My excuses, this time: I had some money in the PayPal account, and I still didn’t have a Classic Head Down Shire B here yet. All the versions of that mold that I do like I can’t afford at the moment, and since I like all three of the colors they were offering, it seemed like the logical thing to do.
However, I sold my Pamplemousse a while ago, and I was never drawn for a Silverado; since I do still have my Silver Snow, that’s the Mini Me I’m hoping for.
I’m with a lot of people here: I do kind of wish Reeves would slow down the pace of all these offers. 2018 is beginning to feel a bit like 1984/5 – another time period where we were being barraged with one Special Run after another.
It was both harder, and easier back then. It was harder, because we had neither social media nor the Internet to keep us informed. You had to rely on your own hobby network – and monthly hobbyist newsletters – to find out about the Special Runs in the first place.
There were not quite as many mail-order retailers as you might think, so there’d be a good chance you might already be on the mailing list of a company who had, or was going to get, a Special Run soon. News and the mail traveled more slowly then: whether you got the sales list on time, or even found out about these Special Runs in time was the bigger worry.
It was easier back then because even though the piece runs were smaller – sometimes significantly so – it’d still take a few weeks or months for most things to sell out. You had the luxury of time – not a lot, but enough to take a deep breath.
The hobby was smaller back then, too. Less competition!
We had our profit-takers and flippers, too, but the problem wasn’t as widespread. There were some examples of quick sellouts, demand that vastly exceeded supply, and a couple of instances of people buying multiples for resale that profoundly warped the market.
Prices for some of the in-demand SRs remained high for while, but the Internet quickly cured that. There are still some – like the Buckskin Adios, or the 1984 G1 Stablemate Draft Horses – that command the big bucks, but most SRs of years past aren’t all that expensive or difficult to find anymore.
And that’s going to be the case with these newer ones, too, no matter how popular a mold may be now. Some go up and stay up, but most go down eventually. Or at least become less hotly contested.
If you couldn’t get one, and can’t afford the aftermarket now, just wait it out a bit. Something new will come along, and people will sell something old to buy something new.
2 comments:
Perhaps my memory is failing me, but it seems to me that it was also much 'easier' in the past as there were also no parallels to today's high-priced exclusive SRs in the past, and new molds weren't locked into "exclusive SR only" status for years at a time.
My opinion is that they can afford to lock them in now because they have members of the Premier Club financing the new molds. You have to figure that if you have 741 people (the only known count we really have to work with, there could be more by now) ponying up $100 each for a deposit, that's $74,100 for those 3 new molds from the get-go. Add to that the balance of the club models, which my calculator says is $314,910, and there's money on top of that too because of the shipping, and you have the answer of how that's possible to do now.
Post a Comment