The Little World

A good question – and one the owners of the places would desperately like to have an accurate answer to – there have been enough hobby shops that have foundered upon not being able to answer it. I often wonder if there was a way to have prevented this.

Note: I realise that some shops foundered through lack of capitalisation – some on the changing city development that threw them out after a lease was terminated – and one that saw an elderly owner defrauded by a partner. It will have been much the same with many retail businesses in the past 50 years.

But sometimes I think that the shops may not have been able to gauge the wants and needs of their customers. They may not have researched enough. They may have not asked what was wanted – or they might have been given the sort of ambitious answers from the hobbyists that led to unwise stock buying.  ” I’d buy one of them if you got it in…” is the classic statement from the buying side of the counter but when the shop buys on speculation, it sometimes is stuck with stock that the so-called customer has pawed over. Getting a substantial deposit for orders is a very good idea for both parties.

I suspect the best plan for an owner is to have direct contact with enough hobby organisations to get real feedback. Of course a great deal of this feedback will be specious, but there’ll be a kernel of truth even in the wildest flights of fancy.

Above all, the shop needs to be organised. A maelstrom is exciting to some extent, but, as often as not, people overlook what they come to see and sales are missed. Good shelves, good shelving, and good lighting never go amiss. And an injection of new stock regularly to keep people anxious to go in. I know a number of my expensive purchases have been made whilst just on a speculative visit.

Ah. Ummm…here’s a point at which the retailer and I both agree and disagree. The point of price. I fully understand that every sale must yield a profit if the concern is to succeed. And some items will have large prices at retail because they have large prices at wholesale. They will be splendid goods, well presented, from well-known makers. Goodoh.

But there will also be less-spectacular goods from more obscure sources. Old stock from somewhere in time and space. Names that have been lost to history, yet still printed on the front of a cardboard box or the top of a plastic bag. Small goods, arcane goods, goods of the third class. Possibly salable, but to the poor and the humble.

These are not goods that should still retain their $ 39.00 pricetag when the rest of the packet has yellowed and split. No sane person, modeller or not, will consider a dime-store plastic truck worth that price. Hobby shops should have regular clean-out sales at penny prices to clear the garbage out and make space for good stuff. The accountant’s loss on the old dreck will be recovered in the impulse buying of the customers when they percolate through the rest of the store.

Remember that Rexall Drugs in Canada had a yearly one-cent sale that gave you an item for that price when you bought a duplicate at normal price – a 50% sale on everything in the store. My mother saved money all year to go spend it at that sale and Rexall made more money than a moose could leap over in every store.