Jabba the Hutt & Han in Carbonite Character Cars by Hot Wheels

I’ve posted quite a bit about Hot Wheels in the last few months, including the Jabba the Hutt Character Car single pack, the Jedi Luke and Rancor Character Car two-pack, and videos about the Rancor Rumble track and the Hot Wheels Van with Rancor and Jabba artwork. So I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about this particular set, except to say that it’s been very hard to find. I’ve never seen it locally and it also hasn’t been available online anywhere that I know of. When they come up on eBay they are going for pretty high prices ($25-$30, which is really high for something with an MSRP of $6.99). I think the issue may actually be that stores are having trouble selling the Star Wars Hot Wheels stuff they do have on the pegs, which caused this set to end up in discount stores instead of being sold at regular retail. I also heard that a lot of them have been found in Canada.

This tweet indicates that someone found the set at a Ross store for just $3.99. Unfortunately they didn’t have this or any other Hot Wheels sets at our local store, and the staff helpfully suggested I check back at Christmas time if I was interested in Star Wars stuff. I finally decided to bite the bullet and get one on eBay when I found one at a slightly better price (around $20 shipped). I won’t be opening up this set since I don’t know if I’ll be able to get another on. It’s a bit of a shame that this set is so elusive since it seems like a nice one. Have any of you seen this “in the wild?”