Dan Lee, almost all CEOs/Decision makers award themselves increased bonuses, even though it has been scientifically proven that large bonuses are a detriment to the performance of any cerebal job. (You try being the scientist who has to sell the idea of decreasing bonuses to a boardroom!)
I think that price raises are mandatory at the moment, as the cost of everything is increasing, and when you are making a specialist product, those different costs interact and compound.
1# The price of oil has been steadily rising over the past few years. That increases transport costs (bringing the plastic to the factories, shipping the sprues to the packaging centres, shipping the boxes to the various stores)
It also increases the cost of plastic (Plastic being an oil based product)
2# Inflation. Alot of people talk about how such and such used to only cost $20 or whatever, but $20 back then = alot more these days due to inflation. You used to be able to buy a cup of coffee with cents, not dollars.
3# The worsening economic situation means that alot of people no longer spend as much on luxuries and hobbies, decreasing Games Workshops income.
4# Increased competition from web based companies further makes things worse for games workshop.
5# The stock market problems have probably driven the GW stocks pretty low, meaning increased pressure from the shareholders to increase profits.
6# all of these factors, and more, interact with each other and can compound the problem.
I'm not trying to justify the price raises, I'm just exploring some of the possible reasons for why they are happening, to try and give a bit of perspective on this beyond the personal "I dont like things costing more" factor that most people judge it by. Price raises are always going to happen, always have happened and I would expect more of them in the future, and in the end, it is games workshops job to profit from selling minis as much as they can, the same with any company, they arent going to drive prices too drastically high, because that would alienate too many customers in relation to the profit. But any and all companies will risk a few customers here and there to keep profits up. When we get all gooey eyed and think a companies job is to do whats best for us, that is when we take a big departure from reality.
edit: also note the fact that games workshop has not so long ago upgraded their plastic technology, and they have added a whole new material to their repetoire (finecast). That means buying/building expensive, shiny new machines to do it all that cost more to run.
