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Brother Azul wrote:Since when the hell has a GW store had a female employee???!?!?! I've seen female gamers, but never a female blueshirt.

My local (now closed) GW store had at least one female employee. My current FLGS is owned and operated by a woman. Female gamers are less of the mythical creature than many on these forums make them out to be, although I'm sure that attitude isn't helping.

My local GW and local major GW both have female staff.

As for blisters, a lot of stuff got pulled off shelves just before Finecast got released, and Direct Only got introduced.
At that point, internet retailers seemed to loose supply/interest in blisters, and GW became a single source of some models.

A huge pity. Everything bar vehicles was sold in blisters when I started, but boxes do make stuff easier to find in the shop.

Brother Azul wrote:Hang on hang on hang on I think everyone is missing the point...

Necroagogo wrote:she said she didn't know

Since when the hell has a GW store had a female employee???!?!?! I've seen female gamers, but never a female blueshirt.

Anyway on topic. It does sound a bit counter intuitive to not have metal blisters there anymore. Most of my impulse buys are the blisters. If Howard is correct and its due to theft then the staff need to keep a sharper eye on their "customers" imo. I once stepped out of a store to get better reception on my mobile so i could make a call, what i didnt realise was that i still had a blister pack in my hand. I had no intention of stealing it but when i very sheepishly walked back in and put it back on the shelf one of the staffers noticed me and made a comment about how he didnt think i was going to steal it which is why he didnt call sercurity.

I was looking to see if anyone else spotted that.

Who cares about GW sale fail. Now this is news.

They do a lot of special order materials to curb holding onto models for longer periods of time. How many Kroxigor will you need for your Lizardmen Army? Why should GW have to keep large items like this in stock 100% of the time when they can make them in large batches and fill orders as they come in. We can complain that they should have 100% of their products in stock at every retail outlet but thats not the best business practice.

Its something that we learned in the car industry. We found that we could automate production and bring the price of the part down tremendously because we can make so many of them and not pay people and we've only got these machines that we bought and the electricity to use them. The issue we ran into afterwards was, well where do we put all of these parts we've made because we aren't selling them so we have to expand the warehouse and our system and eventually we have to scrap a large number because a new model came out and we will never sell them because the demand for the part has declined.

GW doesn't want to invest in dropping a lot of money into making something that is going to be a slow mover. Again, how many Krox will you have in your lizardmen army? I've got 3 in my total 3,000 point list. There is absolutely no reason to make sure there are 3-4 on the shelf of each store at all times because there may be 1-2 lizardmen players at the store who may or may not have all the Krox they need in their army. You can order it and they will have it by the end of the week.

Thats just my two cents. Take it or leave it. It doesn't bother me.

whigwam wrote:

Brother Azul wrote:Since when the hell has a GW store had a female employee???!?!?! I've seen female gamers, but never a female blueshirt.

My local (now closed) GW store had at least one female employee. My current FLGS is owned and operated by a woman. Female gamers are less of the mythical creature than many on these forums make them out to be, although I'm sure that attitude isn't helping.

Now that i think about it my FLGS is owned by a woman as well. The Table top wargaming section and all the model related gubbins is handled by a guy though. The owner just stands behind the jump out the front all day long.

R3con wrote:

Mr Mystery wrote:I mail ordered mine

Not seeing the problem here?

By giving me time to think about ordering a product, by delaying my purchase, you are letting me remember all the other responsibilities and expenses in my life. I cant count the number of times I dropped into a GWS to make a quick purchase, if it was on the shelf I bought it, if it had to be ordered I thought about if I really needed it or not and typically walked away without pulling out my wallet.

Thanks R3con - that's it in a nutshell. Especially true when contemplating a decent-sized beastmaster unit!

GW is hording all the metal for themselves because they know Failcast is complete gak.

boyd wrote:They do a lot of special order materials to curb holding onto models for longer periods of time. How many Kroxigor will you need for your Lizardmen Army? Why should GW have to keep large items like this in stock 100% of the time when they can make them in large batches and fill orders as they come in. We can complain that they should have 100% of their products in stock at every retail outlet but thats not the best business practice.

Its something that we learned in the car industry. We found that we could automate production and bring the price of the part down tremendously

Uh oh I think we hit a snag!!!!

I don't like buying minis sight-unseen, especially after this Finecast debacle. So that means if GW doesn't carry it in stock, unless I know I really want it, I'm not buying it.

Now GW could mitigate this by having one of every in-print model in the store simply for display purposes, or by keeping the prices so low that taking the risk on an unknown product isn't so bad. But if GW wants to charge premium prices, I expect premium service. If GW doesn't like that, well, I guess they can keep on doing what they're doing because they've already lost me as a customer and the longer I'm out I expect the harder it will be to convince me to come back.

mikhaila wrote:GW made the announcement months ago that they were abandoning metal and moving totally to plastic and resin. I haven't been able to order metal models through trade sales for months. (Some of the reasons behind this move are the same as why Privateer and Battlefront are also moving away from metal. A 400% increase in metal cost in 5 years with no end in sight being the main one)

I can order metal models from the GW website, getting a bit smaller discount than normal. I still order in melta and plasma gun bitz packs, special characters, etc to fill the shelves. Hopefully more and more models become recast in finecast resin, or new plastic models become available.

