At the end of the day when people on here debate about maintaining prices in the “Ball Market” it really doesn’t, to me anyway, make sense.
The way I see it, there are a limited number of people in this country that even want to own a snake. If you look at the snake owning populace as a pie, you then have to cut out wedges for all the different species that are available. You are then left with a “slice” of the population that people who sell Ball Pythons are marketing their product to.
I believe the majority of this Ball owning “slice” is comprised of people who will NEVER, EVER pay more than say $100 or $200 for a snake. This leaves a limited number of people who end up trading and selling the high dollar snakes amongst themselves. In the past, it seems, there were few enough morphs, in limited supplies, that the demand amongst the “high-end” players, and therefore the prices, were kept high.
Now there are morphs aplenty, in varieties and quantities that begin to boggle the mind to the point where even a lot of the “high-end” players cannot accommodate and care for them all. This leads to exactly what we see: The newest creations turn out to be “flashes in the pan”, being bought up and traded amongst only the very top-top tier that can accommodate and care for extremely large colonies of snakes. Prices then quickly have to fall to the point where they are low enough to spark interest.
I can’t see this changing in the near future either. I think the money play now is to accommodate, through volume and price, that large part of the Ball “slice” that won’t pay top dollar, but is out there in larger numbers.
Just my opinion.
