Statement from Kernow MRC on Ltd.Edn. models via Dapol

[Etched Pixels]

I asked the same question a couple of years ago of a couple of the big retailers. Unlike the manufacturers, the box shifters do not have a particular reputation to try and protect. The return rate for locos was ~5%. In spite of some people's perceptions, this is roughly the same for both 00 gauge and N gauge and does not differ significantly between the major manufacturers.

 

I've heard much the same, although I must point out that in most industries a 5% return rate would be considered a cause for board level panic, people being fired and emergency corrective action.

[40F]

I've heard much the same, although I must point out that in most industries a 5% return rate would be considered a cause for board level panic, people being fired and emergency corrective action.

 

In other words a knee jerk reaction

[jjb1970]

The problem with most (all?) threads that relate to the commercial relationships in the industry are that they tend to offer a story from a single perspective and are rather tendentious in their use of information and/or hearsay. This is pretty much meaningless, whilst from time to time you do see something which is clear cut, black and white it is very rare in my experience and it is much more normal to be more nuanced and less clear. Unless you know the full story it is impossible to form a genuinely informed or valid opinion on the story. And such threads or posts tend to generate some hot headed posting. So on the whole unless people are in a position to post the complete story or we have people from both sides of a story willing to post I'd prefer that commercial matters were left to the parties involved. But that's just my opinion, for the large outfits like Hornby you can access their annual accounts if you are really interested in their financial health.

[TheSignalEngineer]

I've heard much the same, although I must point out that in most industries a 5% return rate would be considered a cause for board level panic, people being fired and emergency corrective action.

Although I posted something in another thread recently where a company said if they got the failure rate down to 10% on their Chinese outsourcing they were lucky, so they changed to UK manufacture.

[Tricky-CRS]

Well we have had a Nespreso for just over a year, it came with a milk warmer. We are on our third milk warmer and that is broken waiting for return. A mate thought it was great milk warmer so got one, that to is broken so out of 4 that I know of 4 are broken. The fact that they get instant replacement no questions asked suggest knowledge of the problem. So these things are not restricted to our hobby.

[phil gollin]

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%-age returns are only useful indicators IF you understand the context.

 

Finance houses make vast sums of money on minute percentages of extremely large deals (and pay their staff ridiculously large amounts), shop keepers often make a so-so living on large percentages on relatively few transactions.

 

Because of this people use percentage return figures to "prove" anything they like.

 

The prime example are supermarkets who often protest that they are hard done by as they "only" earn around 10 to 12% (can be differently expressed)  -  this SEEMS a reasonable argument until you realise that continental supermarkets usually work on MUCH lower percentages, usually less than 5%.  This is because, as with banks, they have a huge throughput with relatively little outlay in capital and labour costs.

 

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[mikeharvey22]

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%-age returns are only useful indicators IF you understand the context.

 

 

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I thought we were talking about the % of items returned as faulty rather than return on sales or investment.

 

Mike

[34theletterbetweenB&D]

I asked the same question a couple of years ago of a couple of the big retailers. Unlike the manufacturers, the box shifters do not have a particular reputation to try and protect. The return rate for locos was ~5%. In spite of some people's perceptions, this is roughly the same for both 00 gauge and N gauge and does not differ significantly between the major manufacturers...

 

 

I've heard much the same, although I must point out that in most industries a 5% return rate would be considered a cause for board level panic, people being fired and emergency corrective action.

 

As another experienced in Quality Management, my expectation of continued employment in the face of a 5% return rate would have been nil. But that was in a very different industry, where the manufacturing divisions were expected to exceed 6 sigma on all critical process stages where the art existed to do so, and there was (degree qualified) engineer customer support available in the field to assess any problems.

 

Where the minimum cost to the business return rate for manufacturing / transport damage induced faults falls in terms of % customer returns as faulty, for low cost consumer goods such as OO RTR model railways, I don't know; other than to say it will not be 0%. Don't have the data, cannot evaluate. What I do know from a couple of direct experiences, is that a goodly proportion of model railway returns by customers with the claim of 'faulty' are errors, wholly or in part.

 

The supplier has no control over what the customer does in terms of the layout the item has to run on, the power supply, personal dexterity or otherwise, among other things.

Example, item returned visually perfect, claimed ''doesn't run': placed on track, it moved immediately on just a breath of current, ran perfectly in all respects.

Example, item returned visually perfect, claimed ''derails on curves": placed on shop set track layout it ran perfectly around the specified minimum R2.

Example, item returned in pieces, claimed "fell apart": well yes it will do that, if over thirty screws have been undone and removed.

And so on.

 

There were genuine faults too, more of them relating to transport damage than original manufacturing defects in my estimation. Slightly fewer in number than the essentially inexplicable 'didn't work for customer, no problem when used as directed back in the shop' group of returns...

[Sam Moss]

We also seem to have become used to having a Roll Royce service in terms of communications. Maybe we need to get used to having far fewer or no coms as per other manufacturers. 

Would be good if Rolls Royce themselves had a Rolls Royce service in communications.............