What's current state of plastic modeling hobby?

Gaston, modelbuilding is doing just fine, and despite all the "informed" wondering about it, will continue to be just fine.

My evidence?,,,,,,,,,,Time

yup, that simple,,,,,,,,,model building has been "dying" since before the Internet was opened up to the public, we read about it in "letters to the editor" in old fashioned paper magazines. (maybe some of those letters are on the FSM DVD?)

When a discussion goes on for 30 years concerning whether something is "dying" or not,,,,,,,,it wasn't, and it isn't. Unless you are talking from the perspective of a 1 year old that somehow knows that Hank Williams was right and "I'm never going to get out of  this world alive",,,,,in which case, the hobby has been dying since the first model was put together.

Jtilley, I have read that Airfix has placed racks in B&N before,,,,,,but, our B&N is "a fer piece" from our normal shopping haunts, so I haven't had a chance to go and look. It sure is great news that those racks are there, though. That is the absolute perfect range of kits to introduce new modelers, young or old, to this hobby.

Rex

ps, another thought, to anyone that thinks that typing "fer piece" or "y'all" is the sign of illiteracy, it takes a fair amount of work to figure out just how to spell in that fashion, instead of correctly,,,,,,,don't'cha'no

In my neck of the woods (eastern NC), the big barometer of book sales is the Barnes and Noble chain (which has crushed most of the competition). The B&N here in Greenville is indeed devoting more and more space to toys, games, and other non-book merchandise. But it has a good history section, which seems to be just as big as it was, say, ten years ago. And a good magazine rack, which has a good assortment of modeling magazines.

If I drive a hundred miles (a regular undertaking for folks in this town), I can choose from at least three two-story B&N stores in big malls. Surrounded by dozens of other retailers, they concentrate on books - though they also have pretty big video and CD departments. Maybe the terms of their leases restrict what they sell; I don't know. But they always seem to be busy, and their cash registers are always ringing. They look like they're doing just fine with book sales.

I am deeply concerned - as I have been for all the forty years that I've been a professional educator - that young people spend so little time reading. The problem shows up in their writing skills - or lack thereof. I just finished grading a stack of essay exams in sophomore/junior-level early American military history. There were papers in that stack that I would have been embarrassed to hand in when I was in junior high school. (If I had a dollar for every ROTC cadet whom I've taught to spell "soldier"....)

There is light in the darkness. I'm prepared to nominate J.K. Rowling for sainthood. But I'm bothered by the number of students who show up for class on the first day and are horrified to discover that I expect them to read four books in a semester. And all these people graduated from high school.

Last night my graduate assistant and I got together at the local Barnes and Noble cafe to average grades. My jaw practically fell off when I went through the door and saw (drum roll please) a display rack full of Airfix kits. The only competitors being Michael's and A.c. Moore's, B&N just may have become the biggest plastic kit dealer in Greenville, NC. Go figure.

I still have my nook but use it for any free books I can put on it. I even have a few $.99 cents books in there as well. What's nice about ebooks is I can DL free samples to read then decide if I want to buy the actual book itself.

 Book sales are up? Online maybe, but the local Chapters (our local giant book store chain), after killing all the small bookshops,  has turned its whole first floor into a glassware/home decoration department store...

 Also, cognitive tests show reading time, reading comprehension and vocabulary have all declined sharply among youths in all industrialized nations, the more computer connected ones first and most, from the 80s forward. This is very relevant to modelmaking, because it belongs to the same category of interests: Interest into things that are not of the temporary here and now...

 To see why this is happening, I recommend "The shallows- What the Internet is doing to our brains": It explains, using the latest brain research, how the multiplicity of Internet choices is rerouting the brain's circuitry into a more capricious, shorter lived ability to concentrate, with more fidgety and stereotyped behaviour the result.

 Doesn't sound too promising for building models, methinks...

 Gaston

 P.S. Glad to see Ebooks are not doing all that well...

 G.

well, nothing like resurrecting this thread from 2 years ago. Some points I would like to make:

The quality of kits has been in decline for the last decade or so? No new kits that are great and worth mentioning?  I totally disagree, I don't recall having so many great new kits come out in the last decade.  Cost however is a different matter.

I don't buy the age thing. Just because most kids aren't into it, as they have a much wider choice of activity, does not mean the hobby is dying. All it means is that demographics are changing.  Look at golf, less than 5% of golfers are under 30, I don't hear too many golfers worrying that their sport is dying.  So I think the jury is still out on this one.  

As I mentioned 2 years ago (!), the hobby seems much bigger in Asia now than when I was a kid. Back then, you can buy cheap models from your local grocery store. Just toys really, but now 15 LHS in HK within walking distances to each other.

