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Thank you for all the years!

In 1999 I read a Time Magazine article about a woman in New Mexico who was selling thousands of dollars of Tumble Weed to homes and businesses around the world via the internet. Fascinated, I decided to take my experience in retailing and put it to work.
It has been a hell of a ride, but as in all good things in life they unfortunately must come to an end. Due to changing personal and business circumstances I have decided to close TheWarStore.com.

Thank you all for being wonderful customers, supporters of our site for nearly 20 years. Some of you have been our customers for many years, and friends over the phone. We appreciate you very much and will miss being a part of your hobby.

Signed, Neal, Dorothy, Daniel, and TheWarStore team


PreOrders and Backorders


If you have a PreOrder or backorder with us currently, and want to turn it into items that are in stock, we will make a gift certificate for you use with a bonus amount. Please send us an email to warstore@optonline.net with a subject line "Gift Certificate" and your order number if you have that information.


Sale Details


At this point, the only items on our site are what we currently have in stock. All items have been marked down and marked with "LIMITED", so if you don't want to hunt the site, you can search for "LIMITED" and page through the items.

If an item is out of stock, it will be removed from your order! No backorders will be placed.

No coupons will be honored at this time.

We will not be taking any phone or in store orders. All of our inventory is on the website. (Please DO NOT come to the warehouse! We cannot take visitors at this time!)

Yeah, just got the email and was coming to post that...

Kinda sad. I've had great experiences from the War Store before, and they were one of the better online retailers.

Yeah their annual Thanksgiving sale was always 'start a new army' day for me.

But ebay shops lately offer the same price with free shipping, and if I'm not looking to save money I shop locally. So that may have been it.

Or maybe after 20 years he's just done.

Anyway best of luck to Neal, maybe I'll put in an order for old time's sake.

Well, that's sad.

I'm not above helping them clear out inventory, admittedly, but it's still sad.

Good luck to Neal and his crew.

If it wasn't for the War Store, I would have quit 40K back in 01-02. Their army deals kept me going. Thank you for years of customer service and best of luck to Neal and the staff.

I'm sorry to hear this as competition is always good for the consumer. Neal seems like a nice guy and I've always had good experiences with the Warstore.

I wish him well in his future endeavors, whatever they may be.

I'm curious what the straw that broke the camel's back was.

Huh. That's abrupt. Had great service from them for a lot of years, though there were a lot of delays end of last year, beginning of this year that put me off more orders this spring.

Still, saved a fair amount of money and got good service for a long time. Just a sudden end to 20 years of business,

They've been garbage for many years now, so I'm surprised it took this long. Not only is the website nearly unnavigable but they had to have the dishonor of being the last 'professional' website left that has a manually controlled inventory system.

FYI it seems their entire inventory is on their ebay store at a lower price than their website.

Nothing but great service from them. Sad to see it happen. Best of luck to them. I just placed an order for some legion stuff are they going to fulfill the order?

Every time I ordered stuff from them I had trouble (missing items). Their website was glitchy as heck when ordering international (endless loop of 'read our international shipping policies before proceeding'). So often I couldn't order, and when I did, I had the hassle of dealing with improperly picked orders. If they had their gak together, I would have ordered a lot more from them.

After looking over the suggested "Limited" search, then comparing that to what isn't Limited in the respective categories... it's clear that Neal knew this was coming and hasn't placed order for quite some time.

When I first got into Warmahordes (around the time Hordes came out) I used to love the War Store's sale to kit out a faction or start a new one.

But now with manufacturers dictating prices the War Store doesn't offer me anything I couldn't find elsewhere with better shipping. I haven't bought from them in years.

So I kinda saw this coming.

Aw, that's a shame. Always liked the Warstore even though I admittedly didn't order much, but they were always the go to place when I needed something. Best of luck to all of them!

That's a shame as it was a company I ordered from a lot in the early to mid 2000's.

However, over the last several years I almost always had problems with my order. Earlier this year I waited over 2 months for a pre-order only to be told they couldn't get it after I reached out. They seemingly would have been content to keep my money and never ship anything, including the numerous other items not on pre-order had I not contacted them. When I asked why at minimum I wasn't contacted after such a long time, I got no real answer, just an apology and several more weeks of waiting to exchange for other items in place of my pre-order.

That is just a poorly run business, plain and simple. It doesn't take any time to send an email and keep customers informed, and proactively cancel items you can't fulfill.

I'm truly sorry to see them go, but I'm honestly not a bit surprised. They were simply a company who didn't keep up at all with the competition, and there are numerous ebay sellers who offer a far superior service.

I hope Neal and his employees land on their feet and are able to move on to more successful endeavors though.

I loved the warstore and used to stop by a couple times a year. Over the last decade inventory has declined but much of it was rather slow moving lines that didn't get replaced. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the driving forces was the need to have a brick and mortar store to sell GW product. The war store was actually a large functioning commercial greenhouse. They had a retail location in riverhead for a bit, then moved that operation closer to NY city proper. (Don't remember the actual town) The same folks that picked your miniatures on the games side might have been picking flowers 10 minutes earlier. Looks like the greenhouse is still up and running. Hope everything is well with their families and will still stop in for goat cheese when driving by.

