Australia has been urged to crack down on blind boxes as some experts fear they could be linked to gambling.
Blind boxes are sealed packages that contain a figure or toy from a set inside. Buyers do not know which item they will receive.
These boxes have surged into a billion-dollar industry in recent years, driven by brands like Chinese toy maker Pop Mart and viral products like Labubus and Smiskis, with people spending hundreds to thousands of dollars on them.
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Alliance for Gambling Reform spokesperson Mark Kempster said the blind boxes use the same tactics as the gambling industry.
"When you're buying something with an unknown outcome, it's the same as gambling on something that has no outcome on it as well," he said.
"It's definitely a form of gambling. We see it a lot in trading cards and things along those lines as well. It's quite a big thing in Australia."
Singapore's Gambling Regulatory Authority recently announced it was working to mitigate the gambling risks posed by blind boxes.
"These pose risks to our youth in particular as they are exposed to gambling early," Singapore's Gambling Regulatory Authority board member Cecilia Chu wrote in an opinion piece in The Straits Times in November.
Kempster called for Australia to follow with education programs in schools so that young people are aware of the different forms of gambling.
"You need to understand the pitfalls of it and the issues that can come from it if you fall into it at a young age," he said.
"It's this gambling culture we build in society, thanks to the way the gambling is advertised in Australia, that's doing this, and then it's filtering down to all these other parts of life."
How exactly are blind boxes a form of gambling?
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QUT consumer behavioural expert Gary Mortimer explained that buyers, regardless of age, experience a "powerful rush of dopamine" when they tear open a blind box.
This is from the anticipation they feel with not knowing what is inside and the joy and satisfaction after opening the box.
"Everyone can relate to that excitement of ripping open a birthday or Christmas present or the anticipation before discovering what a package in the post contains," he said.
"In fact, the rush of good feeling is very similar to what gamblers experience."
Mortimer said that rush is based on Burrhus Skinner's theory of Operant Conditioning – changes in behaviour due to either positive or negative reinforcement.
"In the case of blind boxes, the reinforcement is positive," he said.
"However, Skinner also found that one of the most powerful forms of positive reinforcement (getting subjects to do what you want them to do) occurs when there is a 'variable ration of reinforcement', more commonly referred to as 'reward uncertainty', and this is where the analogy with gambling comes in.
"Simply, if you give customers a predictable set of rewards, then they lose interest quite quickly. If it's unpredictable, they tend to establish behaviour which is very hard to extinguish."
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ANZ analysis found that unpredictability led to higher sales as buyers made decisions based on how much they had already spent on blind boxes.
"Because of blind boxing, people don't know which one they'll get, so they keep buying until they find the one they want," the bank said in August.
"If they don't find it in the first few boxes, they may feel that they can continue buying further, since they already have bought a few."
9news.com.au has contacted Pop Mart for comment.
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