Finally, LHS are suffering the same fate as Local book stores. The online retailers have taken over. However, books sales aren't down. In fact, NY Times just reported physical books sales went up, and digital books sales growth are slowing.. So despite the cries of the last 40 years, whatever decade the older generation worries the kids aren't reading anymore due to pool halls, stick ball, pinball, video arcades, video games, - take your pick, those kids grow up and are buying books.

Sorry, didn't mean to be long winded.

Rising prosperity across Asia will also see more young people taking up the hobby, IMO.  I don't think we've ever had it better as far as the standard of some of the kits on offer, plus aftermarket stuff.  I have some modelling magazines from the early 70's, and we've come a long way since then.  I do fear that once the baby boomer generation is gone, the hobby will decline, at least in the Western world.

My experiences with Squadron over the past forty years or so have been similar to MJames 70's. For a long time the place offered a great range of products (we always wondered how many it actually had in stock), ordinary prices (which, by avoiding shipping, we could usually beat at the local hobby shop), and mediocre service. Recently the service seems to have gotten better, and the prices seem to be pretty competitive with the competition.

Now, why? Is the company suffering from cash flow problems (i.e., not making enough money)? Or a shrinking customer base? Or does it genuinely want to improve service to keep up with the competition? Or did somebody in management retire, and get replaced by somebody with different ideas? (Precisely that happened a year or so ago at one of the major ship model suppliers, Model Expo. The president of the company went on one of the ship model websites and told us so. How often does an executive in the hobby industry do that?) About the only thing we can be sure of is that Squadron won't tell us.

The plastic kit business has always been tight-lipped. The horses' mouths rarely disclose even anecdotal information. Books like Dr. Thomas Graham's histories of Aurora, Revell, and Monogram make fascinating reading (and terrific nostalgia trips). He has lots of interesting stories that shed light on the earlier years of the hobby. (I particularly enjoyed the tale of the fight between Revell and Admiral Rickover about the cutaway sub George Washington. Rickover was furious that the kit was revealing classified information to the Russians. In fact the Revell designers had looked at one sketch in a popular magazine, and most of the detail sprang from their imaginations. We didn't hear that at the time.) But I think Dr. Graham would be the first to tell us that plenty of equally interesting, and influential, stuff went on behind the scenes that the companies still won't talk about.

From their standpoint, why should they?

The model manufacturers' relationship with their customers occasionally reminds me of a sign that used to hang in an office where I worked:  "I think I am a mushroom, because they keep me in the dark and feed me [organic fertilizer]."

You're never going to get anything more than anecdotal information, as most of these retailers and manufacturers are private concerns, not publicly held companies. Not that a little transparency wouldn't be good. For an example of a private company handling things well, read Steve Jackson Games annual 'stake'holders report - Here's last years - www.sjgames.com/.../stakeholders

I know of no one in the plastic industry being so candid. However, it is easy to tell things were not good at Squadron. Why? They significantly changed their business practices to be similar to their competition; ie, they were being hurt by them, probably severely.

Let me tell you how Squadron operated, up until quite recently. While they may have had good sales, their regular prices were very little less than MSRP. When you placed an order, that was it. You heard nothing from them. Over the next week or two, they might get around to picking, packing, and mailing your order. Then one day, usually in a 2-3 weeks, it would show up unannounced on your doorstep. Because they provided no tracking.

This continued well into the internet era, even after companies like Sprue Brothers, to name one, came along. What was different about Sprue? Well, their prices were better than Squadron. That's enough already. But the service was what was really better there.

Your order didn't languish for days or longer like it used to at Squadron. If early enough, you sometimes got things shipped the same day, and if not, the next business day. With that kind of service, and better prices, is it not hard to see why Squadron would be suffering, given their lazy practices. In short, companies like Sprue and others were simply willing to work harder and do more to get your business, while Squadron sat around on their a**.

Recently Squadron has improved, offering a bit better prices and service. It also seems like my inbox is flooded by them several times a week with 'specials' or 'flash' sales. It kind of reeks of desperation, and playing catch up now - a sign things were less than healthy there. 

I sure would like to see some genuine, honest-to-goodness data on these topics. Just how many local hobby shops have gone out of business in the past decade - and how many new ones have opened? How do those figures compare with previous decades? What percentage of kits from Tamiya get sold in Japan? How many in the US? How many in Europe? What percentage of all plastic kits are sold over the web? How many in traditional hobby shops? How many in places like Hobby Lobby? Everybody's entitled to his/her opinion, but are Gaston's diatribes against 1/32 aircraft kits actually born out by sales figures? In the ship modeling realm, it's been said on several sites that Trumpeter's 1/350 Fletcher-class destroyer was designed by the company's "b team." Does anybody know that for a fact?

Here's another big one. Just how many of each kit gets produced? And when a wholesaler's stock of a particular kit is exhausted, how easy is it to restock? If Squadron wanted to restock the Airfix 1/72 Swordfish Mk I, would it be able to do it? Does Airfix still have any more of those kits in stock?