A pain to not have a complete line of models in, and something many retailers need to adapt to. Certainly not something new, it's been going on for some time now.

Why then are the Resin Models more expansive than the Metal ones?

I dunno, that's what happens. The staff have no control over it.

The reason I can think of for stores to recall their metal stock (rather than waiting for it to sell out) is so that they provide a consistent shopping experience for all customers. This means:
1) Every store should be stocking the same line - all finecast or all metal, but not FC at store A and metal at store B.
2) every item in the store should be the same material - so someone wanting 3 of model X doesn't end up with 2 metal and 1 resin, and two customers buying a product at the same time don't have to argue over who gets the 'better' one.

I had a similar experience with stocking iPods during my retail years - when a new launch was imminent, our ordering capacity was drastically reduced, and our remaining stock had to be returned to Apple the eve before the new release

JOHIRA wrote:

boyd wrote:They do a lot of special order materials to curb holding onto models for longer periods of time. How many Kroxigor will you need for your Lizardmen Army? Why should GW have to keep large items like this in stock 100% of the time when they can make them in large batches and fill orders as they come in. We can complain that they should have 100% of their products in stock at every retail outlet but thats not the best business practice.

Uh oh I think we hit a snag!!!!

Now GW could mitigate this by having one of every in-print model in the store simply for display purposes, or by keeping the prices so low that taking the risk on an unknown product isn't so bad. But if GW wants to charge premium prices, I expect premium service. If GW doesn't like that, well, I guess they can keep on doing what they're doing because they've already lost me as a customer and the longer I'm out I expect the harder it will be to convince me to come back.

Well, I've opened boxes of marauders and found that I have no bodies but tons of arms in the box. GW's customer service is excellent - I asked them not to send me a new box but just the legs. Their response was how many arm sprues did I get? Instead, I got legs to make 32 marauders from one box. I was very satisfied. GW does the same with all of their metal models that were miscast - I had an older commisar that had a miscast in one of the arms where the metal was soft and brittle and broke off. Their response was they sent me a new one and I got to keep the defect. The same would be true if you order their items without seeing them - they would still replace anything defective. You will get what you pay for.

wuestenfux wrote:

mikhaila wrote:GW made the announcement months ago that they were abandoning metal and moving totally to plastic and resin. I haven't been able to order metal models through trade sales for months. (Some of the reasons behind this move are the same as why Privateer and Battlefront are also moving away from metal. A 400% increase in metal cost in 5 years with no end in sight being the main one)

I can order metal models from the GW website, getting a bit smaller discount than normal. I still order in melta and plasma gun bitz packs, special characters, etc to fill the shelves. Hopefully more and more models become recast in finecast resin, or new plastic models become available.

A pain to not have a complete line of models in, and something many retailers need to adapt to. Certainly not something new, it's been going on for some time now.

Why then are the Resin Models more expansive than the Metal ones?

You're asking me?) I can guess, or repeat what GW told me. According to GW the new finecast is taking a lot more man hours to product models, so they charge more. My best guess as to the why on the switch: The raw material for Metals went up 400% in the last 5 years, and the raw materials will continue to go up. Shipping is also much higher than it used to be. The switch to resin will pay off in the long run, but is more expensive and more time consuming in the beginning. In 5 years the cost of resin may have not gone up at all, and metal will probably have doubled or quardrupled in cost. They save on raw materials and shipping costs. Will they drop the price of models? i Doubt it, just raise the price a lot less often.

My GW does not even sell Metal figures any more.

Ogryn wrote:My GW does not even sell Metal figures any more.

There are still some metal mini's that they make that are not available in finecast. You may have to order them but they should sell them to you.

UK GWs have had their metals recalled, and offer them as Direct Only, through their in-store link to GW (a PC with the website on it).
Not sure about other countries.

rather, they should sell all those metal models at a massively reduced price.

That's what other companies would do, but this is GW so no.

It also doesn't help that at the moment the metals are actually much higher quality than what they have to offer with Finecast (at least they're a lot less likely to have model-ruining defects) and are more desirable. lol...

It is helping me stock up on metals on ebay, as people may be 'upgrading' to Finecast

To OP, something similar happened to me. I went in to buy a Tau Broadside and they didn't carry it because it has metal parts. It is a 90% plastic model, but the guns are metal and they can't carry it in store anymore.

That policy is nuts and completely kills impulse buying if you have to order them online and wait for them to be delivered.

Lord_Osma wrote: That policy is nuts and completely kills impulse buying if you have to order them online and wait for them to be delivered.

Couldn't agree more. Wonder how much of the smaller units GW sell are purely impulse-driven and if they've noticed a drop recently.

Scipio Africanus wrote:rather, they should sell all those metal models at a massively reduced price.

That assumes that every single one of those metal models is being offered in Finecast right now.

That's not the case. By recalling them, however, it lets GW have a "more accurate level of stock management and a far easier way to know when to convert something over to Finecast".

At least that's what I was told by the GW mail order guy I talked to.

No, I meant when they become finecast.

At GW Wollongong they sell 2 Metal Minatures because someone returned them.