Reply To: GW: Why do they do it?

[limburger 21708xp 1]

@bubbles15 I’m not ‘entitled’ to anything … nor did I mean to imply I was.
It simply sucks that when things are advertised and then you can’t buy them unless you are awake at the moment the preorders are allowed. I can accept such situations for collectible bits that are advertised as such.
I can’t accept such situations for things that are supposed to be core SKU’s for a game.
It gets worse when the communication about general availability and available quanties is spotty or absent.
Cursed City being prime example … we still don’t know if this was a mistake or intent.

It is anti consumer … and I hate it as it has the potential to harm our hobby.

It’s tricky to get tone across in plain text and with multiple culture/language barriers.
I’ve been told that us Dutch can be pretty brutal and direct in such matters …

@carlospictor I’d argue that what GW does is not a ‘pre order’ in the traditional/literal sense which implies them starting manufacturing after the ‘pre-orders’ are locked in)
This is more like a regular order in advance of actual availability. As a result stock may not match demand at all, because they don’t have time to adjust production process …

@phaidnott
Finding and buying a suitable building/location is trivial.
Getting the correct licenses/permissions (or whatever) so you can actually use the building like you want/need to may take longer.
And I wouldn’t be surprised if internal office politics played a part in that.

I’ve heard stories about one company which was both fined for having their manufacturing inside city zones, but at the same time they weren’t allowed/given permission to move to a new location … (IIRC they went bankrupt as a result).

I’ve heard about a house with horse stables attached that couldn’t be used for horses , because zoning laws prevented that (a fact that the real estate agent didn’t mention … ) effectively making said property useless for its (original) purpose.

I’m sure there’s examples of that sort of thing all over the world, because (local) politicians love to show that they too have power over the peasants in their domain.
And while GW is big (within our hobby/industry) .. it’s not as big as more ‘normal’ companies out there.

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A bit off-topic and possibly related.
The shortage of integrated circuits appears to be caused by factories not having any room for additional orders as they are running at maximum capacity.
Pre covid these factories would have a bit of spare capacity that could be used to satisfy temporary increased demand or short production runs of specific items.
I wouldn’t be surprised of the factories used to produce the cardboard & minis for GW (and the rest of our hobby industry) suffer from a similar situation.

I know for a fact that factories aren’t running at peak effectiveness (I’ve seen numbers as low as 2-4% for certain pharmaceuticals … !)
With Covid regulations reducing the amount of people that can work at the factory floor you’d likely see even less effective use of available production capacity. If you were at 10% effective use pre-covid and are currently at 5% … you have lost 50% of your capacity.  It’s easy to see that there’s plenty of issues that will happen under those circumstances.