to find on the real flag, there were a total of 61 stars.

The flag was imported from China by a company in Virginia. Seeing as how they made their way to Texas from Virginia, it probably means other stores may have them. If they haven’t seen that report and already pulled them from shelves to save some embarrassment.

The manager said off camera from the news report that it’s a “patriotic banner” and not an American flag. You aren’t being patriotic if you’re sporting an incorrect American flag.

I think it’s a little lame that they would be importing something of this much importance from China though. At least make them in the USA. A while back, here in Canada, there were pairs of Canadian flag underwear in beer cases used for Canada Day. That all sounded good until people noticed they were made in a country other than Canada like Mexico or possibly even China.

If anyone knows what I am talking about with the Canada Day thing and I am wrong about any or all of it, please comment.

Have we really gotten so bad that we need to outsource manufacturing items about our country to other countries just to save some money? Do yourself a favor, if you plan on getting an American flag this July 4th, make sure it’s the proper flag before you buy it.

For the entire story/news report video online, go here. For added amusement, or eye rolling, see what conversation starts in the comment section by a seemingly innocent fail.

Posted on July 2nd, 2010 by Mike
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When you’re a kid, going to the doctor or the dentist can be quite a traumatic experience. Many doctor and dentist offices have a supply of candy or toys as a reward after the visit so the kids leave with a smile. That way, hopefully they will remember they got something good so it wasn’t all that bad of an experience.

Dentists usually give some form of sugar free candy and I’m not sure about doctors, lollipop maybe. The rewards differ from office to office I would imagine.

Well it seems that some offices have been giving away children’s jewelry which has been tested and found to contain cadmium. That’s really something parents don’t even want to think about is possibly going on.

The jewelry in question are the Happy Charm Bracelets. They are colored beads on a string with a metal charm. Some have a cutesy charm for girls and others have a manly football for boys. Almost 70,000 were recalled overall and they were being given away for about five years.

If you have any of them, just throw them away.

It’s one thing to avoid buying something, it’s another when they are given to you and you expect them to be safe.

You’ve been given a fair warning.

Posted on July 1st, 2010 by Mike
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You get some articles about finding good food products to buy at a dollar store and then you get articles like this that make just reinforce the reasons why you wouldn’t want to buy food products at dollar stores.

A dollar store owner in Edmonton was fined several thousand dollars for trying to sell damaged goods. Things like dented cans, exposed dry goods and expired items.

It’s easy for people to avoid such products, I myself wouldn’t be picking up anything that looked compromised, but it doesn’t mean they should be sitting on the shelf when they could be taken off. The people most at risk are low income customers who were buying them because they were on the shelf and cheap.

What’s really facepalm worthy is that the owner tried to use the it’s the customers fault for not looking and the employee’s fault for leaving them on the shelf excuse, trying to place blame on someone else, but this was after numerous warnings over a four year period and the judge wasn’t buying it. With all the bad food tossed in a dumpster, no one was buying that anymore either.

Hopefully this opens the dollar store owners eyes on the matter and gets him to clean up his act.

Read the entire story here.

Posted on June 27th, 2010 by Mike
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It seems things are not going as well in the Dollar Store realm as recent news reports are making it sound.

While are some dollar stores chains are enjoying increased profits and better than expected quarterly returns, most likely because of the economy, some dollar store chains are closing stores. In Washington State, 37 Dollar Stores( Dollar Store is the name of the store, not the type ) are closing up for good.

This will leave over 400 workers without a job after hoping things would be getting better. Instead, they found out May 1st the stores would be closing. The Dollar Store chain was bought out and the new owner filed for bankruptcy and decided to clear everything out.

The store closures are going to going to affect a number of elderly and low income customers who relied on the low prices of these dollar stores. In the meantime, they can always stock up on items. Many items are now discounted to help clear out merchandise and some merchandise is even 40% off regular price.

Management is also concerned for younger employees who will soon find themselves looking for another job to get by in a tough job market.

Read the entire news store here.

Posted on May 26th, 2010 by Mike
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