First, your comments would be easier to follow if you'd organize your thoughts and use paragraphs. I've read your post three times now, and I'm trying to understand your point or points. I think the main point you were trying to make is in these sentences.



It's really a simple concept to grasp. Each and every supply and demand type business has to have an increase in inventory for each price gap they are serving. If your $2500 snake doesn't sell for 2 years well when the price has dropped to 1500 you could be producing several more thus increasing your profit margin substantially.



I disagree with this description of supply and demand. If prices are dropping, they are dropping because supply in the market has risen relative to demand. Unless you are the only supplier of an animal, you can't control the supply level in the market. As long as the supply is increasing relative to demand, the prices will drop.



Keeping back some of your animals to breed more of them will temporarily keep the supply low, but your greater production means that your supply is rising. If your personal economic situation allows you to sit on the snakes long enough, you could keep trickling them into the market slowly and get high prices for every individual snake, but unless the demand increases, you're not going to be able to sell all of your animals at the high market price.



To use your numbers, let's say that the demand for Morph A at $2500 is 10 snakes per year. Unless you can stimulate demand for these animals, you'll never sell more than 10 animals per year at $2500. Breeding more of them just means that you'll have more mouths to feed for the $25,000 per year market (10 snakes per year at $2500 per snake) that you're supplying. Planning for the "long haul" is meaningless unless your "long haul" plan includes a way to increase demand at the price you're trying to set.



Let's say that the demand for this morph at $1500 is 50 snakes per year. In that case, the market is worth $75,000 per year (50 snakes per year times $1500 per snake). If someone has the snakes to sell, I can't blame him for pricing them at $1500 per snake and capturing this bigger market. You may not like this development, but a free market is only a reflection of the choices of individuals free to buy or sell as they see fit. If someone else wants to capture this market and has the inventory of snakes to do so, you can sit on your snakes $2500 until the world ends, and you're not going to find buyers for them.



Your other challenge is that when you sell your 10 snakes per year at $2500, you've added 10 new potential suppliers to the market. (Obviously, if some people buy more than one, there will be fewer than ten who have them.) Eventually, these ten people are going to have hatchlings of this morph that they'd like to sell. They may or may not want to follow your strategy of keeping the price at $2500 by trickling only 10 snakes into the market every year. Furthermore, how are you going to decide who gets to make those 10 sales? Your financial situation may allow you to sit on the extra snakes in order to keep the price high, but if those who've bought them are in a different situation, they'll lower their price until they can get the cash that they need.



I work for a large company, and every year or so, my company makes me take anti-trust compliance training. This training is designed to keep us from saying or doing things that could be violations of anti-trust laws. The training is designed to keep me out of jail and the company from paying huge fines. If a government bureaucracy cared about the python business, they would call your post an example of price-fixing and would prosecute you. I suspect that if you discovered big companies doing this with things that you buy, you'd scream for punishment. However, when you find yourself in the seller's position, you think it's just good business to propose price-fixing and scorn the "little guy" who doesn't go along with your plan.





Bill
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It's not how many snakes you have. It's how happy and healthy you can keep them.

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