Roundhouse Bill posted:You guys should go back and read what Ryan Kunkle told be at the beginning of this thread. Here it is again from the email he sent me.
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Bill,
Got your message but don’t have time to return your call today. The Legacy Berk run was cancelled for the reasons outlined to the dealers. Tooling costs came in much higher than anticipated and when spread across the order numbers the cost of production was prohibitive. We’ve looked into other alternatives over the past several months and ultimately had to come to this decision.
Thank you,
Ryan
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These were not BTO, as someone suggested, and there was around 6 months to order one. This was not on Lionel. The market just didn't order enough to make it affordable for Lionel. So in affect it is on us.
Lionel does not exist to make us miserable. We do it to ourselves.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
There is another factor that is easy to miss in the Berk cancellation, we touched on this earlier in the thread, but here is the take away:
Ryan's letter says 'Tooling costs came in much higher than anticipated and when spread across the order numbers the cost of production was prohibitive'.
With the much higher tooling costs, maybe Lionel would have made little or nothing selling the Berks at the price they cataloged, regardless of the orders, so they pulled the plug. The orders may have been ok for $499 production, but was not for whatever the much higher tooling cost was.
So we shouldn't beat ourselves up over how many were ordered at the price Lionel originally pitched without knowing the rest of the story.
Mike
