Skeletons in the Closet

This year Walgreen created quite a stir when it offered a pretty realistic looking bucky skeleton for just $30. It wasn't the highest quality, but it was pretty darn good and it made itself available to all sorts of corpsing techniques, including the "plastic corpsing" method StiltBeastStudios popularized.

Walgreen got their skeletons from a company called Pitini Enterprises, which a lot of haunters found had a pretty scarce website. Skeletal, if you will. If you contacted them about getting more skeletons, no doubt you should have found an email in your inbox today saying they're taking orders for them. You have to pay up front in January and they'll ship your order in June. In addition to a new higher cost for the skeletons -- $35 (hey, supply and demand at work!) -- you'll also pay shipping costs, which they'll determine at the time (though you can get a ballpark figure by going to the FedEx site).

For me, I'll just take my chances at Walgreen again, assuming they get them in, and save on the shipping costs. I can't imagine they wouldn't order them again, considering the response they had last time. I wonder if they'll be charging $40 though to make a profit on them?

I had a chance at one point to buy six "Wuckies" all at once, but then thought, "Do I really want to spend $180 on skeletons?" My haunt wasn't up to where I wanted it at the time and six skeletons wasn't going to bring it there either. I did end up buying four over time but I barely utilized them as it was with all the other projects I had going on.

Right now I'm corpsing two of them, one using StiltBeastStudios' method and the other a more traditional technique. I'll be ready for them when they hit the stores again and while I'll have to pay a few dollars more, there's no real benefit to buying them early and in bulk from Pitini.

What are your thoughts on buying them early directly from the company?

UPDATE: Pitini Enterprises sent out a second email to clarify the first. It says the skeletons it's offering are NOT the same ones sold at Walgreen, but rather the better quality ones (screws and such at the joints) sold at stores like Spirit Halloween and costing upwards of $70 or more.

This sounds like a much better deal now and one I'm likely to take advantage of, either individually or as part of a group buy as suggested by wicKED.