I can spout out profound-sounding guesses in answer to all those questions, but I don't actually know. And I tend to be more than a little skeptical of people who say they do.

I do sense that Squadron, for better or worse, isn't what it used to be. But does anybody in this forum know for a fact - from sources that actually know - what's going on there (if anything)? If so I wouldn't mind reading about it.

In this forum and other websites I see lots of "information" from people who act as though they have special insights into what they're talking about, but rarely do the manufacturers themselves let us in on what's actually happening. And few, if any, "investigative journalists" dig around behind the scenes in the hobby business.

Gaston referred above to "recent memory" as twelve to fifteen years. That (like so much else these days) makes me feel old. To Olde Phogies like me, anything since about 1980 is recent. I can remember clearly when the first Hasegawa 1/48 BF-109E was released, in (I think) the mid-seventies. It excited lots of modelers because it was the first genuinely new 1/48 WWII aircraft kit from a major manufacturer in several years - and the first 1/48 BF-109E since the Monogram one, which came out in the early sixties.

Things are a heck of a lot better now. Whether they're better or worse than they were in 2004 - well, I'm not competent to say. But I'm confident that the number and quality of kits today are better than in 1980.I certanly wish more and better kits were released every month. But as things stand know, the websites and magazines announce at least half a dozen WWII aircraft (ok, some are reissues) every month. And companies like Trumpeter and Zvezda seem to have a limitless ability ito come up with armor subjects that I've never heard of.

I'm not going to defend the Eduard BF-109G. My first inkling of the story was an article in Airfix Model World. The author concluded that much of the brouhaha was unjustified; that the wingspan was a little long and the fuselage probably was, and that there were two spurious bulges on the wing roots. Oh - and it had two little bumps representing the brackets for a sunshade that was unique to the BF-109F. He made corrections that satisfied him in about fifteen minutes - and I thought his finished model was masterful. No, I haven't read many of the emotional diatribes about it on the web; I find such things silly if not downright childish.

And I have to wonder why some of the people who write them build models. (I suspect most of them get their satisfaction from tearing down kits, and rarely build anything. But I don't pretend to know that for a fact.) And how many of them would be capable of building a model from scratch to a standard even remotely approaching what they say they expect from the manufacturers?

I know more about ship models than I know about any other genre (which isn't saying much). I think reliable data would confirm that styrene twentieth-century warship kits have been appearing in record numbers over the past ten or fifteen years, and still are. And their quality (with a few big bumps in the road) has improved steadily. If no future kits are better than that Trumpeter 1/700 Dreadnought, or the Dragon 1/350 Buchanan, I won't complain.

On the other hand, the plastic sailing ship kit is practically dead - and has been for more than thirty years. (Note: I said "practically.")

I don't think the hobby is going to die - certainly not in my lifetime. But I'll stick with the predictions I made in my earlier post. And I'll continue to hope I'm wrong.

While I'm a modeler I don't do what I would call the main stream stuff (aircraft, armor) mentioned in the above posts.

I do sci-fi, space, and 1/8ish figures. While there are subjects in these areas I would like to see done there is enough new stuff I can't keep up.

I have no opinion about Squadron. I've only ordered from them one time about 3 years ago. Since we are both located in Texas the sales tax kills any savings.

The paint supply thing worries me the most.  It's hard to get up here by mail order, so if the LHS closes up, or major manufacturers reduce their lineup, we'll be hooped!

New kits aren't as big a concern to me.  If you're not picky, there are more kits out there than any person could build in a lifetime.  Even if you're picky; there's plenty out there.  To a new modeller, even a kit originally molded in the 60's is still a new kit to them.  I have a wish list of kits that exist long enough to keep me going for the rest of my natural life.

Other than paint, there is nothing being hand-wrung about that would prevent me from enjoying doing what I'm doing.  And that's the point of having a hobby.

In fact, compared to my youth, the internet has opened a whole new world of research.  I used to pick the  marking option by what looked coolest, or most interesting to me.  Now I choose the best back story.

My 10 year old grandson showed a spark of interest when he was about 8. He would come to me and want to work on his model but his interest would last 20 minutes at the most. He did finish two Star Wars snap kits but that was six months ago and he hasn't expressed any interest since.

Gaston, you  really know how to take the fun and enjoyment out of this hobby in your posts. While I don't think the hobby is in any better shape today than it has been in any one particular point in the past 45 years that I have been building, it certainly is a long way from dead. I see more kit selection now in 1/35 injection molded armor, with many more kits coming one day than I have seen in that field ever. Same with ships and 1/48 aircraft. I am more alarmed by things like Testors gobbling up and discontinuing their competitor paint lines, and now reducing the choices in their own line up now, than I am about new releases coming along. I have a stash thats big enough to last me the rest of my probable remaining life span (and then some) at my current build rate if I was to not buy one more kit as of today.

