What we have here, are the newest additions to my collection: blet #24 – the 2014 PG-era WWE World Heavyweight Championship, and #25 – the John Cena Spinner US Championship.
As has been the case with the last nine blets I’ve purchased, these have been primarily financed by money earned through doing online surveys. Which is great in the sense that I haven’t used any of my earned income in order to purchase such frivolities, but when I write out that I’ve basically bought 11 blets, I’m trying not to add up the dollar amount and not wince at what maybe a little more productive or substantiative things I might’ve been able to have done with such a slice of coin but whatever no regrets
The thing is with #24, I never really thought about getting another WWE World Championship blet, since I had the Attitude-era winged eagle blet, but whether it’s just random blet itch scratching, or when I was happy when Big E won the championship, the idea of getting one didn’t seem that unappealing. That’s sometimes all it really takes for me to want to get a blet; acceptance of a current holder, a good deal, or just plain wanting a new blet for the sake of getting a new one.
Also, I was sitting on a small cache of Amazon gift card and gift card codes, and instead of putting myself through the rigors of I don’t know what to spend this onnnnn, once I learned that WWE actually sells some things through Amazon, including blets, and makes them subject to Prime benefits, I knew what I would be saving up towards, instead of bullshit consumables like soaps and socks. So once I hit the price threshold for a 2014 WWE World, I pulled the trigger and here we are.
The bigger story though, would be the John Cena US Spinner that I had long been waiting out. For years, friends would “troll” me and tell me that my collection would never be complete if I didn’t have this blet, and truth be it, when it was actually on TV way back when, I wasn’t a fan of it. I didn’t think it was cool for John Cena to be above everyone else and have his own edition of the historic United States championship, and I was up on a purist high-horse scoffing down on a spinner blet in the first place.
Ironically, it was the work he did in like 2015 when he was the US champion, using the old traditional blet, that really made me a fan of his work, and in spite of the blet he was carrying, made me basically be okay with both versions of it, as indicative at the fact that I have both of them now.
So when the WWEShop re-relealsed the US Spinner in the past year, I knew that it was finally time to have one, as I wasn’t about to pay upwards of $600+ for an original Figures Toy Company replica back from 2012. The thing is that I had to wait out the price, because I really wasn’t interested in paying the full $449 retail value of the blet, when I knew that there would eventual discounts to come into play.
Funny thing is that along the way, some of the snaps on some of my prior blets started breaking off. Shitty Pakistani construction most likely. Regardless, I thought that I could use this to my advantage if flagged, and I took a bunch of pictures and documented them to the WWEShop’s customer service. Now in the past, I’ve always dealt with some fairly mediocre customer service, but I had to at least try. Amazingly, with enough chats with supervisors, I was able to get them to acquiesce to giving me a $50 reimbursement off of a future order, which was pretty much all I was hoping for, so I just had to wait for a sale to stack them on top of in order to get maximum savings and bang for my buck.
Obviously, there was the random sell-out from a few weeks ago that made my blood boil over, but I had to have faith that they’d eventually return. And for a day, they did return, as if all the prior orders’ payments processed, and there were some bounces, and there were suddenly some stock available. But customer service squandered my chance, and I was left in the cold once again, feeling deflated.
But in an amazing, good things come to those who wait moment, the blets came back into stock, and happened to do so at a point where the sale price dropped to its lowest ever, at $337. So, factoring in my additional $50 of house money, I was looking at a very reasonable cost for one of the blets I’ve wanted for a long time, which brings us to present time.
After all the time I’ve been collecting blets, I have the John Cena US Spinner that I went from disliking, to liking, to wanting, and now having. This is where I could say that my collection is complete, but I’m pretty sure anyone reading this knows that that’s probably not going to be true in the long run.
By the time I get blets #24 and #25 up onto the wall, I have quite literally reached maximum capacity. I almost said it was mathematically impossible to add any more blets to the wall, but I also don’t want my collection literally be butted up against each other, and I like having a little bit of a margin in between the straps, so maybe I could add another blet, maybe two, but then I’d be at a point I don’t want to be. I’m down to 0.75” in between blets at this point, and as I’ve digitally mocked up the wall, I’m really at the point where the wall is basically completely full at this point.
Looks like I should consider upgrading homes in order to have bigger walls in order to put my blet collection on. Seems like as good of reason as any there could be.
