The Little World

If you would like to destroy a commercial firm – to lay waste to its factories and plunge its former employees into miserable poverty, you must follow this simple procedure:

1. Buy one of the products that they make.
2. Try it and find that it is excellent.
3. Become proficient in its use.
4. Expect that you’ll be able to buy more on a regular basis.

As soon as you establish this pattern, the company will sell itself to some other buyer who will decide to cancel the product that you have come to love. Eventually, enough people will like different products from the new firm and wish to purchase them that the management will be forced to declare bankruptcy and lock the doors.

This has happened a number of times in the various hobbies and interests I follow, and scale modelling is no different. I have just been informed that a product I love is no longer to be made as the firm has been sold to someone new. I will be reduced to scrabbling about for remnant stock in my home town or on-line stashes.

Or not. There is an alternative.

I shall research similar products from two other firms. They cannot all be bad, nor can they all be untameable. I will find two viable substitutes. The law of averages says that three firms in the same business cannot find buyers at the same time, nor fail simultaneously. Sooner or later one will sell to the other and the loser will have to continue being successful and competent. Then I’ll have ’em at my mercy…