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Someday (soon) the rapacious b*stards that are the Capital Investment funds that have bought up all the shopping malls and high street rental spaces, will find they have killed the goose that lays the golden eggs, and those shopping spaces will fall eerily silent.Hobby shops in malls and town centres are dead, the rentals are too high, but they don't need to be in town centres/malls..
Oddly when travelling I've found that outside of the city where I live, its the smaller towns which seem to have livelier modelling scenes than the larger cities. Maybe its real estate prices, but here in Glasgow at least, many of the model and craft stores tend to be in the less expensive areas anyway. In Glasgow off the top of my head there's maybe six model shops. None of them are particularly large, and I feel like some of them are getting smaller - in the way that they're pushing out the traditional stock for newer systems (the "wargaming shop" has wound up investing more into roleplaying games, and now toys; which I'm lead to believe account for the majority of their sales). Contrast Glasgow with Edinburgh though and its night and day. Despite being the capital, or maybe because of that, there's barely any model or craft shops of note there. Though oddly loads of roleplaying and boardgame shops. Those that there are are on this weird spectrum of being barely model shops and megastores. Its like the one model shop just became so large that nobody wants to compete. Which is sad then that they too are chasing the money and doing away with the smaller scale kits ("no money in them"). Out in the country its a different matter. Whilst you'll never find most of them on Google Maps, I've found tonnes of small shops out tucked away on the back roads. Likely hold overs from other times when there wasn't the distraction of video games for the kids. But they're still out there, and seem to carry modern enough stock (though when miniatures magazines are doing reviews of 30 year old kits, that's maybe not the best term). Though so many have closed down too. Its the ones in cities which seem like they're more fleeting. Perhaps in that the ones that are there have become institutions. Where they only close down due to the retirement of their owners (that's the main reason for closures in Glasgow).The newer ones don't tend to last more than a year or two, which I'm guessing is down to them being less stubborn than the old guard. The lasting stores are aware that its a crap market to get into, but carry on (just like the old yins who turn up to the flea market week on week, despite dwindling sales, just for the company and consistency).Unless they're a cultural shift, the highstreet's dying. Its not just model shops, its everyone who's going through this. Though perhaps the miniatures stores are effected in different ways to say clothes shops of course. As I heard a former manager say recently, "when a customer can buy a product and have same or next day delivery, the highstreet just can't compete". I'd say the highstreet used to have the convenience option over online, but those delivery times are killing even that. Which brings the model shop's appeal down to things like the customer's force of habit, or the "feel" that they offer. Personally I love going to a shop that I've never been to and spending ages trawling through their bits to find stuff I'd have never known about if I was just searching the internet (or are long out of production). Similarly, outside of wargaming clubs and miniatures shows, they're likely one of the scant places you can find where you can talk about the hobby (though as a wargamer, most model shops turn their nose up at me...). We'll have to see how things are in 20 or 50 years. Right now we still have hobbyists who know the experience of going to a shop. Give it a few decades and maybe people will stop seeing that appeal. There may be a resurgance as people look for nostalgia, but I don't see model shops having a product which will ever make them an alternative to the internet for those newer consumers. Though if the hobby were to dwindle in those years perhaps it wouldn't be a question of what could save those shops, as the lack of a market would already have killed them off. Still, with 3D printing and a rise in "makers" its hardly like model making would die in the future. People will still want the experience of cutting things off a sprue and kitbashing (its what the modern props world is made from). It may be though that instead of going to shops the future modeller's going to just pull files from the internet and have them printed off, even just buckets of random parts if they want the kitbashing experience. Discussion's gone to forums and sites like Discord now, and with people spending more time on the internet, that could supplant going to a local model shop or club just to have a chat about our toy soldiers. The hobby as a whole won't die, however I'm thinking that things may move towards these "maker spaces", rather than the highstreet. Its a concept which seems to have grown (especially in America) and adopted model making, among other hobbies, as one of its contents. So there may be a rise in hobbyists who comes from that environment to give the hobby a bit of a boost in future (not to say it necessarily needs it). Nor would there ever be a world where model making ever dies out. The model shop however, along with the rest of the highstreet, may become a thing of the past - relegated to one old shop hanging on in some back alley, or a nostalgia baiting place which doesn't quite get it. These are probably wider concepts than just one type of shop dying off though, with wider economic and cultural questions which will come into play. Who knows, maybe the internet will just go out one day and we'll all be living in a Shadowrun like future where we're visiting model shops between shoot outs with the local Doom Cults... (someone on this forum really needs to tell me off for accidentally writing such long posts at some point )