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I just started getting into this hobby and I’ve started to notice that no matter where I go there seems to be an out of stock problem for things I want to buy even with the online retailers. Is this something that is common in this hobby? It’s very frustrating.

GW are currently expanding their factory & warehouse so hopefully it's a short-term thing.

Some of the new units became very popular very quickly and have been sold out for a while pretty much everywhere, things like the invictor warsuits have been sold or in the US for a few months, hopefully they will be restocked soon.

It's almost Christmas, people running out of stock should not be a surprise.

Games Workshop also seems to run fairly conservatively. They would far rather produce too little product and sell it all out than produce too much and have mountains of it hanging around or (gasp!) sell it at a discount (discount sales come in battle box bundles). If/when something sells out, they can produce more, so there's not much in terms of loss of sales and huge savings in not needing more warehouse space, because warehouse space is expensive.

Contrast with smaller makers of plastic miniatures, who don't have their own factory like GW does and so have to order large(ish) runs of their product at one time to keep the per unit cost down. So Mantic, CMON or Warmachine runs out of stock a lot less frequently but they have a much smaller product line as a result and are sitting on a lot of inventory. But when something goes out of print, it may stay OOP for a long time, maybe forever.

Depends what you want.. where you are .. and what everyone else wants.... I very rarely have ever had an issue.

Overseas tend to run out of specific lines quicker because shipments are slower to transport and tend to be done in bulk. The UK market tends to have far less of these issues because GW has the factories right in the same country so there's no need to wait for a bulk order. They can react to the market demand and deliver with next weeks regular store deliveries.

That said even the UK runs out of stock here and there; but it tends to be more that GW has run out but that stores and 3rd parties might well still have stock in the system.



GW is, as noted, building a new factory and new warehousing facilities hwich all sound like they are going to be able to increase their bulk production, storage and shipping to overseas territories which might well help ease the pressure on stock running out.