 Quote, JTILLEY:"It looks to me like a number of forces are clashing with each other. The quality of detail and accuracy that manufacturers physically can achieve is the highest it's ever been. One result of that, it seems, is that the sales of particular kits have been reduced by the fact that there's so much high-powered competition. I'm thinking, for instance, of the Tamiya and Zukei-Mura P-51Ds in 1/32. Are there really enough modelers around who can appreciate products of that sophistication to justify (in terms of the manufacturers' investment) both of them?"

   The massive re-emergence of WWII 1/32 scale aircrafts (started by Tamiya with their seminal new Zero in 1999) was always going to be a dead-end: Everyone else has rushed head-long into this fad, bolstered by initial excitement and high sales. Now the pace is slacking off as the subject range has reached impractical subjects like the B-17G and He-111, and people are realizing just how absurdly limiting and demmanding this scale is. It was all utterly predictable, but it took a while to happen. In the meantime, one of the by-product of the 1/32 craze was the near-abandonement of WWII 1/48th scale for aircrafts, especially when it came to the larger types. 1/48 WWII being a far more entry-level friendly scale, the lack of anything of real interest happening there (for almost decades now) will probably discourage potential newcomers, and rightly so. I've always thought 1/32 scale was hideous for aircrafts (huge wasted spaces under and around the wings), and very unlikely to merge newbies with advanced modellers into a common interest...  The short term snort of 1/32 will prove a long term waste, and will have ruined any "synergy" with 1/48th vehicles, but in the end even I have to admit that this hardly changes anything. At worst this diversion in resources has simply accelerated the inevitable.

Quote, JTILLEY: "I think one big problem is the plethora of new, high-quality releases, which come out so fast that the retailers seem unable to keep up. The web dealers can sell you a new Tamiya 1/32 Corsair all right, or an Airfix 1/24 Typhoon, or a Revell 1/32 Spitfire II. But try to find a Tamiya Spitfire IX online - let alone in a hobby shop. Last night, out of curiosity, my computer and I went looking for an Airfix Swordfish Mk I. We checked about half a dozen online retailers, and found one that seemed to say it had the kit in stock (i.e., "normally ships in 1-3 business days"). The others either had marked it "out of stock" or didn't list it at all. Should we blame them for putting their money into the more recent stuff?"

  The put their money into what selIs. If the only thing they can sell profitably are brand-new releases, then this means they are now in a world of hurt, given the slow pace and low volumes of current releases...

  I find your comment bizarre: New releases have been slower in coming out than at any time in recent memory (12-15 years probably): Look at an aircraft modelling magazine of the "peak" 1995-2001 era, and you will see how crowded things were with new releases, particularly the After-Market stuff. It is actually quite shocking... Also striking are all the massive retailers/manufaturers that existed then that have now disappeared, with nothing even remotely resembling a replacement, Meteor being one of the more memorable ones...

  The fact that online retailers are not stocking even fairly recent items is a sign of slow sales, not of a hyperactive industry... This is how Squadron started to show signs of decline...

Quote, JTILLEY: "I'm no aircraft modeler, but I've been following with some interest the Eduard BF-109G "debacle." I didn't read the apparent mass of criticism that came when the kit was released, but sober heads seem to have established now that a lot of the criticism was unjustified - or at least blown out of proportion. The magnitude of the problem seems to depend largely on which set of plans one consults, or which other kit one considers the best.

In any case, I have to ask what I guess is an heretical question: If a kit's dimensions work out to 1/47 instead of 1/48, what difference does it make? Just why do we build models? What awful fate is going to befall us if we build something that's 2 percent off the scale dimensions? If I'm working on a wood ship model and I cut a piece 1/32" too big, have I committed some sort of unpardonable sin? To what standards is it reasonable to hold the manufacturers?

I've been at it for 58 years, and I just can't see what some of the fuss is about. The notion that a kit is no good because its wingspan is off by 2 mm (the biggest gripe I've seen about that Eduard kit) strikes me as almost irrational. From the manufacturer's standpoint, just how many people are out there who'll decline to buy a kit because it's 2 mm off? What percentage of the market do those people represent? Should the manufacturer really care about them?"

  Where did you get the 2 mm figure for wingspan? The actual figures are: Kit wingspan - 214 mm (original 9920mm / 48 = 206.6mm), so over SEVEN mms... 7.4 to be exact, or nearly fifteen inches... Variations in measurements with dihedral do occur, but they hardly amount to 1 mm (two inches)...

