Okay, so subscription services are becoming more and more popular lately. If you’ve found yourself completely lost already – the services I’m referring to are where a company boxes up a number of surprise and/or exclusive items and mails them directly to your house. They make them for all kinds of things now, but the “geek subscription boxes” seem to have the most services available, and are one of the fastest growing markets.
A little 4-1-1 basics:
- You have no say-so on the items. So you may end up with things you do not want, you may get awesome gems that you love, or you could get exposed to something you never knew about that you end up adoring. It is a bit of a gamble, but typically the exclusive items make it worth the effort.
- The retail value of what you get is supposed to be well above what you pay for the box – usually around double what you pay for the box. Keep in mind, that double is when you find a comparable item in a retail store. The resell value of subscription service items on eBay or Amazon can be much lower since everyone on the subscription service will get the same items.
- This is not a good service for picky consumers. Items in boxes may not be identical. For example, if there is a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figure in a box, you may end up with Rafael (the red-masked one), while a box down the street gets Donatello (the purple one), and so on. Again, you can’t pick, and items like this are randomly inserted, so it is what it is.
- This was a gift subscription that my son requested from my parents, but be aware that Loot Crate, and many other, similar subscription services, are NOT designed for children. They are primarily aimed at older teens and adults, and while my son is only 10, I don’t particularly have a problem if he opens a box and finds some gory figurine or a download code for a violent/adult game. If that is an issue for you, please investigate a service in detail before signing up.
- The last important tidbit that I can think to mention is that most of these services are by automatically renewing subscriptions. Which means, if you order a one month subscription to try a service out – don’t forget to cancel or else you will be billed again! The same goes for a 3, 6, or 12 month subscription – cancel after your last box arrives, or else you’ll get billed for a 3, 6, or 12 month subscription, respectively, all over again.
Okay, with the nuts and bolts out of the way, let me share with you my son’s unboxing video for the February 2015 Loot Crate box. This is my son’s first ever subscription box, so we had no real idea what to expect, and I believe every item was something foreign to him, but he seemed pretty happy with everything overall.
I apologize for the less-than-spectacular audio/visual qualities of the film. We tried using the $20 “HD” camcorders that we found from Walmart around Black Friday. They are not up to par with my Sony camera, but, unfortunately, you can only truly unbox something once. Next month we will have this down a lot better! 🙂
Trying to Mom 