A few months ago, I wrote a post about how all the Gunpla currently being sold at Target seemingly could only be found at Target. The only people selling them online were third party resellers, all at various markups.
That post isn’t very old, yet it aged very poorly, very quickly. My speculation as to the cause of this lack of inventory was ill informed to say the least. These are actual quotes of what I wrote:
What I am curious about is why, exactly, they have all this inventory of model kits that are seemingly out of print and largely out of stock everywhere else. Did they somehow grab all the remaining kits, leaving everyone else out in the cold?
As well as this gem:
… maybe these really did sell out everywhere. Maybe no other retailers wanted new inventory, and Target scooped up what was left. Maybe they did strongarm their way into a pile of kits (I seriously doubt that, as it would imply they strongarmed Amazon).
More than that, I have since discovered that the problem extends well beyond that handful of kits. During the holiday break I spent quite a bit of time looking for some new kits to pick up. What I discovered is that nearly any model that wasn’t released in the last 18 months is either sold out or marked up, across every online model kit seller of note. There are kits that I have seen in stock and well priced for literal years on sites like Amazon or Hobbylink Japan that are now out of stock. There are kits that I saw as in stock as recently as November that are now gone. Heck, I’m 90% sure I looked at some kits last week that are now sold out. It took me hours to find any decent kits at a reasonable price, and I ended up buying all of them while I still had the chance.
As far I can tell, we really are facing a Gunpla shortage here in the States. So I went to do some actual research to try and figure out what’s really happening.
Supply and Demand
We know that worldwide sales of Gunpla continue to increase year over year. We know that Bandai built a brand new factory in order to help keep up with this demand.
We know that the COVID-19 pandemic has kept a lot of people at home with nothing to do, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that Gunpla fans built more models than usual to pass some of that time.
We also have anecdotal evidence that a lot of new people got into the hobby to pass the time, and at least some of them went in hard.
Pictured above is the backlog of an alleged “new” gunpla builder. To be clear, that is a stack of eleven kits. When I first started, I was building one a year.
Furthermore, if you were to go to https://www.reddit.com/r/Gunpla/new/ right now and sort on new posts, you’d see a bunch of them that look something like this:
It’s not just that you have more people building. It’s that you have new people coming in and building tons of kits at a ridiculous clip. If that photo above is correct, someone built two Real Grades and two Master Grades entirely within the holiday season. Depending on your definition of “holiday season”, that’s two months if you count Thanksgiving, but is more likely reference to December. Four complicated kits in a single month. The mind boggles.
Lastly, while I have no proof, I think it is reasonable to assume that the pandemic has slowed down Bandai’s production rates to some extent. When you put it all together, this looks like a clear cut case of demand outstripping supply.
Should I Worry?
So - should we worry? If these kits are all sold out, does that mean we’ll never get another chance to get them? Or will we be stuck paying out to scalpers?
As far as I can tell, the answer to both questions is “no, at least not long term”.
What you have to understand is that the business model for Gunpla is not the same as it is for things like comic books, collectibles, electroncis, and physical releases of video games. That is to say, Bandai doesn’t drive model kit sales through scarcity1. As it turns out, Bandai keeps all of the molds for all of the kits they build. The only ones they don’t have are the ones that accidentally broke. This means that they have the ability to reprint any kit they have ever made, and believe it or not, they actually do.
If you’ve ever watched something like Gundam Build Fighters, then you’ve seen scenes like this, where characters are standing next to shelves lined with some very old model kits.
For example, in that screenshot I see the box for the High Grade GM Space Command, which was released in 2004. You might have wondered if it is realistic that such old kits might still be on shelves in Japan in such high quantities.
Yes! Absolutely! Because Bandai uses their molds to reprint kits of all sorts of vintages. I’m not actually sure how they determine what kits to reprint, and when, or how often, but (according to multiple sources online) it is something they do. This is why, under non-pandemic circumstances, you can usually find the kit you are looking for, regardless of its age. And if you can’t, you may just have to wait a bit longer for an inevitable reprint. The point is, with Gunpla, you aren’t stuck building whatever is brand new.
So what I would say is this - hang in there. Build what you can, have fun, but if you can’t get your hands on something, just try to wait a little longer for the world to get back to normal. Once demand dies down to normal levels and Bandai has some time to replenish supplies, things should get back to normal. In the meantime, we should all do our part not to go crazy and hoard kits. That way we all have a better chance at getting the ones we want.
Closing Thoughts
- To be clear, I’m not mad that more people are into this hobby. Far from it. I’m simply amazed at how quickly some folks are jumping into the deep end. If I’m being honest, I have feelings of both pity and jealousy. Jealousy because I’m envious of anyone having enough time to build kits that quickly. Pity because I know it is entirely possible that all that time comes from some of these people not having a job, and the kits are bought with money they don’t actually have.
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If you look around on Amazon, you may find a bunch of reasonably priced High Grades, like the following:
Sadly, these prices aren’t quite accurate. Here are the buying options for the GM Command Space.
The shipping costs from all these vendors are more than the kit itself - because they’re all being shipped direct from Japan.
This feels scummy to me. Not the shipping costs, mind you - I did some math that suggests that depending on factors, a single model kit actually can cost about $20 to ship to the U.S. No, it’s not the vendors that are scummy, but rather Amazon. Certainly someone working there can come up with a way to indicate that a product may entail expensive international shipping rates so that customers don’t get a bad case of sticker shock.
- The exception to this rule is Premium Bandai, which actually is a limited quantity, pre-order only racket. [return]