  If you ignore the overly broad fuselage base, it wittles down to around 3 mm, or around six inches, PER wingtop... I won't even go into the grossly overlength fuselage, the absurd square undernose, and the pitiful representation of just about every contour... And no, it is not proportional enough to be in another scale...

  I can't fanthom why you would spend three whole paragraphs to demonstrate you have not read the content of any of the threads related to this issue (or, perhaps more precisely, not read any of them without having made up your mind in advance)... 

  And no, unlike what some like T. Cleaver suggested, you can't just snip 2 mm off each wingtip and get anything that remotely resembles an accurate plan view. The fact that the manufacturer has committed to re-doing the entire moulds (even if there is some skepticism in the industry that they will pull-off such a monstrous and unprecedented correction) illustrates the magnitude of the disaster in their viewpoint.

 My impression is that such an apocalyptic outcome could only have happened because of hiring constantly changing computer design staff, as I am told computer CAD designers are in such high demmand they go wherever they please to the highest bidder. The inability of Eduard to pay enough to retain CAD designers is likely the root cause of this utter debacle, and this likely reflects a lack of revenue, or a misguided attempt to cut corners (as does the glacial pace, and small size, of most new releases). 

Quote, JTILLEY: "It looks to me as though the local hobby shop is almost extinct. I'm lucky to have one 35 miles away - and it really specializes in railroads and RC.  The decline of the hobby shop makes me sad. I have so many nice memories of the shops I grew up with. But I'm afraid the future lies with the internet sources."

  If that is so, then you've just stated there is no future, as whatever you may think of the LHS and toy stores, internet stores are just dwarves in the overall scheme of things... Sadly you may be right...

  Quote, JTILLEY: "They're the only ones who can come close to keeping up with the manufacturers. (Can you imagine a small, local business trying to stock, say, five of each of Eduard's new detail parts every month?) It seems that even the big internet stores like Squadron only stock the very most recent releases"

  They don't seem to stock much of anything since, like amost everyone else, I haven't bought anything from them in about five years, ever since the takeover and the disappearance of the flyers... The one time I tried to buy from them I just shook my head at their shipping conditions and how far they had fallen, and that was years ago... 

 Quote, JTILLEY: "But I've been wrong before. I can clearly remember the mid-seventies, when all sorts of people were predicting that the day of the scale plastic model was just about over."

  I think the ones who said that back then are the exact same ones who say today that he LHS doesn't matter, people who never built models will suddenly take it up at around fifty, and that the internet will inevitably save us...

  Gaston

When I mentioned model RR, I meant serious stuff like a permanent layout and kits, not a ready to run toy trains for under the Christmas tree.  Admittedly there are few locomotive kits today, but still some rolling stock kits, and lots of building kits.  I got involved in my Junior High years with a layout and built a loco kit and many RR car kits. I had a lot of friends building model airplane kits, but I was the only one I knew building model RR stuff.  The model airplane clubs sought out youth members, the RR clubs not so much.

Frankly, I have a hard time shedding any tears over Squadron's difficulties. They let years of hubris get in the way of adapting to clearly changing times. They clung to outdated business methods and a 'We're the big dog; we do things the way we want' attitude, offering indifferent pricing and service while competitors were emerging doing a better job on both. They cannot blame the hobby industry, or 'kids these days' for their ills. Just need to look in the mirror.

Rob, I do hope you're right. None of my five grandkids (the oldest of whom is a senior in high school) has ever shown the slightest interest in trains. I don't know whether they've ever watched Thomas or not. I hope so.

Most 4 year olds know all about railroads from Thomas the Tank Engine or Chuggington. My sons loved the old wooden train sets and plastic sets from those lines.

My 10 year old is interested in modeling, but only really how it relates to another current interest, Star Wars. We've bought and built many of the Revell kits. He plays with them like we would have buzzed around with the old Airfix 1/72 scale fighter kits.

Don's comparison with model railroading is interesting. I have the impression that it is, indeed, an almost exclusively adult hobby today. But kids used to be pretty important to it.

I worked in a small local hobby shop from 1975 to 1980. Its biggest month was always December. The owner bought most of the store's merchandise the rest of the year on credit, with the bills coming due January 31. Sometime in January he'd do the books, and find out whether the December sales had been good enough to keep the store in business for another year. I have the impression that lots of small hobby shops operated that way.

The big reason for strong Decembers, of course, was Christmas presents - most of them for kids. In November we started selling those great staples of the business, HO Train Sets. And the biggest sales day of the year was December 26, when the kids got tired of watching the train go around in circles and the parents came in to buy turnouts, extra track, buildings, cars, etc., etc. And to get balky locomotives fixed. The big discount stores sold train sets, but didn't know how to fix them. I wish I had a dollar for every Tyco engine I fixed by scraping carbon off the commutator, which took about a minute. The kid's face would light up when he saw the locomotive running again, and his father would be so happy when he found out there was no charge for the service that he' buy $10 or $20 worth of track or accessories.

