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Airfix model aeroplanes


James Barnett

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2 hours ago, Ngantek said:

I don't disagree with your assessment on value, but I do think this is a slightly one-sided viewpoint. Costs are going up for businesses just as they are for individuals, and expecting the quality of products (which of course have to be designed, manufactured, boxed and shipped a long time in advance) to magically improve in proportion to spiralling energy and shipping costs is just unreasonable. I also see a lot of comparisons to price points that don't seem to take into account the reality of inflation, particularly when you consider the UK rate is over 10% at the moment.

 

Of course, deciding that a kit no longer represents good value is totally understandable and I suspect almost all of us will have to be thinking much more carefully about what is affordable in the months and years to come given the current economic situation. That drop in consumer buying power, and increase in costs is going to be difficult for 'leisure sector' businesses like kit manufacturers to deal with I suspect. I just wanted to push back a little against a school of thought that I see on these forums quite a lot; that seems to take kit pricing or out-of-print decisions as a personal affront designed only to screw the modeller.

Andy

 

Yes, its slightly one-sided... but then again nobody is speaking up for the consumer.

 

Yes, we have 10%  inflation.....  but that doesn't excuse 100% price rises.

Not saying they shouldnt adjust costs,  but am saying that nobody will buy from them if they take the pee.

And 100% rise is taking the pee.

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It is not only Airfix that is increasing costs.

 

I remember seeing a couple of months ago one of Hannants weekly emails stating that due to the rising shipping costs that certain eastern manufactures would NOT be imported anymore due to the massive increase in shipping making it economically unviable to import anymore! I cannot remember the brand, but they were having to drop them due to the huge costs now involved. We are now seeing other businesses folding due to 100%, 200%, 300%, or more increases in shipping costs, energy costs etc. NO company can afford to swallow those costs.

 

Revell, for example, released their A400m Atlas/Grizzly at £49.99 (I remember as I had to buy a second one due to the original being damaged when we had our house cleaned before we moved). The current issue is £72.99 that is a 50% increase. I'm noticing everyday items, every time we go shopping increasing. I've seen stuff that has increased by 20 or 30 % over what it was in the last few weeks - not 10% that may be the headline ROI but there are items going up a lot more than than, and some things going up less than that. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) takes all of that information and then calculates what the headline rate is (CPI or RPI)

 

None of us like inflation, but sadly at this moment in time there is absolutely nothing we can do about the price increases, they are a fact of life. I don't work! I cannot work due to medical issues, I have a fixed income that does not increase due to inflation. If there is something I want, I save towards it. 

 

I personally think we all need to take a step back from this thread and lay off the Airfix attacking a little bit. Every single company out there is increasing prices due to the world wide situation re transport and energy, no one is immune to its effects and just focusing on one company is unfair. 

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4 hours ago, Graham T said:

This kit was tooled in the 1970s & presumably those tools are paid for.

The tools might have been paid for by the original Airfix company but every time the company (and therefore the molds) have changed hands new debt is incurred which must be paid off. We know that debt service is a significant outlay for the current incarnation of Hornby and part of that will be to pay for this Harrier mould.

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8 hours ago, VMA131Marine said:

The tools might have been paid for by the original Airfix company but every time the company (and therefore the molds) have changed hands new debt is incurred which must be paid off. We know that debt service is a significant outlay for the current incarnation of Hornby and part of that will be to pay for this Harrier mould.

I was just going to say that. Hornby paid for those moulds, along with the other assets - and debts - of Airfix, at the time they bought the brand back in 2006. Whatever the original Airfix company paid for the tooling of their 1/24 Harrier in the early 1970s would have been pretty irrelevant by 2006.

 

The same goes for all the old-tool kits issued by Revell. Revell  has had many ownership changes since the 1970s so again, companies that have bought the Revell brand in more recent decades would not be taking into account the original tooling costs incurred by Revell in decades past. In fact, with Revell, they would also be acquiring moulds that Revell themselves never tooled in the first place - such as Matchbox or FROG moulds.

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Back in the good old days of the sixties, the initial order from Woolworths alone paid for the investment of the tooling. When my firm supplied Woolies in the 70s there were 932 stores, do your own maths. Nowadays it takes longer to amortise new tooling investment. Regardless of that, Airfix is a small cog in the Hornby Group and it is pointless looking at the performance of any individual kit. The release of any kit (new or old) will depend upon the number of sales anticipated. The cost of manufacturing that quantity and the timescale it will take to manufacture within the schedule for all the product they intend to make. Its a numbers game within a vastly bigger picture. Getting hung up on the price of individual kits is pointless.

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On 9/5/2022 at 7:02 PM, Graham T said:

I see their 1/24 Harrier GR1 is back……..at just south of £100.00!  This kit was tooled in the 1970s & presumably those tools are paid for.  Obs the kit has to be manufactured, packed, distributed at a profit & sold by the retailer at a profit but really?  £100 for a 40+ year old tooling?  Their brand new tooled 1/24 Spitfire IX can be had for less!

As it happens a friend of mine commented on the price of this very kit a couple of days ago and he didn't even know that the tool is nearly 50 years old. He hasn't built models since he was a kid but he's interested in aircraft and particularly the Harrier. He said he'd seen an advert for a "new" Airfix Harrier in a newspaper and had been sufficiently interested to look on the Airfix website but when he saw the price he immediately lost interest. A while ago another non-modelling friend said the same about the 1/72 Buccaneer, which he'ld been thinking of buying for his father.

