There was a recent rant against this. This is not really a rant, but I have noticed:
Is there an increase of items that fall into those categories at online dealers?
Is there an increase in e-tailers advertising a “future release” item months in advance of “release date” when one cannot purchase it yet?
Is there an increase in the number of preorder items also not available for months ( I do understand the theory of why they do it…but…)
Is there an increase in the number of items above which then become “back order items” and “backorder/ unkown when available” following their release and preorder dates?
Have others noticed this increase? Is there an increase? Or is it just me? Is it just what I am interested in buying? (I have noticed more e-tailers noting that “your charge card will NOT be charged until the item ships” on these items, due to concerns and perhaps lack of orders over those concerns).
I find it disheartening that so many items nowadays seem to be preorder/future release/ back order that are listed on websites.
I’m not talking about rinky-dink sites either, I mean major hobby e-tailers. And I mean major manufactures like Accurail, Bowser, BLI products etc.If it’s NOT available, it should NOT be listed [;)]. No brick and mortar store can stay in business with empty shelves of “future releases” and “back orders” on 2/3 of its “inventory” now can they!
lol- I can see the hobby “dying” because one cannot get what they want to purchase, whether ready to runs, or kits, or lol, perhaps even products to scratch build! NO wonder they have to “fire sale” things when they actually DO come out with it!
This is NOT ‘life & Death’ stuff - It is just model trains! The retailers get order/shipping info from a manufacturer, and must setup advertising months in advance. Then there is a delay in the manufacturing process/shipping issues/whatever… The ‘target’ date is not met and everything ‘slips’. Some manufacturers are pretty good at balancing this(Atlas) and some are terrible at this(BLI).
As far as ‘we will not charge your CC until we ship the product’ - Most good retailers will not charge you credit card until the item ships(in most any line of business). Some state have laws that the retailer must ship the product within 24 hours of submitting a charge against your card.
I do not see the hobby ‘dying’; we have never had it so good with so many products available…even with all of the delays!
I have a sneaky hunch that prerelease is a good way for manufacturers to avoid making large production runs of items which turn out to have only a limited market. They may set their production run size based on feedback from retailers about the numbr of preorders they’ve taken. I have seen a couple of items go from “prerelease” to “sold out” in a few weeks. This could be a good thing - if the manufacturers can more accurately match the size of a run to the market, they can hold down inventory costs and will be willing to make more different items. We consumers just have to get our preorders in and not wait until the item hits the LHS shelf, "cos it might never get there!
Bingo. In the olden days of less-detailed, less expensive models, it was relatively inexpensive to set up the tooling and make a batch of Athearn BB F-units, let’s say. Today, model railroading is becoming more of a specialized niche market, detail level off the shelf has never been better, tooling technology is a lot better but also more expensive, and there’s a lot tighter scrutiny on production efficiency and the bottom line, so manufacturers can’t afford to produce an expensive, high quality model that doesn’t sell. The better they can accurately predict sales, the less risk they take, hence the pre-ordering system.
They still produce a certain percentage over the total number of pre-orders for people to buy off the shelf. Notice that pre-ordering only comes in to play when you’re talking about relatively expensive, higher quality models such as BLI, Genesis, even newer Athearn RTR (think D&RGW tunnel motor locos). You’ll never see pre-orders for Bachmann standard GP-40’s or LifeLike FT train sets.
galaxy,
In the old days, there wasn’t much to announce, nor were there that many companies to announce things in the first place. We were lucky to get one new loco per year from a company. Today, folks are disappointed when there isn’t a new loco every month.
So you think pre-orders should not exist? Since it’s needed to gauge interest in new products, that means there won’t be too many new products. We’ll go back to the days of 1990 and earlier when you got generic engines without much detail painted in foobie paint schemes. Personally, I prefer to live in the present economic market where I can get NH I-5’s, DL109’s, scale length RDC’s, and most of the NH diesel roster in high quality plastic, rather than only in brass or building it myself.
The hobby isn’t going to “die” because you can’t get what you want when you want it (sort of sounds like that spoiled rich kid from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory…“I don’t care how, I want it now!”). If it were, it would have died 20 years ago when only Atlas had quality RTR locos (everything else was either kits or junk), and folks who wanted specific prototypes had to do without or do it themselves.
