Shopping Smart/Modelling on a Budget

Back at the time of Desert Storm there was speculation that the rocketing price of crude would drive up the base price of styrene and make the hobby more expensive, but those fears did not seem to emerge, at least not clearly from the background chatter of multiple other variables all conspiring to make it more expensive to build models. After all, everything is more expensive, that’s inflation, why should the hobby be any different? Hobbies are luxury pass-times for those with disposable income, after all. But how many of us are in a position to dispose of the kind of chunks of income the hobby field seems to have no qualms about asking these days?

There are companies that play shamelessly to the highest end of the market -- Trumpeter, for instance, by the ambitiousness of their projects and their catering to big-scale enthusiasts, not for their detail and research accuracy, and after 15 years in the game they still come second to the engineering quality and design acumen of Tamiya, Hasegawa and Revell Germany. There are less-ambitious companies working in more traditional scales, though, and their prices remain stingers: Airfix’s new Hawker Nimrod, long-awaited and eagerly-anticipated, hit the shelves in Australia at $99.99. That’s a big no-can-do, pard, for a lot of builders. That’s possibly why the new fancy releases are sitting there on the shelf at my LHS, and the bulk of the stock has barely changed in three years. Also possibly a big reason the shop changed hands and is now concentrating on R/C and railroading instead.

Plastic kits are too expensive. If they were half the price I’d buy a lot more. If they were half the price the shop would sell a lot more, which would be better than selling hardly any, but here we see the distributor-mechanism. Kits have an infinite shelf-life. They’re not date-sensitive, they have no use-by, they don’t get sent back and pulped... They sometimes gain value with age. If the distributor owns the stock, it never will go out on special. Mark-downs are virtually unknown here. The price is the price and if the customer can’t afford it, the stock gathers dust until the shop closes -- but the kits go back to the distributor. Last year a local toystore chain gave up carrying kits for the same reasons, and held a distributors’ sale at the warehouse. I looked in but the mark-downs were simply not enough to tempt me to buy, but I noticed a retiree leaving with a Tamiya 1:350th scale Enterprise he’d paid about $200 for. Ah, rollover…

So where do I find the kits to keep my stash ever-expanding? Simple. eBay. I joined eBay about five years ago and in that time 95% of all my kit purchases have been through that medium. In the header pic (some ready-use items, not the actual stash) of the 69 items on those shelves, 57 came via eBay. The other 12 are through Squadron Mailorder in Carolton, Texas, who had my order every month in the years before eBay was born. I cleared a huge collection of Superscale decals in the days they regularly cycled through the range at 99c. But the days of specials like that are always numbered, and eBay gives you the chance to wander amongst the wares of the world, almost like an ancient marketplace. You can find retailers in places like Hong Kong, Beijing and Seoul that offer the big brands at serious savings (though lately they are almost all hiking their profits by cheating the purchaser on the postage -- there’s no diplomatic way to say it, it’s cheating pure and simple, and to be fair there are plenty in the West who do the same).

The best bargains are most often at auction: resellers who buy up old collections and kick off the bidding at just a couple of dollars. It takes a modicum of skill to play the auction game, but you can learn it easily enough, and you need to be aware of only two things. 1) If the kit is on general release then you’re trying to beat the price at which you could buy it locally: be aware of that price and know what you’re willing to spend, all-up, for the item in the condition offered. If the bidding runs beyond that point, don’t be pig-headed, just let it go. If it’s an old classic then be guided by your instincts, only you know what you’re willing to pay for a collectable. 2) Postage -- it’s no use getting a great bargain on the item and finding out the postage takes all the cream away from the deal. You might as well have bought it locally, paid the extra and taken it home with you rather than waiting weeks (months even) and hoping at doesn’t go missing.

The US really messed things up when they did away with surface mail a few years back, it must have hurt US trade at many levels. It took the greatest bargain and made it ho-hum, what else can you call it when the postage to mail a kit to Australia is double what you won it for? And it’s a cynical act of big government in any case, to support an airline system failing due to fuel price increases. Well, when airmail is the only option, we learn to optimise that too. You do that by having a friend in the country of origin who will accept eBay purchases for you, then will combine them in the most compact shipping carton possible (remember, it’s not just by weight that they charge, it’s by linear dimensions too). A friend -- who will charge you actual shipping costs, not mark up the postage by many dollars to shore up his or her own fortunes as a seller. That way you lose on the domestic postage to get the item to reception point, and save on the international shipping of several items in one unit.

You have to ‘box clever’ as my late Dad used to say. The hobby, though better-served and bigger than ever before, has suffered from the global recession, runaway inflation and national debt, and more than ever it’s a rich man’s pass-time. I could spend thousands setting up the workshop of my dreams, but until that many dollars are both earned and not required for other things, I’ll make do with the one I have, which is not bad: it has most of the tools I want, most of the paints, and is supported by a healthy stash of subject matter assembled by careful collecting. We may not ‘haggle’ in today’s Western marketplace, but you can still find a way to get what you want without paying top whack.