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 Aerethan wrote:

 Testify wrote:

 spaceelf wrote:
Another bad business decision by GW.

Getting rid of one product and using the space to sell another more profitable one?

Yeah sounds about right.

Tell me what is going to take up the 3 feet of shelf space that will generate oh so much more profit .

Dunno, ask your local GW manager.

There's no point, they wouldn't know.

I'm pretty sure any competent manager knows what and where his margins are at.

 Sidstyler wrote:
There's no point, they wouldn't know.

Presumably you'll see when they fill that shelf space.

12thRonin wrote:
I'm pretty sure any competent manager knows what and where his margins are at.

Having hung out with my local manager as much as I have, they know pretty much only past tense things. Profit margins they know because they have book keeping.

An example would be the pulling of Mines of Moria from shelves. That was announced early last week to LGS's, but my GW store got that email Friday night. He didn't know ahead of time. The only thing from the last year that he confirmed he knew about weeks early was the paint line and that was because he had to be prepped on how to sell it and to whittle down the old stock as much as possible. They really don't tell them all that much ahead of time.

The email stating to pull FW didn't say what would be replacing it. It'll probably just be more BL books which you could already have ordered in to the store.

Good thing that White Dwarf now treats FW new releases as equals to GW new releases, making people want to buy FW stuff.
Sometimes one part of GW doesn't give a damn what another part of GW is doing

The excuse our store came up with was a lack of shelf space. Same for losing all but the newest books of the HH series.

Maybe FW doesn't fit the GW policy of declining sales, so they decided to drop everything helping FW sales from the stores, hopefully bringing FW sales in line with GW sales

 Kroothawk wrote:
Maybe FW doesn't fit the GW policy of declining sales, so they decided to drop everything helping FW sales from the stores, hopefully bringing FW sales in line with GW sales

They don't want stores having sales spikes from the HH book throwing off next years projected income.


How on earth can a business like GW which has a revolving product line expect sales to always be consistent. Not every army is going to sell the same as the others. Some will be better, some worse.

Perhaps GW will catch on to that and start only releasing SM every year.

GW doesn't expect consistant sales,

their institutional investors do, that's the problem with being a public company

hence GWs sitting on finished codexes/models they can 'drop in' if revenues look as if they'll be too low (and why they don't just release the lot)

It's the same thinking that got one of my favorite SF bookshops closed down, they did most of their business over the Xmas period, and their bank eventually called in their debts because they got jumpy over the spikey sales

 phantommaster wrote:
The excuse our store came up with was a lack of shelf space. Same for losing all but the newest books of the HH series.

I don't get why they couldn't then either keep them in the stock room (with a poster up on the wall somewhere saying they exist), or order them in on demand.

Also the GW stores usually seem to be behind on news Vs the internet / Independants, they seem to only know the day before things happen, and I've given them heads up on changes days before head office tells them

Did we get clarification as to whether this was a GW decision or a FW one? I remember that removing the figures themselves from GW stores was a FW directive.

 Aerethan wrote:
Perhaps GW will catch on to that and start only releasing SM every year.

yes please. along with mini-updates for all kinds of armies, much the way PP or CB for example do that. It would be glorious!

Disappointing news. The only reason I have any FW books is because my local GW had them. Kind of surprised especially with the HH books out and more on the horizon. It will be interesting to see what they convert the shelf space over to.

well, so much for visiting the GW store they just opened up here. Now there is absolutely no reason to visit. My FLGS sells the minis for less (the owner told me he moves enough product that he gets the same rates as the GW stores do so he passes the savings on to the customers) and I have no interest in GW modeling products (Im ok with my cutting mat not having Citadel written on it.) Also my FLGS has enough tables to actually hold a tourney on. (I was told the store had 2 vs FLGS' 8 tables)

So I struggle to understand how GW making a local store was worth the effort if it can't compete with the Brick and mortar stores that already have a local following.

Okay. I talked to the manager of the Seattle Battle Bunker and he said that the decision was Forge World's and not GW's. Basically this falls along the same lines as their decision to no longer allow GW stores to order FW items for their customers. The stores were apparently not given any reasoning behind FW's decision this time and if you'll remember, FW cited improved customer service as the reason for removing the models.

The manager of the Bunker said he had no idea what FW's plans were or why they feel the need to remove GW stores as a distribution point for their products but he wasn't very happy with the decision.

I spoke to a red shirt a while ago about this and this is what he said:

The FW part of the GW franchise is going to be more heavily focused on conventions and mailorder. They are pulling back stock from GW branded stores as well as bunkers to have more on hand to bring to conventions where they see better sales.


As always I take anything form a red shirt with a grain of salt but this guy seemed legit.

Sounds like they can't supply the demand that shops would make. GW should invest in Forgeworld, but they don't, despite them saying how well it does in their annual reports. And it remains a very small operation from which you can't even get a response to an email.

GW could do so much more with Forgeworld, employ more staff, increase production and get it into shops. But they choose to run it as a tiny side operation and the only love it seems to get is from those actually working in it.

I think it's actually the opposite. The large scale resin kits are big and hard to stock since they take up alot of room. They're also not impulse buys either so cast on demand prevents having money tied up in inventory collecting dust. The number of upgrade kits they can sell are likewise limited.

12thRonin wrote:
I think it's actually the opposite. The large scale resin kits are big and hard to stock since they take up alot of room. They're also not impulse buys either so cast on demand prevents having money tied up in inventory collecting dust. The number of upgrade kits they can sell are likewise limited.

Each store having upgrade sets that are the more popular choices/armies would give FW exposure that they otherwise don't have. They don't need to stock tons of them, but having some on hand allows them to be pushed like any other product.

Furthermore, for FW to be profitable they need to be as accessible as possible. The harder it is to get a product, the less it sells.

Hell even having FW catalogs in store would be better than this policy of "nothing outside of the website" selling.