The other day a Chistmas catalog came in the mail from Walthers, the big model railroad supplier. As I was browsing through it, it occurred to me that I have a four-year-old grandson who's approaching train set age. But he'd have no idea what to do with one. I suspect he has only a vague idea of what a railroad is. Besides, the cheapest of those sets costs close to $200.

Where I live there are no downtown department stores with toy departments. I wonder if such places still set up train layouts in their show windows for Christmas.

The hobby will survive okay without a major interest by young people.  Look at model railroading. It is as strong as ever, even though youth has never been a big part of model RR.  Many people enter our hobby as they near retirement age- folks who had a latent interest but not the time.  I started modeling in the late forties and joined a club in mid fifties.  Older folks then were worried about not as many youth entering hobby :-)

well, about the same as mr tilley stated, but.... my 1st daughter(16 years old) has been working on a 1/48 hasagawa f4u-7 for a couple years(you know, here and there sorta thing) but when she gets to it, she shows real enthsiam for it!! my youngest daughter(15) is an aspiring graphic artist, sometimes she helps me with painting and decaling.

so, it's not dead to the younger folks, they just need the right people to sorta nudge them a bit:))

far as on-line purchase, check out scale hobbyist.com, very reasonable prices

I can't argue with any of the above; I don't claim to have any special inside knowledge. But I am worried about the subject.

It looks to me like a number of forces are clashing with each other. The quality of detail and accuracy that manufacturers physically can achieve is the highest it's ever been. One result of that, it seems, is that the sales of particular kits have been reduced by the fact that there's so much high-powered competition. I'm thinking, for instance, of the Tamiya and Zukei-Mura P-51Ds in 1/32. Are there really enough modelers around who can appreciate products of that sophistication to justify (in terms of the manufacturers' investment) both of them?

I think one big problem is the plethora of new, high-quality releases, which come out so fast that the retailers seem unable to keep up. The web dealers can sell you a new Tamiya 1/32 Corsair all right, or an Airfix 1/24 Typhoon, or a Revell 1/32 Spitfire II. But try to find a Tamiya Spitfire IX online - let alone in a hobby shop. Last night, out of curiosity, my computer and I went looking for an Airfix Swordfish Mk I. We checked about half a dozen online retailers, and found one that seemed to say it had the kit in stock (i.e., "normally ships in 1-3 business days"). The others either had marked it "out of stock" or didn't list it at all. Should we blame them for putting their money into the more recent stuff?

I have to disagree with a couple of generalities in Gaston's last post. I'm a ship modeler and, though there certainly have been some disappointments among recent releases (I'm still steaming about that allegedly "new" Tamiya 1/700 Yorktown), I don't agree about the alleged drop in quality of what's coming from Trumpeter. I just bought its 1/700 Dreadnought, and I'd describe it as equal to any 1/700 kit I've seen. The planking detail on the decks is as fine as that in the best resin kits on the scale, and the use of photo-etched parts is outstanding. This is not a product from a company that's universally letting its standards slide. (I can't speak for its aircraft or armor.)

I'm no aircraft modeler, but I've been following with some interest the Eduard BF-109G "debacle." I didn't read the apparent mass of criticism that came when the kit was released, but sober heads seem to have established now that a lot of the criticism was unjustified - or at least blown out of proportion. The magnitude of the problem seems to depend largely on which set of plans one consults, or which other kit one considers the best.

In any case, I have to ask what I guess is an heretical question: If a kit's dimensions work out to 1/47 instead of 1/48, what difference does it make? Just why do we build models? What awful fate is going to befall us if we build something that's 2 percent off the scale dimensions? If I'm working on a wood ship model and I cut a piece 1/32" too big, have I committed some sort of unpardonable sin? To what standards is it reasonable to hold the manufacturers?

I've been at it for 58 years, and I just can't see what some of the fuss is about. The notion that a kit is no good because its wingspan is off by 2 mm (the biggest gripe I've seen about that Eduard kit) strikes me as almost irrational. From the manufacturer's standpoint, just how many people are out there who'll decline to buy a kit because it's 2 mm off? What percentage of the market do those people represent? Should the manufacturer really care about them?

It looks to me as though the local hobby shop is almost extinct. I'm lucky to have one 35 miles away - and it really specializes in railroads and RC.  The decline of the hobby shop makes me sad. I have so many nice memories of the shops I grew up with. But I'm afraid the future lies with the internet sources. They're the only ones who can come close to keeping up with the manufacturers. (Can you imagine a small, local business trying to stock, say, five of each of Eduard's new detail parts every month?) It seems that even the big internet stores like Squadron only stock the very most recent releases - and the older ones that nobody has bought. I strongly suspect that's a matter of economic reality, though, rather than bad intentions.

