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primarch |
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Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2003 12:46 am Posts: 27069 Location: Edmond, Oklahoma USA |
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primarch |
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Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2003 12:46 am Posts: 27069 Location: Edmond, Oklahoma USA |
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primarch |
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Joined: Fri Feb 14, 2003 12:46 am Posts: 27069 Location: Edmond, Oklahoma USA |
Hi! As a former retailer, I have never bought this train of thought. Since if a product is perceived of "not good value" no matter what the discount it will not sell. When something is perceived "good" then it will sell, of course the cheaper it can be obtained the better. That doesnt "devalue" the value of the product (it is after all wanted), in many cases it increases the desireability. Meaning one customer buys more than he would at a higher price. Of course this is from a clients perspective. The manufacturer would love to sell lots of units at a higher price, but in a niche mrket such as miniature gaming, higher prices usually mean less sales. Regardless of the quality of the product. These two forces working against each other is after all the basis of capitalism. Primarch |
Heresiarch |
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Joined: Wed Jan 12, 2005 5:04 am Posts: 571 Location: Calgary Alberta Canada |
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javelin98 |
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Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2005 6:39 am Posts: 791 Location: Spokane, WA, USA |
This is one of those places where geography should have factored more into GW's marketing strategy. Britain is so small you can drive from one end of it to the other in half a day; I wonder if there is anywhere in Britain where you are more than an hour from a GW store (hyperbole alert -- I have no idea if this is the case). In the US, things are so spread out that having a vast network of GW hobby stores is much less practical. The kind of saturation that can be achieved with fifty stores in the UK wouldn't have even a fraction of the effect in the US. I live five hours from my nearest GW store; the next closest one is 15 hours away by car! I was joking on another thread about driving from my home in Washington to a tourney in Connecticut, which would be about the same as driving from the coast of Portugal to Moscow, Russia! GW's decision to take a hard line with US indie stores was a terrible mistake. They have the local expertise to maximize their sales, they have to bear all the labor and real estate costs of their shops, and they are the ones who mentor younger gamers and turn them into long-term customers. GW/US should, in my opinion, divest themselves of their stores and push hard to support the indie retailers. _________________ Set phasers on "fun"! |
Ilushia |
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Joined: Mon May 08, 2006 10:50 am Posts: 1189 |
This is, really, more or less correct. The other thing to consider is population numbers. Britain packs 60,000,000 people inside it's boarders, and is the size of a medium-sized state. Somewhere like Oregon. The US has roughly 50x as many people in a VASTLY larger area. For GW this means they need vastly more stores to get the same level of saturation as they would in Britain. And more to the point, independent stores can still afford to compete with them even at that level. They simply can't afford to open a store in every town, and that leads to places which are 4-5 hours away from the nearest 'official' GW store, where private stores open and make lots of money to local gamers. GW wants to be the sole supplier of their product, and on the smaller scale in Europe (and Britain especially) that's not too hard. On the scale of the US... That's a lot less practical. The shipping costs of moving material 2000+ miles across the US to keep your stores supplied alone is going to run you far more then it will when the furthest store from one of your production facilities is only 200-300 miles away. There's mitigating factors here, like the fact that 90% of the population is within 100 miles of the coast. But even then it's still very very hard to cover some 3000+ miles of coastline. VERY few chains of stores actually operate on a national scale in the US. And most which do operate multi-national or world-wide (McDonalds, Subway, Etc.) and have some kind of renewable profits. |
javelin98 |
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Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2005 6:39 am Posts: 791 Location: Spokane, WA, USA |
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Ilushia |
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Joined: Mon May 08, 2006 10:50 am Posts: 1189 |
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Ilushia |
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Joined: Mon May 08, 2006 10:50 am Posts: 1189 |
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dafrca |
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Joined: Thu Feb 13, 2003 6:02 pm Posts: 10956 Location: Burbank, CA, USA |
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