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I just have a quick question: When I got into 40k several years ago, a box of Guardsmen were $24.00 for twenty. Now it is $22.00 for a box of ten. Why is it that the prices are climbing up? I know our economy is hurting badly all across the world, but it seems that every year they slowly bring the price up.

Becuase GW hates us...

No, really its because 40k is considered a luxury item. Because it is not so widely played/used/purchased GW has to make the largest profit margin possible to stay in business. With the economy hurting, people stop buying minis before anything really. So GW raises prices in order to make a larger profit margins when they do make a sale.

Also, welcome to Dakka. Ignore the mean and crotchety. Well, most of the crotchety, one of them is mod.

Because enough people keep paying the increased prices to allow it to happen. It really is that simple.

Actually, their numbers continue to go up every year. Oddly enough, hobby shops have reported decent earnings in the past two years, presumably because people are more willing to spend time in their hobbies as an escape during the troubling economic times. It was explained to me one time that part of the reason that GW continues price increases is that, as a British company, they don't follow American business models that attempt to undersell their competitors. Instead, they try to play defensively and raise their prices to maintain their profit margins, but not try to expand much. They also seem to assume that they are the only game in town, and that their customers will continue to be their customers forever. That and a hardcore copyright enforcement keeps them in the money.
So there's my $0.02.

Considering plastics are petroleum based, shipping costs are increasing, and overall cost of business is increasing, the cost of models has to increase so they can continue to make a profit.

Shrike325 wrote:Considering plastics are petroleum based, shipping costs are increasing, and overall cost of business is increasing, the cost of models has to increase so they can continue to make a profit.

For the quantities being dealt with, those numbers are almost completely insignificant.

I know how it works for making pewter models, plastic has lower material cost, but the start up is more expensive.

You know that $40-something Doombull? Yeah, pewter cost for that was less than a dime.

Before this gets locked or moved you may want to check out this thread on Warseer. Pretty interesting discussion on the current state of GW and how it got there.

http://www.warseer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259850

If you dont want to read the whole 25 pages it basically shows that GW has a problem with declining sales volume since about 2004. If this is because of the price increases or the price increases are because of the decline in sales volume I don't know...... but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

eledamris wrote:Actually, their numbers continue to go up every year. Oddly enough, hobby shops have reported decent earnings in the past two years, presumably because people are more willing to spend time in their hobbies as an escape during the troubling economic times. It was explained to me one time that part of the reason that GW continues price increases is that, as a British company, they don't follow American business models that attempt to undersell their competitors. Instead, they try to play defensively and raise their prices to maintain their profit margins, but not try to expand much. They also seem to assume that they are the only game in town, and that their customers will continue to be their customers forever. That and a hardcore copyright enforcement keeps them in the money.
So there's my $0.02.

May also be because of the very large number of hobby shops that have gone out of business has forced their customers into the remaining hobby shops. It would be an interesting study but I would bet that really what you are seeing is less dollars being spent on hobby related material but it still means better business for the hobby shops that made it through the last ten years just because there are so few left.

Not news or rumours at all really, there's been a fair few threads on this if you want to have a search. ta.