We no longer support Hawthorne Village products directly.
Between 2004 and 2010, I knew several people on the Hawthorne Village marketing, sales, and support teams, so I could always find an answer for a concerned Hawthorne village customer. I also recommended many of their products specifically on my site. The truth is, I got a few dollars every time someone ordered one through the site, but I only recommended products I would personally be glad to own, and many of which I did own. Frankly, when I had kids in college, Hawthorne Village helped me afford to keep sites like this one online.
Since then, Bradford Exchange has essentially eliminated the teams I used to work with and become harder to do business with in several ways.
In addition, they started replacing the Bachmann-built Hawthorne Village trains with lower quality trains that I couldn't recommend to anybody.
In the interests of full disclosure, I believe that the Hawthorne Village towns are just as well made as they ever were. And the trains that they are still getting from Bachmann are the same quality as the ones I heartily recommended.
So this is NOT a slam on the quality or value of Hawthorne Village products, many of which I would still recommend even without remuneration, if that was all there was to it. If you see something you like, even after reading their fine print, go ahead and order it.
But the Bradford Exchange people will no longer work with me or answer my questions. And people keep asking me for help with questions they couldn't get answered either, now that the people who were familiar with the Hawthorne Village trains and towns are no longer manning the help desk.
Therefore, having pages that recommend these products on my sites puts me in an awkward position. I used to tell readers that they should call the Bradford Exchange customer service line if they had questions about missed orders or mistaken billing, but I could usually answer or get the answer to questions about the products themselves. (Again, I own several and knew people, so I was not making things up.) That's no longer true, and hasn't been for about two years, no matter how hard I tried.
Time to pull the plug.
Now, because I recommended so many Hawthorne Village products, there are still links to those pages all over my sites. Please be patient with me as I move to replace those links with something that will actually do our readers some good.
P.S. If you're from Bradford Exchange and you have any issues with this post, please use the Contact form to share any corrections, additions, etc.:
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