new cordless drill.

[Bigmac]

my 10 year old cheap cordless drill works fine--but the battery dont. An hours charge lasts about a minute. I cant find a new battery.

So i splashed out on a new one. It came with 2 chargeable batteries--and a charger. Plus drill bits and a snake thing to go round corners.All in a plastic case.

It was £18.99 inc free postage on ebay.

So whats all this got to do with N gauge ?

I suppose someone will state the obvious that " they" make millions of these cheap drills so that brings the price down--to a few pennies--allowing the multitude of online del boys to make a nice living. So why cant the N gauge manufacturers learn from this?

No doubt the site headmaster will enlighten me.

[njee20]

The tone of your post even makes this sound like bait. 

How many £19 drills do you think they sell globally?

How many models of whatever your preferred thing is do you think they sell?

Some reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Obviously Farish could make 1,000,000 units. They'd be cheap. The market would be totally saturated. They'd go out of business. Win.

[Bigmac]

The tone of your post even makes this sound like bait. 

How many £19 drills do you think they sell globally?

How many models of whatever your preferred thing is do you think they sell?

Some reading for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

Obviously Farish could make 1,000,000 units. They'd be cheap. The market would be totally saturated. They'd go out of business. Win.

so why do some manufacturers deliberately make short runs ?

[njee20]

Manufacturers don't openly publicise the size of their runs (except for limited editions), in the case of those limited editions the clue is in the name, they're limited, that keeps demand high.

Stock sitting on shelves costs money, so manufacturers don't want to end up with lots left over, and/or having to discount. That alone becomes a vicious cycle because people will just think "oh, I'm not paying full price, these will be discounted in 6 months time"; this was a common issue with Heljan models in OO.

The market being small, and fickle, makes it virtually impossible for manufacturers to second guess what will really be popular. Obviously they choose models they think will sell well, but we've seen plenty of models (Dapol 59 is the screamingly obvious example right now) where they just misjudged/mistimed the market. That's bad for everyone in the long term, and even in the short term in that instance it's only good if you want a 59 with inaccurate colours and incorrect lighting for £75, even then Rails still have 40+ of some models.

[Newportnobby]

I suppose someone will state the obvious that " they" make millions of these cheap drills so that brings the price down--to a few pennies--allowing the multitude of online del boys to make a nice living. So why cant the N gauge manufacturers learn from this?

No doubt the site headmaster will enlighten me.

You've answered your own question in the first paragraph above.

The list of classes of loco not yet produced is getting smaller along with the size of those classes. The chances of getting 'one offs' such as 'Lion', 'Kestrel' etc are virtually nil.