Re: Walthers buys Life-Like
- From: Wolf Kirchmeir <wwolfkir@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:42:23 -0400
Froggy @ the pond..com wrote: [...] we will have greater opportunity to get engines and cars
that previously could only be had at the whim of a brass importer
Most models were offered after some careful polling of potential customers, and a pretty firm market for at about 80% or so of the projected production run. That's still the case. A brass importer wants to have presold a fair number of models before they'll commit to making them, and many production runs these days are on the order of a hundred or so units, sometimes considerably fewer. This is really a form of custom building.
and at outrageous prices.
If you think brass was (and is?) offered at "outrageous prices", you're forgetting the economics of mostly hand-built production in small batches. The alternative would mean tooling for a plastic kit, and the mfr would have to sell around 100,000 units to recoup his investment. IOW, he'd have to produce a model for which there was strong demand, and produce it year after year. Which is exactly what Irv Athearn did, and why he didn't bring out a new model every six months. (He made a few mistakes, though: do you recall the Pacific, offered with rubber band drive? Gear drive would have meant additional tooling, which would have raised the cost. IMO, Irv goofed: we were _ready_ for a good quality plastic + die cast kit with a reliable Athearn drive.)
The economics of brass locos (each model affordable by a few hundred or so modellers) worked as long as wages in Japan were low, then when those rose to comfortable levels, production was moved to Korea. Now that CAD/CAM has made tool and die making much, much cheaper, it's economical to produce relatively small runs of plastic locos, on the order of ten thousand or less. But note: As China corners the market on these products, its potential competitors in Europe and America are going bankrupt. This means that the machine tools and more importantly the skills to use them are being lost. As Chinese wages start to rise, you'll see the prices of plastic rise, too. Oops, don't look now, but that's already happening.
Now, let's take a moment to look at prices. Back in the day, when an Athearn locomotive cost US$10, that represented a day's wages for me. Today, I can get a better model for a lot less than a day's wages. Oh sure, I'd like to be able to buy my toys for $10, but in order to do that I'd have to go back to making $10 - 12 a day. I'll pass on that offer. So then, in the end, things don't really change all that much, and they aren't so bad as we try to make them seem sometimes. Do you want to pay a bit more for what you want, or not have any opportunity at all to get what you want?
How "bout it?
Froggy,
Agreed, it's a point I've made many times. In real money (the money I earn, not the money the economists gabble about with their understated inflation rates), our toys are cheaper than they were when I bought my first brass loco (2nd hand, and I still have it.) When you consider the improvement in quality, even of train-set quality rolling stock, they are a real bargain.
BTW, brass has turned out to be a bad investment, selling for maybe 2 to 5 times its original price, whereas it should be selling 10 to 15 times that price just to maintain its value (keep pace with inflation.)
.
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