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 The "El Cheapo" mentality is not only confined to US consumer behavior, it has reached the entire western world. The hunt for bargains has led to the deterioration of the MSRP, which long has shed its guiding function. The Walthers catalogue has been my guide to model railroading for years. I used it to calculate my shopping list, knowing, that my LHS can get the items of my desire for me, sometimes even with a slight discount. The most important issue was, that I did not have to shop around to get what I wanted, I knew, it was available in short order.Times have changed. I do have to spend a lot of time chasing the product I want to buy in the internet - not always to get the best deal, but just to get it. Limited runs force me to buy at a time I may not want to buy yet. More than once I missed to get something I wanted. And even if I am able to buy, is it really a bargain? None of us knows, how the MSRP is actually calculated, whether those fantastic discounts have not already been considered. What does that DCC equipped sound loco with a MSRP of $ 399 actually cost, landed in the US? Maybe $ 60 - 80? Even with a discount of 30 - 40 %, there is a lot of money to be earned. Would Walthers, Horizon and the likes be still in business, if there wasn´t any money in it? I doubt that. I am not bashing Walthers or anybody else for that - it is finally our own behavior, which has fostered this change. But it has led to the demise of the LHS as a stable source of product for our hobby and hinders the entrance of new players into the market. And finally, it costs a lot of jobs, local jobs, not Chinese jobs, as the Chinese by far are not buying products from us to the same extent. Do we really want to deplete our own economy  in the long run?
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