... Which doesnt explain why I have Chinese guys haggling me down $2 on clownfish....

I don't think it's a matter of income rather than the retailers not cutting each other's throats in TO.

Operating costs and distribution chains also play a large part of it. This is evident even between stores in Vancouver.

Just my $0.02

Cut throat competition isn't a bad thing, keeps the prices within reason - 400$ for a frag, or 100$ for a single zoo polyp is not really reasonable now is it?

Lord knows the guy who collected it didn't get paid more than a few pennies, the markups all happened on the distributor/trans-shippers/retailer end.

Andy

I've never been a believer that geographical location is a reason for stiffer competition between similar markets.

Rather, Economic Principles state that changes in income shifts the demand curve.

http://ecedweb.unomaha.edu/DEm_Sup/shifts.htm

Simply said, the more money you earn, the more you are willing to spend on the same item. With increased demand, the price of the item also increases. The diagram above shows the effects of the prices on a good as income increases.

The way I see it, if a store is pricing items too aggressively low or high, they will not be in business for long. From what I saw in between Toronto and Vancouver, the price difference between the 2 markets were very similiar to the income differences between the 2 cities. The items in Toronto were slightly higher by about 10-15%. Makes sense to me. What we see in the markets now is simply natural economic forces in play.

Of course, supply curves have an impact on price as well. So if there are too many suppliers, price will go down. I just don't think that Vancouver has abnormally that many more suppliers to make that much of a difference. That's why I think income makes a difference.

It's all about what the market will bear. Unfortunately in the West, the hobbiest has been conditioned to lower prices compared to other markets in NA.

What one considers reasonable for pricing is definitely a matter of perspective. What you may consider reasonable may not be to the store owner who has to cover his overhead plus put a little in his pocket at the end of the day.

places like reef raft are hardly a fair comparison of the average east cost operation. they specialize in the best of the best and their prices command that.

i can tell you after living in the states for years that many of the shops in the larger cities have prices more inline with vancouver than toronto. with easy access to shipping 2 day ups for free many of the shops have dropped their prices on equipment and the more common livestock. where shops start to make money is on the more uncommon and rarer corals. im not convinced that the argument of people on the west coast are cheap and wont pay the prices is really true, i think it's more like the people on the east coast of canada are being charged more money and they pay it.

It doesn't matter which way you slice it, SOMEONE is getting rich at 100$ a polyp, and I will venture to say that it isn't the collector. But if someone wants to pay that price for that coral, then I say go for it...

Im with rick. in 3 years that coral will be big enough for frags and then that person can trade or people can buy it for cheaper.

Funny thing is...here an explanation of the coral that RR is selling for $100/polyp.

"Genus Dendrophyllia: Near impossible to distinguish from Tubastrea w/o microscopic analysis of corallite skeletons."

Kind of like the diamond vs cubic zirconia thing. Hard to distinguish the 2 without a microscope, but 1 is way pricier than the other.