About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

P is for Profiteering in Plastic

This screen-shot from the latest eMail on Airfix's D-Day range is the most blatant piece of profiteering I've seen in a long time, I hope people will be as equally disgusted as me and share this around the communities of modelling, war-gaming and figure collecting...

Issued as part of the 'D-Day' tie-in, those who are new to those branches of the hobby that consist in the main of gaming horse-and-musket or earlier with white-metal figures may not know this item...for the rest of us (90-odd% of the various branches of the connected hobbies) it is as familiar as a bad penny in the saucer by the door!

It is an old, tired moulding, first issued by Airfix in the 1960's. and which through the 70's and yeay, even unto 1980/81 still had a pull back, spring-loaded, firing mechanism that allowed you to shoot little green shells about the place until the hoover and the carpet monster had eaten them all, after which it was matchsticks!

The mould paid for itself in about 1972, the contents of this box contain a non-working gun, which is based on the sort of deck-gun the British Navy employed on gunboats at the turn of the last century, not anything the Germans employed on the Atlantic Wall.

The plastic in this box is (by the law of pound-shops) worth about 65p. They - Hornby-call-us-Airfix - have also released a set with two landing craft, a jeep, the new howitzer and a set of 2nd type US Marines. If they are all market rated at £5.99, then that's £25+ for £16.99....a bargain...but this?

This is a rip-off of the highest order, a staggering amount of money for a boxful of shite! They should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for this, the people who died on those beaches died to make a better world and save us from totalitarianism...yet we seem to be losing our democratic voice and sliding back to the time of the robber-barons with complicit or powerless legislature and a business class determined to squeeze the last penny from our cold hands..I can't put my anger over this into sufficient words...Sixteen-fucking-ninty-nine?!!! Outrageous!

4 comments:

Paul´s Bods said...

It is a bloody rip off, especially as there´s loads on evil bay, boxed sets with firing guns for 5 -10 quid.

Hugh Walter said...

Well...you can tell I'm angry Paul...it's a bloody toy...a fiver's worth of toy at that!

H

Anonymous said...

Here's a thought- a Matchbox Sherman cost 25p 40 years ago. The revell kit now costs £7.50. That's a factor of 30 or almost 9% per year compounded. Not a bad investment.

Hugh Walter said...

Hi Annon

A lot of these old kits are 'overpriced', but it's one thing to pay a couple of 'extra' quid to get an old favourite, or needed kit, it's quite another to be ripped-off a tenner or more for a tired old toy!

H