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Ollie's strike again


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16 hours ago, Tom Geiger said:

I take back my 6 years and realize it was when I first moved to PA maybe 8-9 years ago. They advertised it as a warehouse fire sale, but we saw it as the Lindberg sale...

Just to grasp the size of this I looked it up.  Ollie's has 330 stores across 23 states.  Founded in Harrisburg, PA in 1982 by Morton Bernstein and Oliver ROsenberg.  Yea, that's Oliver on the logos

So figure a pallet or two per store... where to we find 500 pallets of model kits?

This is a good question. I can not think of a store that carries model kits which would have such large quantities, with the exception of Hobby Lobby. But Hobby Lobby liquidates with clearance sales, as documented in many places, with car kits for $7.48.  Maybe Michaels, but they seem content to sell the same 5 revell kits at MSRP + 200% . 

 

I think these may be over stocks from Round2. Look at the kits which are offered. First, the Lindberg ships. These were considered old and obsolete in the 80s.  They will not appeal to the serious ship modeler. I think the only market for those is the nostalgia market. 

Next, we see two Truck kits. These may be subjects of limited appeal, and Round 2 may have saturated the market for trucks with a bonanza of long awaited re-issues.  

Then the Daytona kits, If I recall correctly,  those are well known to be the least desirable Daytona kits with the plastic planks to add to the fenders to make the fenders large enough to match the nose. 

So these all may have been kits for which Round2 misjudged the market and got stuck with a large quantity of.

That is just my guess.  I love trying to solve a mystery like this, thanks for bringing it up, Tom.

 

 

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Went to Ollies in Colonie, NY today. Just ships and planes. And the manager could answer if they will get cars or trucks because they don't know what is in each box until they open them. While there I went to Hobby Lobby seeing their website listed about 15 new items in the model section and they have about 15 -20 new items listed day. All diecast. So I was hoping they had marked the other kidts down. No such luck. 

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1 minute ago, ewetwo said:

Went to Ollies in Colonie, NY today. Just ships and planes. And the manager could answer if they will get cars or trucks because they don't know what is in each box until they open them. While there I went to Hobby Lobby seeing their website listed about 15 new items in the model section and they have about 15 -20 new items listed day. All diecast. So I was hoping they had marked the other kidts down. No such luck. 

I have a horrible feeling you just gave me a "Preview of Coming Attractions" of my own weekend. :unsure::lol:

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1 minute ago, Snake45 said:

I have a horrible feeling you just gave me a "Preview of Coming Attractions" of my own weekend. :unsure::lol:

If I remember correctly Snake. The last time you had to frequent the stores pretty regularly as the kits changed on and off. So who knows. Maybe try calling? I asked the manager about that and he said they could only tell you what they had on the floor. Not what was in the warehouse as the box are not marked. I could see what he was talking about buy looking at the boxes on the floor being unloaded. A lot of the boxes had things like"toys" to "remote". Stuff like tat on them.

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19 hours ago, Tom Geiger said:

It makes you wonder where they are getting this stuff!

This is a very small market.

Back when they had their first big sale, some 6 years ago it was all Lindberg.  We surmised that Frank had a warehouse full of slow movers and sold it off to finance the latest kit releases.  

Since then they've had a mix of all manufacturers.   People said it may have been from Hobbyco, again slow movers from their big warehouse.

And now they are gone...  where is there an entity  that would have quantities of these kits?   Remember Ollies is getting larger as a chain.   Their sale represents a huge load of models!   Intellectual curiosity is killing me!

The big dump of toys they got in last week (and suspect new stuff will flow in through Christmas) is the final liquidation from Toys R Us. Now TRU did carry some models like the Revell Junior Series - the odd non-scale cars you assembled with a big plastic kid sized screw drivers.  But everything shown in the flyer and mentioned by people here is either more of the old Lindberg stuff they haven't sold or it's 18+ month old Round2 kits.  That would leave the most obvious suspects to be HobbyLobby and Wal*Mart. Because in addition to the fact Wal*Mart carries some models on the online "store", they also placed Round2 kits back into a bunch of stores that had prior success selling models over the past 5 years. The lack of anything Revell (or even Moebius) makes me lean towards Wally World because H.L. would have sold off all the stuff that didn't sell.  It's a sales outlet large enough to get these models by the case load - my local Ollie's always has a couple of cases lying around on top of shelves when they do these kit blowouts and they are factory sealed full cases in their original boxes, not mixed case lots being boxed up by a warehouse liquidator. 

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I went to my closest Ollies last night. They hadn't put out all of their stock yet but one of the employees went to the back and brought out the boxes of what they got. All they got car related was the MPC/AMT '72 GTO and the Lindberg '96 Crown Vic cop car. No thanks. The other night they had a couple of the MPC/AMT Dodge Daytonas and a some of the MPC '50 Mercury snap cop cars but they were all gone last night. Some people must have been desperate, I think. I'm sure they'll be on eBay or the Facebook model pages soon at inflated prices to snag the unwary.

