Normally Leanna would handle such queries but she is out of the office today and rather than leave the customer waiting I looked into the matter myself with the help of Warhouse Manager Mike Sparks.
We have a lot of items in the inventory, some of which (including all of the miniatures) we get from outside vendors. All of those miniatures are handled in this same way.
Mike checks the inventory on any given ship whenever he pulls some for an order, and checks the entire inventory every week. Once a week, he orders a restock of anything we are low on. Normally, the restock arrives before we sell the last of the stock, but sometimes there is a surge of sales of one item and sometimes the casting house takes longer than usual to produce and ship our orders.
If any item runs out of stock, the company policy is to deactivate it on the shopping cart because we do not take orders for things we don’t have. (Books ship to the wholesalers a week before mail orders ship so we have the books in stock when we take "pre-orders" for them. In some cases we might be out of a print-on-demand book but since we can print new copies in an hour we do not de-activated those on the cart.) This is what happened when we sold out of 2500 Fed CAs; we deactivated it even though we had already ordered more. As it happened, the customer inquiry came in on the same day as the new shipment but it will take a day to quaity inspect the ships and reactivate them on the cart.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, November 21, 2016 - 05:11 pm: Edit

Normally, the contract for 2500s makes "factory seconds" unworkable, but these two ships were such spectacular casting failures that Bruce pulled them out of the melt bucket and sold them to us so that somebody (x2) could make a nice display piece. We'll sell them to the first two customers (one each) who pay Leanna $6 (half price; they include engines and a stand) plus shipping.