A Very Sad Day...

Tony

Staff member
It saddens me to see so many great companies that are either out of business or changed owners and might as well be out of business. The first is Hobby Express, formerly known as Hobby-Lobby, Notice the hyphen and not to be confused with the craft store Hobby Lobby. They used to sell a lot of great balsa kits for a really good price. Well the first thing you see on their new site is the owner's new years resolution for 2018 is to retire. Then it says auction now closed, business sold. Very cold, very blunt, and the prices of everything have doubled, if they are even in stock, which most are not.

They purchased their kits from company named AeroCraft Rc who made the Telemaster. An absolutely fantastic kit. I own one and they are great! But, you type in their address and you get a blank white page with a very weird URL. So they are gone.

It's just a sad day for the Rc Hobby today... For me at least.
 

Admiral

Well-Known Member
It's a sign of the times Tony, the same thing is happening in Australia. The days of the larger Hobby Shops centrally located with knowledgeable staff to help customer is gone, margins are too thin and rents and wages are too high for them to compete with online stores. Here there appears to be a trend for smaller premises in out of the way places selling mainly online and operated by one or two people (often husband & wife).

You can't stop the culture changing, large hobby shops are a victim of the internet as much as anything else, and we have all been guilty of it, you go into your LHS and see a battery for $80 you think to yourself I saw that on line for $60 and postage is only $8 so the LHS misses out. When I started in the hobby there were plenty of LHS's and you could only compare between them, so an even playing field kept them all in business.
 

Tony

Staff member
You are exactly right about that Keith! It's a sad reality but being online, you have very little overhead. It just sucks that the new generation is going to miss out on great build kits like the Telemaster. Yes, there are still a lot of them out there (Gullows, TopFlite...) but I don't think any of them are as old as the Telemaster which is from the 70's I believe.
 

liquid1

Member
Admiral , your spot on. And I’ll add sometimes rude staff. Same goes for bike shops. I don’t mind paying more if the staff is friendly and helpful. The taxes and overhead are acinine these days for local business
 

Rowdy

New Member
Man i was reading these posts, and it just took me back.To when i was a kid growing up in the early 90's and the LHS was hands down, one of the coolest places you could be. and it wasnt long until i worked my ass off for my first Team Associated truck.......and off to the races i went. everything i learned about r/c came from the people in the hobby shop. There were so many things that were taught to me. a whole lot of invaluable information was handed down to me and many others. That shop eventually went out of business, and my interest for alot of things r/c related soon followed. eventually years later i decided to get into helicopters. My first move didnt involve ordering something online, living in a different state i looked up the closest open hobby shop i could find, and made a visit. That being said, i understand how and why local hobby shops have failed due to internet sales. but for me that doesnt mean that ill stop going. Even if that means paying an extra few dollars now and then. All in all its the people like us, who understand and do what we do to educate that next new person and not let hobby shops die. because if that happened to me i would just be screwed. i dont learn from reading for the most part. I learn by working hands on. i know im not the only one, and thats important.
 

Tony

Staff member
Yup, I started my hobby back in 94 and back then we had a track in OKC called RCRC, or Radio Controlled Race Course. They had a rather large indoor dirt track but eventually they were pushed out because their prices were too high. One of the companies that pushed them out was Competition RC. This is the track that I had done most of my racing, both indoor concrete road and outdoor 10th scale truck racing. I eventually did some dirt oval stuff with a modified Associated TC3 with a rally kit on it, but it just wasn't the fun I had back in the day.

The owners a year or so ago decided go finally retire after 21 or 22 years in business. Not sure if the track is still going since I have not been up there in well over a year. But man do I miss racing. I just hate having to drive an hour to do it.
 

Admiral

Well-Known Member
I have lost two LHSs in the last couple of weeks, one just up the road sold mainly buggies etc, but could occasionally get me out of trouble, the other in Sydney and they were the Australian KDS agent for my Agile & Chase parts still trying to recover the $70 for the last order I placed and didn't receive.
 
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