6/30/2023 0 Comments Dragonbox always out of stockLastly, while I have no proof, I think it is reasonable to assume that the pandemic has slowed down Bandai’s production rates to some extent. Depending on your definition of “holiday season”, that’s two months if you count Thanksgiving, but is more likely reference to December. If that photo above is correct, someone built two Real Grades and two Master Grades entirely within the holiday season. It’s that you have new people coming in and building tons of kits at a ridiculous clip. It’s not just that you have more people building. When I first started, I was building one a year.įurthermore, if you were to go to right now and sort on new posts, you’d see a bunch of them that look something like this: To be clear, that is a stack of eleven kits. Pictured above is the backlog of an alleged “new” gunpla builder. We also have anecdotal evidence that a lot of new people got into the hobby to pass the time, and at least some of them went in hard. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic has kept a lot of people at home with nothing to do, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that Gunpla fans built more models than usual to pass some of that time. We know that Bandai built a brand new factory in order to help keep up with this demand. We know that worldwide sales of Gunpla continue to increase year over year. So I went to do some actual research to try and figure out what’s really happening. It took me hours to find any decent kits at a reasonable price, and I ended up buying all of them while I still had the chance.Īs far I can tell, we really are facing a Gunpla shortage here in the States. Heck, I’m 90% sure I looked at some kits last week that are now sold out. There are kits that I saw as in stock as recently as November that are now gone. There are kits that I have seen in stock and well priced for literal years on sites like Amazon or Hobbylink Japan that are now out of stock. What I discovered is that nearly any model that wasn’t released in the last 18 months is either sold out or marked up, across every online model kit seller of note. During the holiday break I spent quite a bit of time looking for some new kits to pick up. More than that, I have since discovered that the problem extends well beyond that handful of kits. Maybe they did strongarm their way into a pile of kits (I seriously doubt that, as it would imply they strongarmed Amazon). Maybe no other retailers wanted new inventory, and Target scooped up what was left. … maybe these really did sell out everywhere. Did they somehow grab all the remaining kits, leaving everyone else out in the cold? What I am curious about is why, exactly, they have all this inventory of model kits that are seemingly out of print and largely out of stock everywhere else. My speculation as to the cause of this lack of inventory was ill informed to say the least. That post isn’t very old, yet it aged very poorly, very quickly. The only people selling them online were third party resellers, all at various markups. A few months ago, I wrote a post about how all the Gunpla currently being sold at Target seemingly could only be found at Target.
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