As I recall hearing the story some years ago--six or eight at least--what
happened is that MTH (Mike Wolf) caught Lionel complicit in
pirating Korean designs, had them by the short and curlies, so Lionel rolled
over on K-Line, effectively getting so large a judgment against them that they
got the entire business in settlement. Which was too bad, as K-Line was just
starting to get serious about two-rail O scale (I have not been impressed by
the K-Line S scale I've seen).
Jace Kahn
General Manager
Ceres & Canisteo RR Co./Champlain County Traction Co.
> Dealing with Lionel goes deeper than that. I once dealt with them but found
> out the hard way that the distributor sold to anyone at the same price I
> bought at when they decided to dump stock which was right after selling to
> dealers. The owner of Bruce's Trains in Sacramento who is a very large
> train store and once ordered huge amounts of Lionel told me that he got
> burned for many thousands of dollars of stock when customers started to find
> out that they could buy at discounts from Lionel when they back up their
> trucks at shows or sell at discounts at distributors. His Lionel business
> went down by over 50%. Also clubs started to get big discounts from other
> distributor resources. I am one of those who got burned and ended up dumping
> almost all of the Lionel products at a loss or cost at best. Trying to deal
> with them with their "Holier than thou" attitude is a story worthy of a whole
> pitcher of margaritas. Lionel's lack of marketing intelligence in dealing
> with S products make them their own worst enemy. Too bad MTH lost their
> battles and died.
>
> Howard Sheffield
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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