When Cosco stopped selling gluten free bread i did. There's a lot of thjngs i do that with. Companies with these tracking cards get rid of stuff that few people buy. Well I'm still buying those certain things and just because it's not selling as well as another product is no excuse to get rid of it. It's why there are 20 brands of ranch dressing in grocery stores. If that's all there is that's what people will buy. If there is no other choice than one type of thing how do people know there could be another. Sales show people buy ranch dressing because that's all there is. If there was more offered there would be more diverse sales.
I don't think anyone is beating the dead horse in the room, which is a good share of people are NOT going to buy from IWM directly. The #1 reason for that is the base shipping costs of $10, or might be more since I last looked. When you have something that is as prohibitive as shipping that doubles the cost of the item that you want to purchase you are not going to see people make those purchases that they would have otherwise made. When you add that sometimes you can find the minis for a buck or two less you ensure that fewer people are going to buy from IWM directly.
Some of us just don't really have many choice when it comes to buying, so we look online. I would like to have a nearby store that stocks BT and buy minis from them, but that just has not existed since 2001. When you have such a choice its hard to turn to IWM, though you may want to. This is even harder if you are not the kind of person that buys $100+ of minis at a time, either due to being more impulsive or just encountering empty spots in your collection at random times. Some of the minis on the list might have sold more had these walls not been manufactured in the first place.
As for the ranch dressing example, its true that the more you stock of one thing, the more people will likely buy it since that is all there is. It is much like game stores that I have seen since 2001. Sure, they are 'game stores' but when you walk in it might as well be a games workshop store because all there is is 40k and warhammer, then games that look like 40k and warhammer. That is how BT gets edged out since fewer people play the most mainstream game they see their game marginalized which forces the person to either buy into the new game or deal with the nonsense of being a second rate customer who has to order through special orders or online which are effectively the same. I don't care to support a shop that does not care to support me as a gamer, so why not just buy online and not bother going to the shop?
The BT collection is going to be unwieldy compared to other games so I can see how they would retire some designs. It just sucks to see that the design you want is archived and you don't want to spend even more just to get one made or the effort of getting others to buy one when they mihgt not care about it. $25+ for a single mini sucks.
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