The Little World

New year seemed to demand new experiences. Also new work.

So I rather hurried to complete a model before midnight. It was not hard…just a small one. That meant that January could start afresh at the club with a new kit.

The stash owner always has the problem of which to select. In my case I intended to give in to one of the Christmas presents. After all, I selected them myself so I knew what I wanted. I also had a moment at the hobby shop to review what was on the shelves. It was a lot…

I’d gone for paint and tape, and was moral enough to return home with paint and tape only. But I was interested to see which kits were still left on the shelves after the Christmas rush and the Boxing Day sales. Not what sells…what not sells.

Many old acquaintance kits were seen. Not only reboxed 1950’s Revell classics – at 2024 prices – but a whole section of European types that seemed largely unknown and unloved. Ex-Soviet aircraft kitted up by a Ukrainian firm. They had been there for a year or more and had clung to the shelves like barnacles, despite desperate little sales periods. Let’s face it – their target audience was half a world and half a century away.

Quite why the buyers for the shop…the owners, one presumes…fell into this trap I don’t know. Perhaps it was a case of take the B or C stock to get supplies of the A merchandise. That was the case in the photo trade, and filled the shelves of the shop I worked for with some of the most unsaleable lenses you could have ever not asked for.

The only way the camera shop got shot of those optical landmines was to give them away as prizes or promotional items. The hobby shop would do well to consider this idea for themselves. Every metre of shelf space lying under dead stock is capital being wasted. Every person in the shop is taking wages for minding them, too, and with no return it is all red ink.