AMC Dave, It's very hard to see the car number in your photo. But that car looks to me like an Industrial Rail reefer and if the car is numbered #14743, well, that's also an UMD car number. The trucks, also hard to see, look more like UMD trucks and not the postwar copy the Williams trucks were.
Tiffany, it's not greed. Menards has other sources of revenue and do not make complete entire product lines as do Lionel and MTH. Nor do they have the same R&D and tooling costs, or technology investments. And because they sell direct, they do not have the same mark ups due to the distributor network and then also the dealer network on top of that.
United Model Distributors, (original maker of the Industrial Rail cars) had a similar advantage in that they were a distributor having the trains made for them. So although they had R&D and tooling costs, they didn't have the distributor mark up.
That said, I agree Lionel has priced themselves out of the traditional market for many traditional customers. I want to buy traditional train cars, and not make a subsidy payment for the tooling for new scale products. Nothing against those products, but we all know the prices for traditional Lionel train cars is nearly equal to, and sometimes more than new scale products. For example, the new LionScale cars, made in the USA, are priced less than a traditional car with die-cast trucks, and not far above a traditional car with plastic trucks, made overseas from tooling long ago paid for.
But I don't run the Lionel company. They can do as they see necessary. But as a train consumer, I have the same prerogative. Fortunately for me, there are many other choices on the secondary market for traditional rolling stock instead of new Lionel.
And for many, Menards has become one of those options, to which we should all be thankful. This is a side business for Menards, that they could probably just as easily do without.
Also, remember this when you post your long lists of products you want to see Menards make. They're currently doing things slow and progressively steady, seeing what the market will support and thus, also helping contribute to their retail pricing. Notice that even with Menards, their long flat car from new tooling, costs more than the box car or shorter traditionally sized flat car. Regardless of the name printed on the product box, new tooling is expensive for all the train companies, given the overall small market that this is. Precision R&D to get an accurately scaled product adds even more costs.
