It's funny, but it always seems to be the same few people who want to blame anything and everything on ebay. Did ebay kick their dog? Did ebay kidnap their kids? The main reason HL and most collectibles have faded can be traced to one thing and one thing only, GREED! Whither it was the “secondary market losers” who bought multiples of many pieces, and then made up prices and gave them to the publications of the day. Or was it the dealers who went nuts and ordered large amounts of HLs because of imagined demand. This GREED led HL to believe there was a greater demand for their product than there actually was and of course they started over producing to meet this imaginary demand. Thusly we ended up were we are today with certain people whining over and over about how ebay has ruined HL when we all know the real problem is these people are not able to put their children through college or fund that early retirement they had dreamed of. They are stuck with closets full of HL figures they had hoped to sell and make a mint on. HLs that aren’t worth the cardboard boxes they are stored in. Ebay did not cause this GREED; it just exposed it for what it was. With ebay’s arrival intelligent collectors were able to skip the “secondary market losers” and find out what these little pieces of plaster and paint were really worth. For a while there HLs were worth quite a bit on ebay, but as soon as the prices started to slip a little the “secondary market losers” panicked and flooded the market with their horded pieces. At that point the market collapsed under the shear weight of the “rare” pieces that were suddenly everywhere.


Opps I think I may have just answered my own question about why certain people seem to hate ebay so much.