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Boss 'eadbreaka wrote:I really can not fathon out why they would get rid of such a popular and useful service.
Does any one know why?

High management cost tied to obsolete metal models for low revenue and low profit?

What I don't understand is why GW doesn't make every sprue individually available for sale. That should be easy money.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Boss 'eadbreaka wrote:Yes, but when you do the math, they made more money selling each individual part, when you added every bit in the kit together, they were making a few bucks extra.

Except it cost them *several* bucks extra to spin & store & stock & pick & pack those individual bitz, along with having to spin up "unpopular" bitz. GW almost certainly lost money on every bitz sale.

nkelsch wrote:
Actually, they shut it down because all of the bitz fell off the wall in a massive disaster and it would have been financially impossible to pay the manpower it would take to re-sort all the bitz, and there was no reason to re-cast multiple pieces of EVERY METAL MODEL THEY MADE in order to support the full line of all thier bitz the way they did for the website and troll magazine.

Really, all the shelves collapsed and fell on the floor. That is the long and short of it. They sold off the bags by the pound to clean up. I got a giant bag from the 'orc and goblin' area of the pile and ended up with literally hundreds of metal squigs and black orcs. I still have piles of metal bitz from the days when I could bit by weight.

Oh... and the battlewagon that drove around and sold bitz at GW events was stolen... straight up and has never been found.

.

Close, but not quite.

Bitz room at Glen Burnie had a major disaster when a few tons of bitz collapsed into a huge pile. But the bitz service was down in Memphis when it closed up, as I remember. All of the manufacturing and warehousing in the US moved to Memphis years ago.

The bitz wagon did get stolen. They found it 3 weeks later, stripped. It got revamped and used again for a couple of years.

Let's clear up some rumors here. I worked in Direct Sales for GW, all the way until they got rid of the bitz program.

Mikhaila pretty much has it right. The bitz service lost the company money, because of all the work it took casting, sorting, picking, and shipping the orders, than fixing problems, then inventorying everything. It simply did not work out to do all that work for a small profit. Furthermore, the workers down in Memphis usually did not know the product, and because it was hard, menial work, retention was low, so you constantly had to retrain people to pick, pack and ship bitz. I can tell you almost half my day involved fixing mispacked bitz and box orders. ( The other half I spent talking to Mikhaila! jk jk). They actually had a 4 man customer service team down there to match the 6 man team at Glen Burnie headquarters.

Also, the company stopped selling bitz by the weight years ago, and employee orders had nothing to do with the service being shut down.

The big crash in the bitz room happened when the bitz were still made, stored and shipped from the Glen Burnie office back in the late 1990's-early 2000's. I beleive manufacturing was moved to Memphis around 2001-2002 ( because the 1st Baltimore Battle Bunker store was located in the old casting/polishing room and that opened up summer of 2001.)

We only sent out whole models as a correction when the parts were not available as bitz.

Finally, the move to plastics also factored in. Eventually all the kits but a few will be plastic, and when the molds wear out, they may not be able to make a new one from the original master. Using a cast figure to make a mold leads to an imperfect copy. Bitz would have died out no matter what.

I do believe they had a great idea making the bitz packs, and they asked our department to design up all the kinds of bitz packs we thought customers would like...and then they promptly forgot about us, before they decided to eliminate our department.

KeithGatchalian wrote:We only sent out whole models as a correction when the parts were not available as bitz.

I must have regularly got a different customer service group, as I think if I had records from that era (3rd edition) I would have several examples to the contrary. Not a big deal, though, and I'm guessing this might have been a bit of a hot topic for the CS department. (Sending new kits is easier, but I'm sure the company would prefer to ship a $2 part weighing a couple ounces as opposed to a $30 kit that weighs a couple pounds).

KeithGatchalian wrote:Finally, the move to plastics also factored in. Eventually all the kits but a few will be plastic, and when the molds wear out, they may not be able to make a new one from the original master. Using a cast figure to make a mold leads to an imperfect copy. Bitz would have died out no matter what.

I do believe they had a great idea making the bitz packs, and they asked our department to design up all the kinds of bitz packs we thought customers would like...and then they promptly forgot about us, before they decided to eliminate our department.
bitz.

I agree that a lot of people would have been very happy if the 'bitz packs' had been pushed more aggressively. I can understand GW not selling some sprues because it would make it too easy to make full models out of leftovers or similar, but it would be nice to see a lot more sprues offered and maybe do more special accessory sprues (like the Ork Roller thingy)... Ideally one for each race every 'refresh' even if they're sometimes infantry parts, sometimes vehicle stuff, etc.