The container imports have slowed down dramatically for a number of reasons. Mainly, the greed of dealers who ironically, blame the private importers for driving up the supplier prices.
The reason prices have gone up is due to greed. Container prices since 2008 have doubled. To this day, you will still see sellers list container pins at stupid prices. No educated person is stupid enough these days, but sometimes a fish will be hooked by the sales pitch. Suppliers overseas see these eBay ads etc, and as a result, doubled the supplier price.
There are still hundreds of games overseas. But the prices have been driven up. There are only a handful importing them. I have 80 sitting in a warehouse overseas - I just don't have the room here. Since January, at least 300 have been offered to me. The usual scare tactics of "the supply is drying up" causes some to panic buy, and then magically another 100 turn up.
There is no drought of pinball machines for sale. There are tons of them, but the issue is that dealers won't drop their prices because they want their 2008 profit margins. Then they complain business is slow and that they are getting out of selling pinballs. I hear this almost weekly. Funny to hear !
Machines are not leaving home collections like they used to because they are holding on to grail games they bought years ago. If you sold a collection bought in 2008, the profit on that sale would not be great, so flipping is not the answer.
Having said that, in the last week alone, I've been offered 5-6 games that need to be sold to pay for KISS LEs and Premiums. Same happened with AC/DC. So expect private machines to be moved on in the next few months.