Well, I hit the pre-order bug at my LHS for the new Sunset HO Z-6 brass Challenger, which has been advertised in RMC and MR Review for the past six months or so. And just to prove my good faith, I put down a deposit on the loco (the LHS owner said that several had pre-ordered the loco then cancelled). Due date–October of this year. And it’s Sunset, so I pretty much trust them–this is a limited run model.
But I wouldn’t pre-order from BLI or PCM, simply because they’ve proven not to live up to their delivery dates in so many cases.
I submit this theory: “pre-orders” on “future releases” do not “guage” much of anything, as people are getting fed up with it. To wit:
There have been many rants over pre-ordering something that never got produced, that never got to market, so they no longer pre-order anything.
There have been many rants over pre-orders that they were CHARGED for, never got produced, had trouble getting money back, so they no longer pre-order anything.
There have been many rants over pre-orders that never got released within the specified time or at the specified date months and months later, so they cancelled their orders, so they no longer pre-order anything.
I for one will not “pre-order” anything for those reasons and more:
I do not want to give out my credit card info to an e-company (even if not charged) and have it “floating in the nether regions of their e-world” while I wait for something that may or may not be produced. I will submit my credit card for something I order that I will GET . I may have little control over what they do with the info when submitted then, but identity theft is too easy these days, and mine has been “borrowed”.
2)I would not place an order for something that “may or may not” be produced. It seems to me that all these items on a “pre-order” list may ormay not be produced. If I place an order, like many others, I expect to get it, and like many others will be upset if I don’t. If they aren’t going to offer it, then don’
Defend it who will, this preorder stuff is obnoxious. I won’t do it now and I won’t do it in the future. Personally, I think the upgraded open-stock mass-produced stuff has a lot more to do with the increased quality of MRR merchandise than all this hyper-limited BS. But if people want to do it, very well. I see it as a lot of people once saw brass…great if you can get it.
I don’t think it gains us more variety, at least not directly. If mfrs. were using it as market research, we’d see constant preorders opening and then closing when insufficientn people expressed interest. We do see this, but not to the degree we probably would if it was being used as research. It’s probably just a way to help the mfrs. adjust the run sizes so they don’t have a lot of unsold stock.
As for market research, I think they do this for model steam by opening up one of Brian Hollingsworth’s books, finding a US loco, and making that. “I’ll do a K4, and an NYC Hudson, and a Big Boy, and a Cab Forward…” This is one major reason this limited-run plastic and zinc stuff isn’t quite like the limited brass of years ago. It’s more AHM-like in range, a sort of All-Stars collection.
One of my LHSs also has an online store. If you go in, you can see shelves full of orders being shipped out on the following day. While I was in the store a few weeks ago, they opened the mail and there were new Atlas catalogs in there. I watched as they entered the new items into the system for the online store, complete with their discounted pricing and availability date. Basically, they make the information available to the consumer as soon as it is available to them. I like this. If I want a pre-order item, I can pay for it now and it will show up at my door in a few months. Otherwise, I can just wait until it is available and order it then, unless it is sold out by the time I get to it. Seems like a good (and fair) deal to me.
Why should they wait until later to make this information available?
I don’t make deposit payments (at least not more than an occasional token payment) and, fortunately, they aren’t often required. I’ve waited up to five years for an item to be delivered. By the time I got it, I had moved my focus to a different gauge. There are also announced models that will never be produced, and some items listed by retailers for reservation when the project had already been cancelled for some time (such as Division Point’s MM-3.) I’m sure manufacturers don’t always inform retailers or consumers of a project’s cancellation.
I believe it is unreasonable for producers and retailers to not expect cancellations after people have waited a year or more. Also, it is unethical to expect a non-refundable deposit until there is a firm delivery date. If the delivery date is not met, the consumer should be able to cancel the reservation without penalty or prejudice.
The ‘good faith’ deposit I made was to the LHS, not Sunset. So if it turns out that the Z-6 gets cancelled, I’ll just turn it into a gift certificate and get something else.
My original post/question/rant was on a INCREASE in these items. I don’t mind a pre-order on a few items, such as specialty locos on specialty road names, but increasing to include many items? And I don’t mean just locos…i mean on rolling stock and other items.
