The Little World

That is either a very good rule for golf or a really weird idea involving musical chickens. But for our purposes we’ll apply it to scale plastic model building.

Many people in my scale modelling club – The Tuesday Soviet – pursue the purchase of kits through the internet. They patronise larger shops in the eastern states or overseas and also deal with back yard importers and distributors. In doing so they have access to a surprisingly large variety of models.

I have seen them gluing things that only ever seem to be offered on the internet and am somewhat envious of the variety of the kits they get. Of course many are of scales or subjects that don’t concern me, but I can see the merit in them nevertheless. To each their own.

However, the purchase of these exotic boxes does nothing at all for the local hobby shop owners here in Perth. They still have to find the rent for actual premises and salary for actual staff. They need to do it with sales that turn a profit – hence slightly higher individual prices. They need to do it with goods that will move in a reasonable time – hence the pedestrian nature of some shop selections. Not everything can be exotic or fabulous. Not if it is going to collect dust, rather than money.

So spreading your hobby dollar afar may be legal and tempting and cool to do, but it eventually makes it ever so much less likely that there will be a local supply of plain old paint or Xacto knife blades of a Saturday when you need them badly.

I also look upon the collection of exotics and fabuloso’s as placing a lot of emphasis on novelty and cheap thrills. If you can get as much pleasure and pride out of working well with a kit that is less packaged or primped, you are ahead of the game.

So I have decided not to order kits from elsewhere – with the possible exception of Metro Hobbies in Melbourne when they have Czech oddities show up on their doorstep. Even then I shall call at our two local general shops to see if something of the same container has fetched up here. I’ve had the experience before of purchasing there…only to see the same thing arrive here.

I shall play the kits as they lay – there are still dozens of varieties of model that I want to build and surely some of them are here in my local shops.