Al left D&J several years ago. I see him at Jacques Littlefield's place periodically as he volunteers there with me.

What is Jacques Littlefields?? Ask AL if he is willing to teach me how to paint a carrier deck yet. He promised me when I was sixteen that he'd eventually teach me.
Cheers.

Damon, we'll agree to disagree. I'm in the food marketing business, and while there are niche retailers who do well, eventually most categories succumb to the larger retailers for some specific reasons, including economies of scale. Your post is very passionate, and my heart is with you. But there's a fundamental difference between selling locally-grown food products and models that are the same, whether ordered from Hong Kong or purchased in a bricks & mortar store. Consumers will pay more for "locavore" food choices, but not for a kit they can get for up to half the price on the Internet (and if you buy in bulk, there's no shipping charges).

Like I say, my heart is with you.

But my head says that the LHS doesn't stand a chance long-term.

Some will survive, but overall they are undermined by the manufacturers who sell both to them and to Internet retailers. The latter can undercut them in a variety of ways, and without a conscious decision to spend more per kit (something few people will do), the LHS can't compete with the guy in Oshkosh who has little or no overhead, and who can make profits selling in bulk. As you undoubtedly know, retailers pay interest on the money they borrow to purchase inventory, so the guy who can unload his inventory quicker is going to make more money than the guy who has a stock of un-bought Sd.Kfz.7s he's keeping around in case I walk in and have to have one.

The same thing happened a few years back when I was in hockey equipment testing: the manufacturers couldn't resist selling to Sports Authority, and even though they developed a "cheaper" line for SA, it still killed off local skate shops. The the Internet retailers undercut both of them.

When a business must survive on the kindness of strangers....

I cannot get over the idea of what seems to me "mercy buying".

The LHS is just the end of a chain with all the middle-men making lots of money from kits they import. There is a certain company in Australia I used to know a lot about and they would regularly make 100% or more profit on a Japanese kits they imported. That left the poor LHS having to charge more and me having to pay even more. Then you would have to wait months, even years, for a new kit to appear in the stores after you had seen it in magazines.

That all changed with the coming of the www, all for the better in my opinion. I still buy paints and the occaisionaly kit from the LHS, but I don't like being ripped off by middle-men and save money by buying from overseas companies.

Someone in the thread somewhere mentioned a LHS in San Carlos. Does anyone have the name and contact for them? Cheers.

...weren't breaking any sales records but it was a great place to hang out, trade war stories, and buy plastic kits.

My hats off to anyone who runs a LHS!

Some of the guys in Silicon Valley Scale Modelers had models on display at Yanni's and didn't get them back. He kept the change in business direction secret saying he was just remodeling.

It's always interesting, when someone brings back one of these old threads, to see so many names that we don't see anymore. I always wonder if those people lost interest in the hobby, or just lost interest in participating in online forums?

Hisham