About a year ago, the Bachmann Spectrum 4-6-0 w/DCC & Sound was advertised at $ 184,99 and now the same source sells it for $ 214,99. Compared to the MSRP of $ 360,00, that´s still a bargain, but a steep increase of over 16 % in just one year!
At times, when incomes tend to shrink, one would think that prices would at least stay stable, but certainly not to be increased.
Up until recently, the loco sold for Euro 319,00, which is $ 440,22. It is now “down” to Euro 264,90 or $ 365,55. The price includes 10% Customs duty and 19 % VAT. There is no way I ever could lay out close to 400 bucks for a bread-and-butter loco, made in China.
I bought my first car in 1974. It was a Plymouth Valiant. While it was a nice car I could never buy a car for the price I paid for it today. Indeed my current vehicle cost almost 6 times what I paid for the Plymouth and it has a heck of a lot more equipment and rides much better than did the old Plymouth. Inflation hits everything equally hard so what if this happens in the hobby market.
The fact is that we are in the same situation many peple were in ib 1929 after the Stock Market crash back then. And we are there for many of the same reasons which I won’t go into as will come across as a political message.
Model railroading as a hobby the hobby we know didn’t exist back then. If you wanted to model railroad, there were no companies like Athearn, Walters, Bachman r many of ther others to supply stuff. You had to make most of it from scratch and that made it a very different hobby from what we have today. But if you come right down to it, modelers were diferent back then since most had the skills tomake everything they needed.
So what about inflation? It does exist and it allways and always will exist. As modelers we have to realize that we can’t always afford to buy e
Strange that the US Social Security administration recently announced that they won’t increase monthly benefits for cost of living adjustments because inflation is supposedly negative (or below a set threshold).
I too have noticed that deals are harder to find in our hobby lately. I suspect it has more to do with the limited run manufacturing strategy which has kept inventories relatively low. Good 'Ol fashioned supply & demand takes over to keep prices higher.
In this case, I don’t think it’s inflation. Rather, it’s the realities of the international marketplace. We have had years of “offshoring” of our production to China, primarily. Now, the Chinese people want higher wages. The stockpiles of low-priced raw materials that built up early in this recession are running out, and those bargain prices are gone, too. Fuel prices are up, so shipping costs more.
Inflation will be back, but we are actually just seeing trains, in particular, catch up to where they would have been.
Don’t forget the international curency exchanges that continues to affect what the dollar is worth less than it was worth even several weeks ago. I Think that causes most of the price increases these days. Couple that to the lack of confidence in the US economy and the value of anything bought with dollars is certainly going to cost more. It therefore really isn’t inflation but a lack value in the dollar.
The retail MRSP of HO engines keep going up and up but i don’t pay it. Most sell for way less then the MFG thinks it should. I have 2 Bachmann 4-6-0’s and 2 Bachman 4-4-0,s both spectrum and paid less than $70.00 each new.
I also have about 10 Atlas and Broadway engines with sound and won’t pay more than $110.00 New.
Just have to shop around more.
Have you noticed the price of silver? I had some siver coins i saved from the 1960’s. I just sold them for 15x face value. Got $15.00 for every dollar saved. Thats $15,000 for $1000.00.
Ulrich, up until just the past decade, or so, most model railroad hobbyists were a pretty frugal bunch of guys who could do their modeling mainly through the use of their own skills, inexpensive kits and materials, and ingenuity. Because so much in the way of kits/materials they employed were either crude, or fairly basic and were modified and detailed aftermarket by the hobbyist, manufacturers’ costs and their selling prices could be kept relatively low. Then, too, model railroading had had a long history of being largely a “blue collar” man’s hobby here in the U.S.A., so a broad spectrum of wealthy guys wasn’t perceived to be there to justify higher prices…except from the 1980’s onwards, as the brass market’s prices started to soar.
Way back when, Linn Westcott editorialized in MR that, “What the hobby needs are some rich guys, so that the manufacturers will offer more sophisticated, detailed, items.” Well…Linn’s wish finally came true over the past 15 years. There was an obvious influx of folks in the 1990’s and early 2000’s for which money wasn’t a seriously limiting factor, but skills were and whose approach to the hobby was largely not to build much in the way of their equipment, but simply to buy it ready to go.
Although these guys constituted only a modest percentage of all hobbyists, the manufacturers quickly recognized this change in their customer base and since then prices have gone nowhere but
I for one can’t understand how equipping a $100 DC loco with a decoder and sound chip jacks the price of it up to 2-3 hundred or more. If you add a decoder and sound module yourself to a DC loco, it costs a fraction of that. Is the rest labor? Feels like the market is taking advantage of us because we want our DCC and sound. It’s like buying a new $25000 car–OK, you want a GPS and back seat DVD player?–$75000. We’d all walk out of the dealer showroom in a heartbeat. Lucky for me I bought all my stock a few years ago when Spectrum and Genesis DC steam was $100 (or less! ), Proto and Atlas DC diesels were $40 on average and Athearn blue boxes were $4-$7 in the hobby shops. Ah, the good old days!
I don’t think you can make judgements about inflation based on one item. A few years ago when the Walthers 75th anniversary catalog came out, just for grins I compared the prices with the 50th anniversary catalog which I had saved. By comparing just items that were the same as they were 25 years, Kadee #5 couplers, structure kits, etc., I found that most items, when adjusted for inflation, were as cheap or cheaper than they had been before. Only a few were more expensive. One had not changed at all in price without adjusting for inflation. When it comes to locomotives, they have improved so much that I think we are getting a lot more for our dollar than in the past.
