This blog lives at the intersection of “Peanuts” and “books”, which is generally a comfortable place to be, but it has its surprises. The other day, my wife, daughter, and I were shopping at Miniso, a mall store that leans on licensed product (lots of Snoopy) and Japanese import items. My daughter called me over and showed me a display of blind-box Snoopy dioramas… and then she showed me the picture on the side of the box. Each of these dioramas is displayed in a plastic book.
The intersection of book and Peanuts.
And they were $26 apiece, and as a blind box item, you couldn’t just buy the one you want. With some blind box things, you can just get a case — there may be six different sets, and six sets in a case, and you buy a case and you get them all. But this one had five different designs, and four in a case, so there was no way of getting a certain set. This would not be cheap. Plus, this is a Miniso-brand product, so I’m not counting ojn being able to find it at all elsewhere,.
But I get home, and I do a little searching, and I find that they are actually available online, and at cheaper prices…. particularly finding it at Shein, which has them for less than $11 apiece. So I ordered four, reckoning they’d likely just send a case and I’d probably get four different ones.
Well, they sent four, but not a case. The side of the box let us know that there was Snooy as a cook, an explorer, a detective, a magician, and one marked “SECRET” with him as a diver. Had I realized that “secret” actually meant rare, that only one out of every 108 boxes has a diver in it, I might’ve bought a case somewhere — it’s likely that cases have all four common figures unless one has been swapped out with the rare one. But with four random figures, we got the explorer, the magician, two of the detective (which was the one we most wanted), no cook, and of course no diver. It was quick to put the pieces together, so now we have three constructed sets… and an unbuilt detective set in case there’s an emergency,
If you see this and are considering ordering them from Shein, order them right now. Why? Well, for one, their website says they’re almost sold out. But also: Shein is based in China. As President Trump has decided that we’re not paying enough for things and he’s going to put extra charges on things coming from China, that price is likely to go up very soon now.
