"John Turner" wrote
Pinch? What pinch? Not being able to spend money fast enough to keep up with a market in entirely non-essential products doesn't strike me as much of an economic outrage. I can see why you, as a retailer, like this guy (and it also inflects your comments on the outgoing retailer in Cambridge, to which I've just replied), but hell, if I had that much disposable income to pour into modelling, I'd aim it at a rather more demanding level of product than glorified plantpots that'll stand being put into a flowerbed for those who run 4mm stuff round the garden. Skaledale isn't my idea of the way that modelling is going, or ought to go. Your bank account may say otherwise, but if I could spend 75 quid a week on toys instead of food, it'd go on kits and scratchbuilding materials for a major legacy modelling project with finescale realism in mind. Milk the guy as a consumer by asssuring him that Hornby aren't going to issue stock faster than he can buy it, but don't look on him as the long-term future of modelling as a discipline. (Maybe ask Roy Jackson how much he's spending on getting Retford up to scratch - his kit pile and stock boxes are pretty impressive and he's barely got a building in place; if you act as his broker you'll be kept in clover for another twenty years without selling an ounce of Hornby).
Has modelling really become about volume rather than quality? If anyone wants to be in the money market, they ought to get into O gauge and stay there, while Pete Waterman can still persuade City bankers to buy ornaments for the shelf from their bonuses. Otherwise, sell cheese, aromatherapy oils, CDs, fairtrade teabags, almost anything except proprietary 4mm models.
Tony Clarke