Tin is now trading at around $11,000/ton, a 21 month low. And you know what happened to that other key ingredient of miniature manufacturing, oil. See, there is a silver lining to all this. Just don't expect miniature prices to go down.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Down is Up, Up is Down
Remember this graph I posted from August? The reason for all the miniature price increases? The prediction that much more of this will drive miniature companies out of business?
Tin is now trading at around $11,000/ton, a 21 month low. And you know what happened to that other key ingredient of miniature manufacturing, oil. See, there is a silver lining to all this. Just don't expect miniature prices to go down.
Tin is now trading at around $11,000/ton, a 21 month low. And you know what happened to that other key ingredient of miniature manufacturing, oil. See, there is a silver lining to all this. Just don't expect miniature prices to go down.
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It's just like the price of bread, the price of beer, the price of fuel... when the raw material price goes up, so does the price to the consumer. When the raw material price goes down, the consumer pays exactly the same. In the UK, there's actually an annual price increase in beer - the Government ups the tax on it by a penny per pint, and the price of a pint goes up fivepence. They think we don't notice... but we certainly did the time the Government caught them out by not increasing the tax on beer! They do the same with cigarettes, too... which, taking exchange rates into account, cost roughly three times as much in the UK as they do here, and yet more people smoke in the UK...
ReplyDelete"Just don't expect miniature prices to go down."
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's the kicker. There was noticeably less complaining about the most recent GW price increases despite the poor economy, because a lot of gamers know that GW's costs were skyrocketing.
Now that those costs have gone the other way, they should go ahead and roll back those increases, but I don't expect them to do it. More realistically, they better pass on the 2009 annual increase if they don't want a significant backlash.
Smart gamers know the difference between necessary increases and gouging. GW needs to make sure it stays on the right side of that line.
One of the smaller UK minis companies had a message on TMP that advertised a "discount for U.S. customers" and pointed out that a strengthening dollar would get them more product if they ordered direct.
ReplyDeleteThought that was a smart idea.