I attended the IPMS Region 11 show this past weekend over in Coco beach. While parousing the dealers room I came across RoG 1/35 Tank Destroyer Jaguar 1. Cool little piece of armor. I know it retails for about $30 so I asked the vendor (Tank Rats) what he was asking. He said $40. I assumed he was confusing the model with another so I pulled the box off the wall and showed it to him. He again said it was $40. I explained to him the model retails for $30 and you can get it for $25 on eBay.
He explained to me that RoG was having financial difficulties and they recently closed their doors and another company (he told me but I can’t recall) it acquiring their molds. He went on to tell me that the $30 Jaguar kit I was interested in was going for $60 online and he wouldn’t sell his three for less than $40.00. He did try to show me these so-called exaggerated prices on eBay but discovered they kits were going for about $25. I was skeptical so I asked some of the other vendors at the show if they had heard the tale. It was news to them. When I got back to my room my club and I check online for any additional information and found none.
RoG site is up and running, there are no articles that I can find online and I don’t recall any talk of this on the major discussion boards and the vendor’s we asked had not heard of this major development so I am thinking Tank Rats was blowing smoke up my skirt.
I am posting this long winded tale to find out if there is any validity to what I was told. Is Revell of Germany out of business or was the dealer just trying to pull the styrene over my eyes?
EXACTLLY!!!,I read the model mags from all over and that would be front page news and have heard zilch about it!!! I suspect he was just trying to get the best price he could and was hoping somebody was gullible enough to bite!!![2cnts]
You know, I’ve never had any dealings with them, but this is the second incident (at least) in the past couple of month where someone has had some rather unsatisfactory interactions with TankRats. The last one, as I recall, was someone who could not get an order filled and could get no response to e-mails (does that sound right?).
This incident seems like them trying to artificially inflate the cost of a kit. Hmmmm… seems kinda shady to me…
More shenanigans from a vendor whose reputation is less than stellar.[2cnts] Revell Germany is a powerhouse akin to Tamiya, Italeri, Dragon, Revell USA, etc. Any model store I visited in Europe was dominted by them. If they were going belly up, it would be all over the model related web in a flash.
Thanks for your question - but your information is not true. In fact we have increasing investments into the hobby business, more than 80 novelties in the year and we are not planning to decrease our efforts in the future.
In fact we are developing some additional promising lines, have entered successfully the RC segment and therefore are looking optimistic to the next years.
Best regards
Thorsten Koss
So there it is folks… direct from the horse’s mouth.
BTW, you are very correct about the retail price as well. I picked up that same kit at a LHS a few months back for around the price you mentioned. It is a neat looking vehicle.
I’ve found that many store employees seem to think if it isn’t on their shelf or easily available through their distributor it doesn’t exist. This is not just related to models, I’ve run across it with books, movies, boots etc.
I run into that problem at the library of all places. They don’t have a healthy selection of military-related books(yet they have freakin’ five Clinton memoirs…I don’t care to read about his sexual adventures.)
Thus because of the shortage of military books I always have to order books from other libraries. Their usually pretty good about it, but sometimes they give me a response of “are you sure this book exists?”[:(DD] D’OH Obviously, it exists because I saw it on Amazon retailing for $29.95…geez.