As my own personal benchmark for inflation, I compare prices of MacDonald’s food items to what they were in 1968 when I got my first job there. The Big Mac was 49 cents, now $3. The fish sandwich was 30 cents, now also $3. Hamburgers were 20 cents and cheeseburgers 25 cents. Those are still under a buck. So the increase in price has ranged from 4 to 10 times what it used to. Overall, I’d guess the average is about 7 to 8 times which is probably in line with overall inflation.
Well, I do sense an overall price increase when I study the ads in MR. Aside from the fact, that people in China begin to demand higher wages for the work they do, I think that importers/manufacturers attempt to reap additional profits. China keeps the exchange rate RMB/USD at an artificially low level to foster exports (and to counteract the wage increases), so that can´t be the reason for the increased prices in the US market.
True, scratch building could be an answer to beat inflation, but not all of us have the means and skills to build a loco.
Germany has been more of a R-T-R market, right from the beginning. A lot of German manufacturers have also turned into importers, having their locos and cars manufactured in China. A Brawa Bavarian State Railway S2/6 4-4-4 steam loco, manufactured at the same plant as the Bachmann Spectrum 4-6-0, with the same level of detail and quality, sells for about $ 620,00 here! Buying a DCC/sound - equipped steamer below a tag of $ 500 is close to impossible. Linn Westcott was right with his statement - you need to be a rich guy to be able to afford that!
Despite being still sizable, the German model railroading community is shrinking year by year, not because of lack of interest, but because of pricing. Show me a parent, who is able to spend $ 1,500 for a Christmas starter set to kindle his son´s/daughter´s interest in trains.
I am afraid that I start to see the same trend in the US market.
That’s what happened to Lionel toy trains in the U.S.A. over the years, as well. While for decades Lionel was the premier manufacturer of children’s toy trains, today it is the manufacturer of mainly collectible, high-end, model trains affordable almost exclusive to only well off adults. Lionel chose to pursue the money. So are today’s scale model train manufacturers.
Once regarded as physically the third arm of Christmas in the U.S.A. by both children and adults (the other two being Santa Claus and the Christmas tree), toy electric trains for Christmas are essentially a long vanished element of the holidays for today’s kids. And as a result, the ranks of the supposed “next generation” of model railroaders here will be exceedingly thin.
I think it’s funny that the Chinese workers are demanding higher wages, yet the quality control is non existent. I don’t know how many products I have purchased lately that were defective, I’m always returning things back to the LHS.
If you’re gonna jack up the prices on us, at least make sure the stuff works. Geeeeeesh.[:(!]
the word quality is not existing in the Chinese language, only the word copy [swg]
Not so long ago, I was able to talk to one of the product managers from one of the leading MRR brands in Germany. They had, and still have, big quality issues with their Chinese sub-contractors. They have resolved it by establishing their own, non-Chinese people, for QA in China. Which, of cause, adds to the cost.
I dare say, if you´d add up all the cost of quality, you might as well move back the production to the US or Germany or … A lot of renowned companies have already begun to do this.
Whichever way we look at it, we will have to face rising costs in our hobby!
My sediments exactly! If we’re gonna pay more for these products, bring the manufacturing back to the US (or Germany in your case) so we don’t have to deal with the quality issues.
These companies have to see the quality issues are affecting there sales. I now stay away from some products because of defective issues. I vote with my wallet.
On a side not, at least these companies are listening to us and are starting to put Kadee couplers on their rolling stock!!! I just noticed Exactrail’s new releases have Kadee #5s already installed. Link
No, the Chinese can manufacture items that are equal the quality of any item in the world. The problem is that level of quality costs as much there as it does anywhere else. If you’re shopping based solely on price, you’re going to suffer the consequences, and the Chinese have no problem cranking out cheap crap if that’s all you’re willing to pay for.
I think there are several factors here, all working against an affordable hobby.
Standard of living and wages are increasing overseas where much of our Model Railroading locomotives and cars are made, as well as, track and other stuff are made.
Currency exchange is changing. The U.S. is pressuring China to revalue their currency. While that’s good for us as a whole, it’s bad for model railroading prices.
Since about 2000, Middle class income has not kept up with inflation (recently in many cases, it has actually declined as workers are forced to take pay cuts or furloughs).
The quality bar has gone up significantly. Museum quality is now the norm. Good running out of the box is expected.
Unfortunately, I think think this will only get worse going forward.
Milepost - yeah, sure they can, but they are not interested in, unless they see top $ for it. Remember that their background is a communistic economy, where a plan determined the output, and only quantity counted. That thinking is still around.
It finally boils down to “you get what you pay for” - I´d rather pay the premium to my own folks, though!
I’m sorry, but is NOT true. The products that I have had quality issues with are top of the line rolling stock with high prices. One example was a recent purchase of the new release Walthers Bi-level Autoracks, they were a whopping $28 each (at my LHS), and were $40 each on Walthers site. I had to replace ALL of the wheelsets as the darn things would not even roll, I mean come on. So I had to spend extra money to get them to roll correctly when they should have came this way right out of the box.
Michael - it is a question of who´s bagging the money, the manufacturer or the importer? My guess is, that for a $ 28 car, the manufacturer sees not more than $ 5.
Yes, this is very likely. People often forget that there is the manufacturer’s price (under contract), and then a distributor (could be Bachmann themselves, just as an example), and finally the seller., each wanting to build in close to a 100% profit margin. The final selling price, understandably, rises very quickly. And if the distributor is Walthers, who might sell to other distributors/suppliers to LHS’s, now you have another tier in the price setting.
I think I can understand why BLI went the route they did over the past three years or so. It may have been contrary to common practices, but they eliminated distribution/re-seller costs that the customer had to absorb, and it may have helped to keep them afloat in tough times. Not sure, though, just guessing.