All retail business is under great pressure to change and the traditional hobby shop is under more pressure then most. You can see it all over the country and perhaps the world. As the traditional hobby shop owner has years of declining real income they close and retire or move on to something that will put food on the table. The traditional hobby business had an inventory of items that people needed all the time and would special order other items as needed from wholesalers. The traditional model is broken in many ways! With the aging of the baby boomers who for the most part did well. I think we are in the golden years of choice and quality in the model railroad hobby but it is not helping the small hobby shops. Most high quality and special product items are produced in "limited runs" today. If a small shop wants to handle limited runs they have to buy large batches and put them into inventory and while the quality has gotten much better the price has also gotten much higher. The long and short of it is that it is not good business for a small shop to carry a large inventory that might not sell above cost because that is how you loose money. Wholesalers could buffer the small shops but if they did they would have the problem of loosing money on inventory that did not move so they don't. The small dealer can't win because he can't afford to stock limited run inventory and when he orders an item, it is often out of stock at the wholesaler while the wholesaler is still selling the item retail if you mail order from them.

The net result of retail crunch in the hobby industry is that we are loosing worth while local hobby shops at a steady rate. Some of the shops are growing with mail order and lately with web sales, so all is not lost. The new super hobby shops have the traffic of a national customer base to move inventory and are able to afford the cost of stocking the limited run batches and having a large amount of money in inventory. What the changes in the industry mean, is that most of us will need to buy some or all of our supplies mail order. The changes are for real and we don't have a way to stop the current changes in process. For the most part I don't mind mail order, because I know what I want and I normally get a better price. At least I can get what I want for hobby supplies most of the time.

I do have some issues with how the industry is changing and how it effects the future of the hobby. How are new people going to enter the hobby? In the past you would go to the local hobby shop and see the cool stuff and when you got hooked the people at the hobby shop would tell you how and what to use to get the results you wanted. If the local hobby shop is gone then what? My small answer to the problem, is to create this web site where I can give the details about what I did, how I did it, why I did it and the results of what I doing with the hobby. I have searched the web many times and I have to admit that a new comer to the hobby currently would not be able to replace the information you would expect to get from a local hobby shop with the information on the web without joining a web group and asking for answers. We have to hope that anyone that could become a model railroader will find a copy of a railroading magazine and join us. My second problem with how things are, is finding out about what you want so you can mail order it. We have the Walther's Catolog but not everything is in it and how the price of the catolog is climbing! I don't know if this is true, but I would not be supprised if Walthers is charging some people to have their product listed in the catolog which would mean less content. How will I find out about the small providers of model railroad equipment so I can order it? For every problem there is an answer...