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Just remember that the ad broke yesterday for the sale.For the ad they have to hold back stuff to put it out for the sale date ,otherwise it's  called false advertising. That is the law here in Michigan. After visiting Ollie's on Tuesday of this week some stuff was out but not all of it.I went back yesterday to all the stores and picked up the 50 Merc- Police car, 69 Charger Daytona, 72 GTO, chrome Texaco tanker trailer and the 2 truck kits kenworth and the other one. Just keep rechecking guys!!!!!!!!!

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34 minutes ago, paul alflen said:

Just remember that the ad broke yesterday for the sale.For the ad they have to hold back stuff to put it out for the sale date ,otherwise it's  called false advertising. That is the law here in Michigan. After visiting Ollie's on Tuesday of this week some stuff was out but not all of it.I went back yesterday to all the stores and picked up the 50 Merc- Police car, 69 Charger Daytona, 72 GTO, chrome Texaco tanker trailer and the 2 truck kits kenworth and the other one. Just keep rechecking guys!!!!!!!!!

Yeah same for me, Got the trucks early and they had more out yesterday...

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I haven't seen anybody else mention the AMT "Showroom Replica" kits.  The Ollie's closest to me had stacks of them:  the '05 Chrysler 300c, '09 Corvette, '10 Camaro etc. They have a "Showroom Replicas" logo in one corner of the boxtop. Pic below.

I'd never heard of these kits before I saw them in Ollie's.  According to the Round 2 website, they're unassembled promos: "Since then, several all new kits, based on modern muscle cars have been released in AMT’s 'Showroom Replicas' series. These kits harken back to the days of the aforementioned promotional models and really show how the brand has come full circle."

These wouldn't be worth $9.99 to me.  I don't have much interest in late-model cars anyway and they wouldn't seem to have many useful parts to steal. 

amtamt742.jpg

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Stopped in the Allentown store last night. 

Had a bunch of ships and planes, a few old Lindberg Ford and Olds cars, the Datsun, and the VW bus. 

Seemed to have a ton of single car display cases as well.

Gonna check the local Wilkes Barre store in about an hour to see what they have. I’m not getting my hopes up too high though. I don’t think this one will be as good as their last big but out. 

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Yesterday I was dumping out my recyclables into the curbside collection toter. 1 page of a sale flyer caught the wind and fell on the ground. I picked it up, and of all the paper to fly out of the recycling, it was the page from the Ollies ad with toys and models.  I figured this was a sign. I was out and about today, and I stopped at the Sterling, VA Ollies

 

I found:

MPC Police Patrol Car (49 merc?)

MPC 1972 GTO

MPC 1969 Charger Daytona 

 

they also had the lindberg Gato Sub, and the Lindberg 1/600 USS Manchester ship kit. The cars were $9.99 and the ships were $7.99

I might have been tempted to buy either of those trucks, but they did not have the truck kits. So nothing which appealed to me, but if you have a Keurig coffee maker there were good prices on big boxes of K-Cups.

 

Edited by kurth
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Just got home from mine. Only cars they had were the '67 4-4-2 (I bought one just for parts to build my MCW resin '65 4-4-2) and I think some kind of '37 Ford convertible. Several ships, F-100 and TBF airplanes, and I think some skeleton feet or something. Maybe they'll have more/better later. 

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I stopped by the Aberdeen, MD store this evening and they had the IH and Kenworth trucks, the plated tanker trailer, Patrol Merc, Dodge Daytona and the 72 GTO. I picked up one each of the trucks and a tanker. The AMT/MPC Daytona isn't good for much unless you're building a Nascar racer and the GTO is the one molded in dark orange, so I passed on those.

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I just got home from the store in Lexington NC. I picked up 2 4300 Transtars and 2 K100 KWs and a Chrome tanker. Still several tankers left and a few trucks if you are in the Lexington area.

A word of advise. Check the entire store. I had already given up on there being any truck kits, and the on an end cap, there they were. Models were in at least 4 different locations in the store and the tankers were not with the trucks.

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I picked up that GTO today. I didn’t realize how de-contented it was though. The chrome tree is broken into 3 difference pieces containing only the stock engine parts(several of which shouldn’t even be chromed), various body trim parts and two sets of wheels. Another bag contains about 30 parts for the chassis and interior. Seems like it would take more effort to remove the parts than the .30 cents in plastic saved would warrant. Glad I only paid $9.99

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I remember buying that '72 Goat kit when it first came out.... the bottom of the body was fogged in black below the belt line and wrapped in tissue paper from the factory ... That's all I remember about that kit other than being molded in a (yuck!) ? light brown color.....

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