Out of 173 products listed for a well known road name at one well known large e-tailer, about 45% (78) were "back order, future release, or pre-order. (Yes I counted them all)
Almost HALF their listings were not even available!!!
Will it become necessary in this hobby to pre-order and wait for everything?
RETAILERS traditionally sell whats in stock, displaying same. (SEE before you buy). Think of Sears, Target. (Catalog sales have all but disappeared). ALL RETAILERS order in advance to get product.
MANUFACTURERS announce lead times, and manufacture in ‘batches’. DISTRIBUTORS buy on contract, offer CREDIT, and STOCK items for their retailers. WHAT’S NEXT? (Deposit’s). Whose money is paying for start-up?
IF YOU WANT ca$h & Carry’, buy from a LHS - one that carries what you want.
WANT to cut corners? SO do they.
The Orientals invented ‘Just in-time delivery’, eliminating ‘Inventory’. Inventory costs money. Athearn, as a manufacurer, used to carry Inventory. No more. Now they are an importer
a) The manufacturers rarely meet their release dates.
This is because they are not really the manufacturers at all. They all have their products made by factories in China. In fact, most of what you think of as some of the biggest brands in model railroading are only 2 - 5 person companies.
b) The product sells out before it is available.
Take the recent example of the Con-Cor Aerotrain and M-10000 models. All of our copies were accounted for before we even received them. As soon as they were released, Con-Cor was completely sold out, we were sold out quickly and the distributors had very few left which didn’t last long.
Funny thing is, by the time the review of these new products appear in Model Railroader, they are pretty much no longer available!
Then we have to field calls from customers looking for said item and explain why this brand new item is no longer available!
So here’s a question… why don’t major companies such as Atlas offer a custom printing order? I’m not talking about creating a whole new model, just telling Atlas or whoever to print you a particular road name and number? I’d love to order an SD-40-2 or C-40-9 in NS from Kato… even if I had to pay a little more and wait 6-8 weeks. At least I’d KNOW that I’d get something after "pre"ordering it. Another thing that makes my blood boil is a “just announced!” product complete with bells, whistles and fireworks that just happens to be another nauseating BNSF SD-40-2 except this time in SWOOSH!
Because you wouldn’t be willing to pay the price. Not only will there be lettering of road name and number, but there is the paint scheme. Almost all the costs for setting up a run are fixed and up-front. Let’s say it cost $2,000 to set up a run. The first locomotive could cost $2,000. If a second is produced, the cost would be $1,005 each, and so on. At those prices, it is better to hire an individual to do the custom work if you won’t do it yourself.
You really think it costs that much? These companies obviously already have the equipment to do this… but I think you might be right seeing is how they don’t already offer this service.
I recieve Athearn/Roundhouse news today about products scheduled for Jan 09. I might ask my hobby shop to get this item at that time. But I know he will have a few copies on the shelf so I can look em over then.
Pre orders? No.
Now if I needed parts from Walthers to finish the Modular, ya, I will ask the hobby shop to get it for me BEFORE I need that part. So when it arrives in two weeks or so, Im ready to lay it into the building. Now that is “Just in Time” ordering.
BLI/PCM really burned up the hobby on the Pre-ordering. I recall years of waiting for a engine only to purchase another set availible now from Proto to fill in the passenger duty. Proto was the first to get the worm when thier engines became availible and I wont likely be looking for any more passenger power anytime soon.
I suppose I act like the real railroads, matching availible power to fill a need and not relying on pie in sky announcements in magazines or online.
No pre-ordering for me. Either it ships within a week or no order at all.
In fact… consider this:
It is much easier to hunt and buy a OOP item (Out of production) from somewhere in the world online than it is to try and grab a pre-order coming off that Pacific Ship and never making it to the shelf of a hobby shop long enough to be examined before ordering.
Oh ya, stop with the big rail names. The 100th announcment in a orange road name that has been hyped for years on a 40 year old choo choo is quite enough. Now that Blackstone K engine in Narrow Gauge was a SWEET! announcement.
It is disgusting to purchase a engine phase one version 1 orginal paint only to turn around and read a announcement to a phase 4.3, executive paint scheme (Accompanied by a real life shot of said modern engine leaving the paint booth) and prices half the cost to boot.
One other thing. The forums tend to tear apart any new announced engines before it gets out of the factory. I show you