Keeping tropical fish is one of my hobbies. I am unable to find a small pump used to pull air out of water carrying pipes, and a “Majano Wand”, a small rod that uses 12v to dissolve glass anemone pests.
What can you not find for your hobby?
Astronomy forums are full of stories of people waiting months for Telescopes.
I’m not sure about the equipment side of things, but fish and coral price spiked (like 10x) after the power outage in Texas. Sooo many people lost all their livestock (in well established tanks, that can easily be into the thousands of dollars) that it drove the prices up when the power came back on and they were starting over due to the huge demand. Plus, on the freshwater side, the tanks froze and wrecked equipment and even caused the glass to crack.
On the other hand, I was at my local fish store (in Wisconsin) back in early January and heard the owner mention that Dec 31st was their busiest day ever.
The only hobby shortage I noticed was with 3D printers. Back at the start of all this, 3D printer filament was tough to find. I’m sure some of that was due to new people entering the hobby with their new found free time, but a lot of it was because the filament makers had shut down production. Many of those places are very small operations with just a handful of employees. So it’s not that they had a backstock of 10’s of thousands of spools. They probably had a few hundred on hand when they closed. But, as far as I can tell, we’re well past that now.
“Hobby parts unavailable during the Pandemic”
I’m just curious why this is. My hobbies, such as they are, seem unaffected. I’m wondering why some hobbies were affected by the pandemic. Did the manufacturing stop for people to do other things for the pandemic? Did people who sold hobby parts stop doing those hobbies and turn to something else during the pandemic?
I remember early in the pandemic, yeast and flour were difficult to come by, apparently because a lot of people stuck at home took up baking. I’m sure that doesn’t explain all shortages everywhere, but it’s another possible factor.
In some cases the hobby supplies were a pretty small industry so it either due to the new demand or the place making the supplies closing up for a few weeks/months, the supply dried up. In my previous post I mentioned 3D printer filament. The places that make it aren’t very big and don’t crank out all that much of it. So when they had to close for a week, their (or Amazon’s) stock quickly ran out.
In other cases, like aquariums or making bread, a ton of new people took up the hobby all at the same time and the suppliers simply couldn’t keep up.
I don’t think it’s so much that they were stuck at home baking, it’s that baking, and specifically baking bread, suddenly ‘went viral’, for lack of a better term. People that had never made a loaf of bread in their life were suddenly making multiple loaves every week to try out all the different recipes they were finding.
A lot of board games are printed and assembled in Asia, and then shipped to the U.S. on container ships. Not only did demand spike for games last year (as people were looking for something to do at home), but there have been production delays and delays in the availablity of shipping.
Ah, thanks! Over the past couple years, I’ve wondered how a world would look if people had UBI (universal basic income), a little more time and a little more money. What would they do with it. Maybe this is a small insight into that.
Here’s a short video I saw a while back about a puzzle manufacturer talking about how demand spiked to the point that they can’t keep up with it.
My brother works for 3M. Last year my dad asked him what’s going on with the mask shortage and he said they have just about all their resources directed to making masks 24/7 and they simply can’t keep up.
I’m guessing that “Tim’s Little Pump” and the “Majano Wand” shut down so that their employees could avoid being in a crowded assembly area. “San Francisco Bay Shrimp” has an apology on the web site, that they have slowed down. I imagine they can do everything from home except packaging and mailing.
Concerning fish pricing, apparently that was just in Texas. Is that Capitalism or supply and demand?
I have certainly tried to help the economy by spending the money Uncle Sam sent me by buying more fish. 
Not that I’m in the market for anything which depends on these but there’s a shortage of computer chips, which is part of why finding a PS5 or top-of-the-line graphics cards for your PC has been difficult.
Model kit paint. For some reason, Testors brand paint is in very short supply. Not just the dedicated hobby stores have empty shelves, but also places like Michael’s.
I like to paint miniatures for war games like Warhammer 40k. At various points during 2020, I had a hard time finding certain paint colors because my local store just wasn’t getting anything restocked. This was a combination of supply chain issues as well as increased demand as people had little to do but spend more time indoors. Games Workshop, maker of the aforementioned Warhammer 40k, had some supply issues as well and some of their miniatures were hard to come by. But that was due to a combination of COVID, Brexit, and GW’s own business practices.
Canning jars are starting to be available again but jar lids are still in short supply. There were a number of sellers online hawking counterfeit lids. I never would have thought that would happen.
My hobby was very useful this past year! It was a nice stress reliever too - I canned everything but the cats.
I’m having a PC built for me right now. I’ve been working with a laptop I bought 3 years ago but I realized recently that after I bought it I put it where it is now and it hasn’t moved since, so I might as well just buy a desktop.
Had to buy a refurb GTX 1080ti GPU off Amazon rather than a brand new RTX 3080 for almost the same price. They just couldn’t get the part. I could have waited 3-4 months for them to order one directly from Nvidia but I need this thing sooner than that. At least with a desktop I can just switch it out at a later date, which is not possible with my laptop.
If drinking wine may be considered a hobby, and not an occupation, I have been unable to find Franzia’s Pink Muscato.
I’ve been thinking a bit more about this and wonder if this is just a displacement of supplies. I used to bake bread a lot at one time, so I know that grocery stores don’t carry a lot of yeast in the best of times. But it’s not like there’s a real shortage of flour or yeast since they’re used heavily in restaurants and bakeries. It’s just that they’re not packaged for consumer use.
Very similar to the toilet paper shortage. it’s not that there wasn’t any toilet paper. It just wasn’t packaged for consumer use, and the commercial grade toilet paper wasn’t acceptable for home use.
I wonder if some of the hobby supplies are just packaging issues.
Sadists.
in some places there’s not a AD&D book to be had (yeah i know they got rid of the “advanced” part years ago… im old …) wizards of the coast who usually do single runs of things like source books and the like
used video games went up to outrageous prices… nintendo Gamecubes that went for 30 bucks a piece in '18 and '19 for 30-50 bucks a piece are almost 200 dollars now same for a lot of the games
Used game guy says "its becuase in the lockdown people want their old games from when they were kids " which is why such drink coasters as muppet party adventure and namco party are going for 8 times their worth…