Surprise In Store Finds

While out hunting after work looking for new Hot Wheels cars (we are well overdue for a new case assortment or more) I was very surprised to see Matchbox 9 Packs on the store shelves. I have been collecting since 2011 and aside from a few leftover 2010 Hot Wheels 10 packs at Kmart, New Zealand has not received any 9/10 packs until now.

At $20NZ (around $15US), these packs are cheaper than purchasing a single Matchbox at our cheapest retailer ($3NZ) but as the only attraction is the exclusive car with all the other cars being mainline repacks (and unlike Hot Wheels, the selection of cars is the same in every package), I can already for see that the experiment to bring these back to the shelves will fail.

Nice to see while it lasts however, and you never know - a sale may see one of these packs coming home with me.

Further down the "die cast car aisle", some 2015 Cars "Deluxes" were found, the first deluxe sighting since the very limited release around the time of the Cars 2 movie (2011). Unlike the regular cars that migrated from being in USA packaging to European packaging in 2014, these continue to be in USA packaging. Sadly, Cars cars are very expensive here in New Zealand and the deluxes share the same issue at $25NZ (around $19US) so while a couple looked nice, it would take a major sale (50% or more) for one of these to come home.

A couple of steps away, more new product in the form of Maisto Custom Shop and Maisto Elite Transports! Sadly the Custom Shop boxes were mostly full of repackaged 2013 product, but I did find one new car and it was a car I had been wanting for some time. So something actually came home with me. The Elite Transport had a better result, with 5 new models to choose from (along with older product repacked into the new style packaging). Even with a sale, I decided that I didn't really want or need any of the offerings and so left them.

And I didn't find any new Hot Wheels...