it may help Estes om the short term, but if distributors and retailers don't support the line, it will hurt the hobby in the long term. Availability will be limited as retailers will cut back or no longer carry the line.
It is such a specialized industry, I don't see anyone else coming into the industry.
Consider Quest (pre merger, buy out, whatever). They had BP motors, they have kits, they had parts. They're like Estes but smaller. And you'd never see their stuff except in the biggest hobby shops. Estes would have to screw up bigger than this, I think, to make room for a serious competitor.
(In my favorite LHS ever I even also Sunward products.)
The people running Estes now seem to be more interested in the dollar and not the people giving them dollars.
Oh god, not this discussion again.
Estes is a
for profit company. Of course they're interested mainly in the dollars. That's why they exist. That's how it's supposed to work. They provide products and services in return for dollars. Their interest in providing quality products and services at good prices is that that is how they acquire dollars. This may be a bad business decision, because it might hurt their profit, not because it means they don't care about us. If they cared more about us than about the dollars then they'd cut their prices in order to provide products to us at the expense of their profits, and they'd go broke. Our relationship with them is symbiotic, based on our interest in building and flying rockets and their interest in making money. Their interest in those dollars (and other companies' same interest) is what allows the hobby to exist as it does.
They've made a decision that is likely to be against our interest as hobbyists, is certainly bad for their distributers and sellers, and may prove to be against their interest because it hurts their profit by disrupting the symbiotic balance between us. I hope it
does hurt their profit, because then it will be in their interest to reverse this decision. They won't reverse it because we're upset and they care about us, and they shouldn't. They don't exist to make us happy; they exist to make money
by making us happy, and balancing out happiness with other factors.
Rocketry is more or less a dying hobby with young kids so
Oh god, not this discussion again.
There've been many discussions here on the forum about how he hobby is dying. At the same time, we have scout troops and school groups building kits and coming to launches every weekend. Most of those kids will not become hooked on the hobby, but a few will. And that's how it's always been: only a few who try it out stick with it. If the fact that only a few stay means the hobby is dying then it would have died decades ago. The NAR membership grows, month after month.
[M]y local HobbyTown sells more Quest stuff than Estes.
OK, interesting.
I've never seen that, but I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad Quest is doing so well, and I'm glad that they, or someone, might help with hurting Estes over this recent decision and get them to reverse it.
I can't order anything to a US address, as my Credit card is "canadian" so it's refused.
I ran into that, but with Target, and in reverse. My niece was registered at Target.CA (among other places) and I wanted to get her something from there. I couldn't order it and ship to her address because my card is American. I had to call a colleague in Canada who placed the order for me, and I reimbursed him by PayPal. If Target.CA took PayPal, everything would have been easy. But that's not about rockets, so I'll shut up now.
