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No longer supporting Bradford Exchange/Hawthorne Village
https://www.cardboardchristmas.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2161
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Author:  paulrace [ Fri Sep 30, 2022 9:49 am ]
Post subject:  No longer supporting Bradford Exchange/Hawthorne Village

Many of you know that I used to advertised Hawthorne Village trains and towns on my Christmas and train web pages. I knew several of the reps and customer service people at the time. They mostly worked for a Canadian subsidiary called Collectibles Today.

Sadly, when they reorganized their business after 2008, they shut down Collectibles Today. As far as I could tell, they fired all the reps and customer service people I knew.

Now their "Customer Service" desk is run by people who are supposed to handle EVERY thing Bradford Exchange makes, including lifelike baby dolls, collectible plates with paintings of John Wayne in various roles, etc. Which is to say, they know NOTHING about the Hawthorne Village trains and towns.

Not to mention that Collectibles Today used to order all of their trains from Bachmann, so I knew they were supported by that manufacturer, and generally a good deal at that. Now Bradford Exchange is ordering about half of their trains from cheaper manufacturers who are making - frankly - junk, and who offer no support at all.

In addition, they changed how they work with folks who advertise on their behalf, and they shut me down because I wasn't sending them massive #s of customers.

Because I supported Hawthorne Exchange for decades, there are still references to them on individual pages on some of my Christmas and train sites. Yes, I need to weed those out. But people call me every so often and ask how many cars or buildings are in such-and-such a set, or similar questions. I USED to be able to contact the reps and ask them. And most of the customer service people knew the answer. Now nobody knows the answers, least of all me.

Just saying. The buildings are still mostly fine products, if a little expensive when you count in the shipping and handling fees. The On30 trains that are actually manufactured by Bachmann are fine products. If you "subscribe" to any of their series, you'll get a new product to pay for about every 3 weeks and nobody knows how many products you'll receive.

I still have a few of the On30 and village pieces myself and am satisfied with them, but that is in no way a general recommendation of Bradford Exchange.

I mention this at this time. because this week I am letting a domain name expire that I set up because I was going to help Hawthorne Village collectors answer each other's questions through a forum like this one. But I've lost interest. . .

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