I remember them having to close down their store and move to a cheaper location a year or so ago. That probably didn't help.

I'm in the same boat as many others. Use to buy a lot, then the prices or selection just wasn't as good as other stores for what I liked but still ordered once a year or so if they had a good price on something. Still, never had poor customer service from them but sometimes they'd hold an order for weeks over an item they didn't have in stock then just send the shipment without it. Always got a refund for what wasn't in it.

Damn, that sucks. There was a point 5-8 years ago where I was ordering through them at least once a month for awhile.

Damn, that stinks. I never had anything but great experiences, but like others said there have been cheaper online options for many years now. Between Miniature Market and Gamenerdz and Discount Games Inc and Ebay, I don't think I've ordered from Warstore in 10 years.

That's too bad, TheWarstore was THE best option back in the early 2000s, I can't remember the name but back then there was really only 1 other major online store that sold Warhammer 40k and it was even better discount, but they SUCKED! They'd lose orders or short items and their customer service was atrocious, Neal was a welcome change to them. Really wish I could remember their name, just to spit on their memory again.

Best memories of Warstore was a friend getting a free Iron Warriors army back in 3rd ed when they were BS. Especially since we were poor starving college students at the time, Neal accidently crossshipped some packages. He then sent my friend his entire original ork order plus some extras if he agreed to ship a couple of backordered items back so Neal could fulfill the other customer's order.

I never personally got a free army, but I DID drunkenly order $450 of metal Tanith blisters late one night, seemingly on a whim. It was quite a story for years amongst my friends, even after I admitted that I'd been thinking of doing Tanith for a while leading up to it. Playing with them down at the FLGS, I quickly became "That Guy" with the all-infiltrating infantry hoard that was BS to play against, it was the epitome of a skew army before anyone at the FLGS even knew the term. I eventually sold them for more than I paid, that female Tanith model alone was regularly ebaying for $25 a piece almost as fast as I could list them.

 Kalamadea wrote:
I can't remember the name but back then there was really only 1 other major online store that sold Warhammer 40k and it was even better discount, but they SUCKED! They'd lose orders or short items and their customer service was atrocious, Neal was a welcome change to them. Really wish I could remember their name, just to spit on their memory again.

New Wave? They're known as Cool Mini or Not nowadays.

But they were bringing the war to your door for a decade or more

Sad to see this go down for Neal. Did a good business with his operation for a few years. A gentleman in all his dealings.

Neal and his crew have been great.

Sad to see him go, but wish him all the best.

Maybe the “going out of business sale” will give me a compelling reason to order from them for the first time in years.

Found this link on another site- https://suffolktimes.timesreview.com/2017/12/sex-offenders-hired-through-church-program-allegedly-stole-from-southold-employer/

Seems he was betrayed by someone he tried to help. Not a good story at all.

kenofyork wrote:
Found this link on another site- https://suffolktimes.timesreview.com/2017/12/sex-offenders-hired-through-church-program-allegedly-stole-from-southold-employer/

Seems he was betrayed by someone he tried to help. Not a good story at all.

Wow, just wow. Good on Neal for trying to help out, but those two deserve plenty of time behind bars. Local game shop I used to work at many years ago went out of business a couple years after I left because of employee theft by my replacements.

Very sad article. Deplorable behavior by predators. I hope they get buried under the full weight of the law.

That is very sad. That is a lot of inventory to lose.
I feel so sorry for them. I'll have to try and make an order.

That sucks. How do you not realize that $125k-200+ worth of inventory is gone though? In both states I've lived in as an adult in the US, stores are required to do a complete end of the year inventory for tax purposes and massive "shrinkage" of that magnitude should pop up even with a cursory check.

 warboss wrote:
That sucks. How do you not realize that $125k-200+ worth of inventory is gone though? In both states I've lived in as an adult in the US, stores are required to do a complete end of the year inventory for tax purposes and massive "shrinkage" of that magnitude should pop up even with a cursory check.

I doubt it was done all in one year.

It is worth mentioning that article is from 2017. Doesn't mean that it didn't set into motion all of the events that have culminated in this, but it was 18 months ago that this happened. It certainly explains some of the downturn people have reported in that time with The War Store though.

It is a shame though; I remembering visiting the "store" back in 2002 when it was in a shed at the back of their greenhouse. Neal was a nice guy and back then had actually managed to carry Forgeworld for a bit. Hadn't ordered from them in a while since I tend to want to get as much as possible from a single vendor and their inventory system didn't evolve like some of their competitors so you always had the somewhat obfuscated "in stock (and can be shipped)" and "In Stock (after I order it from my distributor)" like some other places use. Always puts me off for some reason.

Hope Neal and his family find some other endeavor to be successful at for a few decades like this one.