Carl Tuveson wrote:
> Any sale of AF products would be money in there pocket no matter where it
> comes from. To compete with one's self is the American way. Look at the
> divisions of GM, Ford etc. They don't just sell a cars with one wheelbase...
I expected that someone would bring this up. Sorry, Carl, it just won't
fly. For most of their lives, each division, was set off not only in terms of
style, performance and so-forth, but in particular in price. GM's price tier
went from the bottom end of Chevrolet through to the top end of Cadillac. For
sure there was some degree of overlap between the adjacent tiers, but they did
not go head to head with each other. More recently the distinction between
tiers diminished which contributed materially to the decision to drop certain
divisions. This trend may have started as far back as the elimination of De
Soto from the Chrysler line. But very recently GM announced the elimination of
Oldsmobile in a couple of years. Moreover, even within divisions a lot of
pruning has occured with the aim of reducing the overlap with models in other
divisions.
That they don't sell cars with one wheelbase is precisely an attempt both to
compete with other manufacturers of cars with similar wheelbase and to avoid
internal competition.
In the end however, the selling of automobiles bears little resemblence to a
comparison of S gauge with O-27. Here the markets are tiny by comparison to
autos. They depend very heavily on Christmas sales. There is a very
traditional aspect to the product line with certain cars and locos available
year after year. Who would expect to buy a brand new 1949 Ford year after year
after year for more than 20 years. Lionel O-27 and AF occupy the same niche and
have since Hector was a pup. If their sales were totally additive to one
another then you might expect that LTI would try to push each very hard, but to
a significant degree they are subtractive.
(Alex, I promise this is my last missive on the subject.)
Bob Jackson
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