 

Of course it's not just Airfix, though perhaps they attract more comment. It's several years since a model shop owner told me he'd stopped stocking Italeri kits because of the price he needed to charge for them and I notice that (e.g.) their Ca 313/14 kit of similar early '70s vintage is retailing in the UK for an eyewatering £30. I bought an Academy P-51 a few weeks ago because I have a tentative plan to build a 1/72 F-6C at some future date, I didn't have a kit in stock to cover that project and it seemed prudent to lay one down now while there's still an affordable option. It cost £10.99, which seems reasonable enough, but when I put it in the relevant cardboard box in the garage I noticed that the one I'd bought from the same shop within the last 18 months had been £6.99. That's a 57% increase. I still call in at my local model shop on a weekly basis but now I look at kit prices and with the increasingly occasional exception I can't justify paying them. When I heard that Arma were producing an F-6C my original thought was to buy one for the project I mentioned. When I discovered that it costs over £24, though, I dropped the idea.

 

If I didn't have a stash to live off which I accumulated over several decades, I really think that after 50+ years (including the 1970s price rises) this would be the point at which I would have had to part company with the hobby. For instance, I rediscovered an interest in 8th AF aircraft recently. Luckily, I have unbuilt kits from the last time round, including several Liberators. How much is a 1/72 Liberator kit now? The only option available from a well-known retailer is £70. Secondhand ones are £40 - £60. 

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The price increases in the early/mid 1970s were of an even bigger magnitude than what we are experiencing now. And the demographic of typical kit buyers (chiefly boys and male teenagers) were funding their kit purchasing from pocket money - so the impact of those price hikes would have been even more keenly felt.

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Good point Eric Mc. In the 1970s I remember regularly being taunted by an advert in Military Modelling magazine for the 1/16 Imai Elephant tank destroyer. Its cost (several times that of a normal 1/35 kit) was way out of my price range as a younger person, and I used to wonder how many - or how - few modellers could afford this detailed kit, with realistic tracks and other attractive features. For all I knew, the kit was possibly even crewed by tiny 1/24 scale elves wearing Wehrmacht uniforms which bore the correct red piping. Its massive size made it a lovely thing to look at, but even if I had had enough cash, I could think of better things to buy with my money, such as new shoes. (Sound of mournful violin music.) What I'm trying to say is "Caveat Emptor": Let the Buyer Beware. Or something. 

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On 9/8/2022 at 2:40 PM, Eric Mc said:

The price increases in the early/mid 1970s were of an even bigger magnitude than what we are experiencing now. And the demographic of typical kit buyers (chiefly boys and male teenagers) were funding their kit purchasing from pocket money - so the impact of those price hikes would have been even more keenly felt.

On the other hand, as a teenager in the 1970s I wasn't paying the household food, utilities and council tax bills, nor did I have a house to maintain, a wife and a dog. Nor internet access, a smartphone, subscription TV etc. because they hadn't been invented yet (and a good thing too as far as the last two are concerned). Fast forward 50 years and I'm once again on a fixed income, this time an occupational pension, but with all those commitments now having to be taken into account.

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A Personal View 

 

In this thread we have speculated a lot about a company's profits, debts, marketing costs etc which seems to suggest we accept that a business is a machine for making money. I don't think that's always the case because many small model related company owners seem content not to grow, but just to make a living (or half a living) while enjoying producing the things that they enjoy. However, I think that the big companies are surely in it for the money, even if some of the staff do it for the love of the game.

 

Given that motivation, I believe that it would be foolish for them to hold prices down in a period when due to huge media exposure of the world's problems, they are expected to rise. The financial crisis is surely beginning to bite some of us but there are many people who still have plenty of disposable income. So far, it's not as bad as the headlines suggest. So far...

 

With inflation on everyone's minds I think it would be idiotic for businesses to miss the opportunity of increasing profits by raising prices far more than their rising costs. The value of an item is classically "whatever the market will bear" and if the market expects prices to rise but is not yet in financial distress sufficient to prevent purchasing, then the companies should grab as much of our dwindling money as they can while we are so apt to panic-buy for the future. When sales fall off because we are all skint, I predict that they will bring the prices back down. They will be able to do this because they will have a little extra money in hand from the current trading period.

 

I'm now thinking that I'll mostly live on my stash until things settle down again. However, that didn't stop me buying a couple of second-hand kits from a market stall yesterday. I know the owner to be one of those people who trades for the fun of it, in retirement, for the love of the game. Curiously, his prices are still much the same as they have been for the last few years.

 

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On 9/5/2022 at 7:43 PM, IanHx said:

Yes, we have 10%  inflation.....  but that doesn't excuse 100% price rises.

 

Whilst I'm not about to die on the hill supporting £100 for a 1970s tooling, the 10% inflation figure is average across the entire UK economy and not useful to compare any one specific thing.

 

Regardless who is to blame in the end, it costs me 50% more to drive my car to the post office than it did last year on fuel alone, and as we posted in March, 3000 empty tins from Germany this year cost 50% more than 3000 empty tins from Germany cost the same time last year - plus of course the Brexit gift which keeps on giving i.e. the requirement to finance VAT on top for up to 6 months depending on timings of invoice receipt to quarterly VAT returns to receiving VAT relief. Let's not talk about the cost of power to the business...

 

10% increase as a guide price? You're dreaming...

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26 minutes ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

 

10% increase as a guide price? You're dreaming...

 

Agreed, the real rate of inflation is a lot higher than the officially published figure !

If the actual cost prices really have doubled, then its dark days ahead for the hobby because

customer's incomes certainly have not doubled......meaning they can only buy half as much - or even less.

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