Important News

Back to work for us all after a stocktake and a very busy festive season. Highlighted just now is the fact we have less than ten copies left in stock from our allocation of just two hundred copies of In the Wink of an Eye. We had ordered 500 copies for both ourselves and to sell to other traders by wholesale. However, the publisher pulled our order back against our wishes and has attempted in doing so to break the government's Resale Price Maintenance Regulations by attemptingpreventing us from offering any form of discount on this title and attempting to stop us from offering the title to customers as part of our 3 for 2 offer.

We try to give all of our customers the best service and deals we possibly can and have done so now for over 26 years, this is not the first instance of other publishers attempting to prevent us doing this by restricting sales, and have also been likewise in breach of the government's regulations to protect consumers. To be honest, I am getting fed up with this behaviour and tactic which has also been repeated by several other publishers in their attempts to hold Strathwood's market position back unfairly out of direct sight of the public.

How Resale Price Maintenance harms consumers

It’s important that consumers benefit from competition and can shop around to get the best price or service for themselves. This is particularly important when consumers’ budgets are tight, and costs are increasing.

Resale price maintenance: prevents resellers advertising goods or services below a certain price, this means that customers are denied the chance to shop around and compare prices to save money, and can lead to higher prices for customers.

Rightly or wrongly as part of my own New Year's resolutions, I have decided to expose this problem publicaly on this forum in an attempt to draw consumer's attentions to this issue. For those who wish to know who else has been guilty of this practice in the book and DVD marketplace, just work out which other railway publishers titles we should be selling and could be selling or have sold in the past, and yet we do not offer to our customers today. The reason is simple, the usual trading terms offered to others are unfairly being refused to us as they seek to "protect" their marketplace to the customer's ultimate disadvantage.

Now this disclosure will be both controversial and unpopular to some I am sure, but it is important to get this information out there.

As a business, Strathwood are happy to even pay some suppliers in advance of usual credit terms and have already done so with several in the past, even paying prior to delivery of the stock to our warehouse. Yet, two of them at least have we feel have abused our marketing position and then gone on later to refuse to supply us further stock, after we had promoted their products hard for them giving them higher sales numbers and market exposure, most likely in an attempt to try to protect their place in the market for themselves.

In fact, although we offer all our own trade customers their usual discounts off whatever price we sell to the public at, soin turn we don't take any unfair advantage over them. Instead, several trade outlets refuse to stock our publications as part of a foolish and to be honest vindictive trade vendetta that is being conducted by some of the players in the marketplace. They are happy to talk quietly among themselves at shows and exhibitions to attempt to hold Strathwood back in the marketplace, but it is not only against the law in their tactics, but unltimately damaging to the hobby too. If only they could see it in an otherwise declining marketplace, as we are all getting older as as the dinosaurs we really are. Their behaviour, if they could see it for themselves is damaging to everyone. Two things happen as we sadly ultimately lose every enthusiast and modeller in the current age, where the younger generation would rather play computer games. That death of the enthusiast is one less purchaser for new or secondhand books, models or relics. At the same time the deceased's own collection will ultimately return to the marketplace through preserved railways, clubs, eBay and dealers back into the market. Thus increasing the available stock available to a declining number of potential consumers.

It would be great if those other traders dropped the ideas of some sort of cartel that they have been persueing and opened up the market once again, to the best interests of customers and the trade alike.

Further details on this issue can be found here on the government's own website  https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/resale-price-maintenance-advice-for-retailers/resale-price-maintenance-advice-for-retailers#supplying-products-to-a-limited-number-of-retailers and also there on YouTube.

Kevin Derrick

Owner of Strathwood