In terms of product quality, I think we're in a golden age. (The fact that people are getting emotional about a dimensional error of 2 mm seems to prove that.) But I'm afraid that economically, the air is draining out of the balloon. If I had to predict what the hobby will look like in ten years (a risky enterprise), I'd guess the number of new releases will go way down, it will be almost impossible to find decent kits that are more than a year old, only big cities will have local hobby shops - and nobody under 30 will be building models.

But I've been wrong before. I can clearly remember the mid-seventies, when all sorts of people were predicting that the day of the scale plastic model was just about over.

Unfortunately, This is what I feared. My LHS, Hobby Town, is doing fair, but they are a franchise and have name recognition and are able to absorb slow times to some extent.

What really disturbs me, and this is something I already knew, is the younger generation has no interest in the hobby. I cant' even get my grandson interested no mater how much I try. He is too interested in his Xbox.

 Interesting take from a Hobby Shop owner (In 2011) in the Model Retailer magazine site:

How has the hobby industry changed for the better in the last ten years?

Published: January 4, 2011

Rusty Brooks, AAA Hobby Supply, Marietta, Ga., answered this way:

I have been in the hobby industry for more than 25 years. It has not changed for the better from the viewpoint of the local hobby shop. During the last five years, I've seen manufacturer support of local hobby shops evaporate. In the past, we were called by various hobby marketers (Revell, Polar Lights, Lindberg), and they asked us what were good sellers and sought input for future reissued kits. Occasionally, we were surprised by boxes filled with samples and other promotional goodies. Now, we have trouble getting restocks of newly issued kits from the distributors, and we never hear from the manufacturers. The trend of the industry towards smaller and smaller production runs for kits, combined with the ever increasing prices as the manufacturers try to add details to the kits, which are often replaced by aftermarket items anyway, has led to our area (metro Atlanta) declining from 12 model shops 20 years ago, to just two in an area of five million people!

How has this possibly been a change for the better? I guess you’d have to be one of the companies that bought a manufacturer and decided to sell direct to the public instead of using the traditional supply chain America has always had. At this rate, there won’t be any local businesses left to buy anything from, much less hobbies.

Paul Scopetski, The Spare Time Hobby Shop, Marlboro, Mass., wrote:

That’s a tough question to answer in a positive mode! 1999-2001 were our peak years. Since then, our retail gross sales have been down 45%. 35% of our inventory doesn’t generate 5% of our sales, yet occupies space and rent! It has stagnated (trains, slot cars, science and educational kits, games and radio control). The youth of America do not care about our industry any longer, and the hobby industry has abandoned that age group. In the past 10 years, we have had yearly price increases, oversaturated lines of product, not a single hot category developed, and absolutely a zero future.

Take the recent iHobby show. DML pulled a no-show, and Tamiya refuses to attend. Osprey bolted in 2008. No book or small market companies attend. So what kind of messages is that to the small store trying to survive? If the industry doesn’t care, why should we? We’re all dying slowly. Nothing has changed for the better. Sorry!"

 Worthy of note:

 I Hobby 2013 was held: 2013 iHobby Expo, held Oct. 3–6 at the Schaumburg Convention Center in Schaumburg, Ill.

 Gaston

 It's been over two years since this thread has started, and some interesting perspective can be added into the fray.

 New or continuing trends that I can discern during those past 30 month(!):

 -More closures of Local Hobby Shops.

 -Internet retailers now starting to show signs of trouble themselves...: Squadron's steep decline being particularly  ominous. Online sales volumes were always low overall, now they are declining...

 -From the boss of one small but well-informed kit manufacturing company: "Internet sales volume will not be enough to finance new moulds": Abundantly confirmed if you look at the volume of new releases in the past two years: The slowdown in pace is nothing short of remarkable, even in previously growing areas like 1/32 scale aircrafts...

-Releases that do happen show no inkling of awareness of widely discussed subject gaps... Companies seem to live in a world of their own, but that's not really new...

 In spite of this, I would say duller more mystifying releases are definitely trending...

-Airfix continues to be the exception to an overall gloomy picture, now investing in bigger kits while most others try to cut costs by going for smaller subjects. Trumpeter briefly invested in huge bigger scale ships, but now that seems to have slowed down.

-Quality of new releases is definitely down, way down, the recent Eduard Me-109G debacle indicating some serious methodology problems... Trumpeter/Hobby Boss quality shows no sign of improving after 15 years, quite the contrary(!), as their low-standards home market gains in buying power (Chinese consumers don't care to do research, so poor kits will likely continue to flood the market, if at a now diminishing pace)

-1/48 Jets and WWII Russian aircrafts are trending, for a little while at least...

-Old trend that is accentuating recently: Most shows are getting smaller, while a few choice ones are still bigger from time to time. Shows in general seem to be in a very recent decline, despite these bright spots...

