"I don't believe there is any peer pressure put on people to sell animals at artificially high prices."



...



"If the scorn from other breeders is so great, why is it that you have people coming out with ads selling Spiders at $7K to $10K. These people that put such a low value on their animals have every right to price their animals at whatever value they feel is fair in their eyes. Maybe their animals are of inferior quality and they are having a difficult time selling them. Maybe they just want to make back their money as quickly as they can and they don't care about ruining the market. Which is poor business in my eyes.



I would not buy from someone that handles their business like that. They obviously don't care about the market and the business and they don't care about the people that are investing money in their animals. They are basically saying, as long as I make my money back, I don't care about anyone else. I can't imagine them lasting in business very long."



If you wouldn't buy from someone who doesn't hold the agreed upon price that sounds like putting pretty good pressure on them to hold the price! Lots of people say this but in actuality I would imagine that if you wanted something you didn't already have you would look for the best deal (including quality) that you could find.



I agree that the incomplete dominant/co-dominant morphs are an excellent investment and perhaps even better than recessives. Especially if you have adult normal females and know how to breed them. Price fixing isn't new and isn't limited to dominant type morphs. It's just that the gap between the fixed asking price and the price at which the supply is really demanded opens much quicker with dominant type morphs.



However I also think that after the number of breeders with a morph gets to a certain point it's the buyers and not the sellers who determine the price at which the now large numbers of babies will move. The price is always an interaction between sellers (supply) and buyers (demand) but in the beginning the sellers have more control and in the end it's the buyers. I may be way out of line and lots of spiders may have moved at last year's list prices and all the drop between this year and last may be just to increased supply. It just seems like a suspiciously large drop that could have been caused by a break in ranks from holding a price last year where not many really moved. The real price is the price at which most of the available supply really sells. If the real price is lower than the common asking price the first breeder who advertises that price isn't lowering the price, the buyers already lowered it, that first breeder is just the one who comes clean and admits it. It seems to me that this is much more honest and less greedy to give the new buyers a better chance to make money by buying at the real price and not trying to get a few to pay the artificial price that can't last forever and is destined to take a large sudden drop when the price fixing fails.



I wish we had a good strong snake auction with lots of traffic and reputable sellers so everyone could see what the real prices are rather than each buyer having to negotiate what they think the real price is behind the scenes. I think the extra confidence this sort of a system would create (seeing the price that animals really sell for) would attract enough extra and confident investors that prices would probably hold even better than with price fixing and with more steady and predictable drops.

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