The Little World

The heart of a hobby shop owner must be made of leather and whipcord. Or marzipan. Either way, it needs to be tough and resilient.

The ultimate test of this comes at the end of the day when the last customer leaves and the till is totalled up. If the last customer is the only customer all day, the cash-up goes a lot faster. And there must be days when this seems to be the case.

After the economics are totted up the owner gets a chance to walk the aisles and look at all the things that didn’t sell yet again. The kit boxes and the half-filled paint racks must leer out of the darkness at him with accusations of bad planning and buying.

It’s been worse in the last few years as the pandemic and wars sucked away a lot of the stock supplies that people really did want to buy…and then sent in odd shipments of stuff that has not sold elsewhere either. I suspect that a lot of the kit makers have failed to read the room as far as making things that people actually want to build. To sell, a kit has to:

a. Be a recognisable prototype.
b. Have some relevance to the buyer.
c. Be priced reasonably enough to justify the money.
d. Be of buildable quality.
c. Be packaged with some degree of quality.

A lot of the things that have clung to the shelves locally miss out on many of these points. Buyers can excuse one or two but when most of the kit is naff, the money walks out the door.