-At my local club a new trend: People talk about their lives, not modelling, because there are too few interesting new releases to talk about...

  To this I would add a significant slowing down of postings on most modelling forums... Trending are purely utilitarian posts like "What color is this wheel well?", or "What paint do you use?"

 My overall impression is that the decline of the hobby has significantly accelerated in the past two years, since this thread was started, and for the first time this is in actual industry overall numbers, though what is included in the "industry" is so much beyond plastic modelling, it's actually very hard to know what it means... "I Hobby" moving from Chicago to Cleveland is kind of memorable though...

  Gaston

If you were a diorama-builder, Hobby Lobby would definitely count.. It's a "One-Stop Shop" for all diorama materials... Many tools as well... With their 40% coupons, you can stock up a lot of supplies, tools, and paints.. And by paints, I mean the various craft paints that are the same colors we commonly use in military modeling, but just have different names, like "Mushroom" and such... 

Also, oils, acrylics, and water-colors in tubes, fine brushes, compressors, air-brushes and accessories for them, benches and lighting, storage, etc...

All at 40% off... IF you do it right...

What is the state of our hobby? I'll put it to you this way my LHS closed its doors for the last time this weekend. Now there is not a hobby shop within 30 miles of me,except Hobby Lobby, and I don't count them. However new subjects and re-pops keep coming out. I suggest buying while you can however you can esp. Sci-Fic guys.

As I'm 18 years old I think I can give a good perspective on this...

First of, many of the points who are pointed out by some of you guys are completly right,
The price of modelling has become higher than ever, but allowance has risen to,
I get about 20 euros a week, which is pretty common, even a bit on the higher side,
as you all know, you could allready buy yourself something decent with that, so the price? hmmm, maybe, it could be a factor, but I think the main reasons are that,

Back in the day, you bought yourself a normal kit,  which contains something about 20 parts,
If you buy a normal kit today, you allready get a kit with a whopping 80 parts or more, and most kids want something big, which is often not good because it also makes it harder to complete it, and never hits the finish line, so he will never ask for a second kit, and never discover what a great hobby this is, I was lucky, bought myself a C-47 from revell, a BIG kit, who doesn't contain that many parts and fits together OKAY.

In my eyes, the biggest factor is, there are to many, easier options to go with,
when you go to a toy store, a child can't choose what he wants, because there are to many things to choose from, and lots of parents think of modelling as a dull, maybe even stupid hobby to have
(offcourse we would disagree, but we aren't the common people to, and we know what modelling holds inside) so when the kids points to a box saying, I want that, the parent will go, but don't you want some lego's or playmobil?
When you shuv a Playstation 3 (game) under a kids nose with a model kit next to it, 90% of the kids will choose the playstation 3, xbox 360 or whatever...

But what should also be known is that, the hobby isn't dying, it's changing.
I know lots of kids who model, but they don't build planes, tanks or boats, or actualy they do, but they build Warhammer, lord of the rings, star wars planes, tanks ,boats or whatever it contains, in which they can play boardgames with.

And there are kids who build models, but most of them stay hiding in the shadows, I know my LHS-keeper very well, he tells me that it's true that I am the only one of my age (14 - 25) that builds models, but there are kids who do build models, he has about 5-8 kids from around 6-12 that get there mom to the store to buy a kit, so it's no so bad as we often think it is, but if we keep on buying kits in expo's, internet and various, which makes our LHS dissappaer, then modelling is doomed to fade away at some point...

But I don't think that is how it will end, even if it will end, look at all these brands who make so much new kits that we have to many options on buying the same plane but from three or four different manufacterers,
you can't say the hobby is dying, but it is true that, modelling isn't as popular as it used to be,
but main reason is, there are to many things to do, with not enough time to try even half of 'em.

I just think, that instead of dying, the age group has changed, and we can't even say what the modelling society looks like in country's as Japan, Korea and China. Because from some pictures I have seen on the internet,
I just think that the largest modelling society, can be found over there. Especially in the first two examples.

With regards, Ninetalis.

Interesting perspectives on this subject.  You know, I have a 7yr old son that I've build several of the 1/72 Testors WWII planes with.  I let him paint w/brush the acrylic paints included, aasemble what he can, put the decals on (I usually have to adjust them a little) and he seems to really enjoy them.  That being said, if there is a kit waiting for completion vs my wife's Ipad (with Angry Birds on it) he will choose the later, I suspect many other kids would too.

Interesting points, while I agree that I would love to see the current generation of teens to up that general knowledge quotient, I'm not sure I buy into the whole premise of the 'dumbest generation'.  Here's an interesting counterpoint to the book's premise, written by another academic...

http://blogs.princeton.edu/librarian/2008/09/the_dumbest_generation/