Acan....this price...Really???

[cutterx23]

This entire hobby has gone bat **** crazy with the prices of coral these days... I've been in this hobby for 18 years and remember buying rocks with 50-60 ricordea for around 35 dollars... Now your lucky if you can get two stinking rics for that price let alone a rock with 50+ on it
I also remember rocks with all over 1000 zoa's on them going for around 60 on the high end for what are now being called "whammin watermelons"
I understand this is a customer driven market and if people can get away with charging it then more power to them I suppose but for the guys like me who have been in this industry a long time I have a really hard time trying to justify these prices to myself
When I first started elegance corals were out of my price range because I piece about 12-14 inches across was about $200 and THE CORAL to have back then was pulsing xenia... I remember practically paying for an entire 90 gallon reef with metal halides just of the profit and store credit I made from selling stalks of that stuff, now I can't give it away

Gas back in the day used to cost under a $1, now it's over $4, so do you not buy gas either because you can't justify the increase? Candy and soda at one point in history cost a nickel, so I'm guessing no more of either of those for you as well? Why pay a $1 when it used to only be 5 cents?

Also how legal were those collection practices back then? How deep did they have to dive to get those Xenia and ricordea? How deep do they have to go now to get what we all want? How many divers were out catching things then versus now?

Love all the assumptions made in this hobby. We assume, oh here's an acan at shop A and what looks like a pretty similar acan from shop B, but shop A is $50 cheaper than shop B, so shop B MUST be over charging and ripping us off!!! Ha what jk. Maybe they got ripped by a wholesaler and paid more? Maybe shop B bought the colony and shop A just had a frag. Maybe shop B did a direct transshipment while shop A had to purchase at wholesale.

Unless you understand all the intricacies of the ENTIRE game, it is pointless to *****. As I said before on pg 1, of another one of these ridiculous threads, there is the simplest solution ever: if you don't like the price, don't buy. It's so simple yet we gotta have a whine thread at least once a month to cry about pricing or PH. Many hide behind the "this is ruining the hobby" line, while I don't think it's some store charging whatever for a coral, I think it happens in these threads where all the new people look and say "oh my god, this is all a big rip off, I can't trust anyone because the people on R2R said they can get this for that much. Everybody wants to rip me off, I'm done." When that's far from the case. I imagine the whiners, from what it always sounds like, would prefer vendors and stores not be around, and just swap with other hobbyists cuz that's the cheap way to go. Well guess what, that happens then we are all out of a hobby. We need them, they need us, simple math. Simple solutions to the problems. How bout we stop wasting time on these threads, that always grow and grow and spend that time and effort on something useful. Not "informing" us all you feel ripped off.

 

[Jonreefer]

Jonreefer so now your cooler/better because you did not have to pay to play or because you got a better deal on coral then me. LOL Arrogance goes both ways. Ryan got it right different strokes for different folks.

I back no vendor in particular. Heck I just got back in the hobby. Sometimes its like I never left, this thread could have just as easily been posted 9 years ago. I do think some of the photo shop images are ridiculous but thats nothing new just exaggerated with the use of LEDs.

I back vendors that bring in nice coral at what I consider a reasonable price. That is subjective & based on my Opinion only. I support those stores & ignore the rest. People have been naming corals for years & will continue to do so.

Obviously you didnt read how I wrote it. I said $200 for that acan as I only paid $50 for mine implying that I paid what it should cost not some outrageous price cause its on the internet and was possibly given some cute name. Personally I think private sellers I see posting on here in the for sale thread are going above and beyond even what a vendor charges for a coral. it seems people are trying to turn this hobby into something only for the rich posting prices of $500 and up for only 2-3 heads of some coral.

 

[Opus]

I agree cutterx23. That was well said. And it is just going to get worse. I was talking to a LFS person the other day that has been over to the suppliers in the pacific and they are going to all these websites and seeing what is being charged so they are doubling or more their prices. I was told a nice rainbow chalice colony that would have been $1000 a year or 2 ago is now 3 or 4 thousand from the wholesaler. As for the ricordea comment made earlier by someone, I've been around since the late 80's and I never saw ricordea in the $1 per polyp price range. Maybe if you lived in Florida. Maybe I just lived in an area where they always charged more. I do remember that you could buy "fancy" Florida live rock for a couple of dollars per pound and it would have ricordea on it. Sort of a bad example though since Florida has been basically shut down since the late 90's for coral/rock collecting. Last I knew you couldn't take any coral out that was attached to rock. I remember there were issues with companies that would try and grow ricordea in the ocean on rock they had put there because the gov't said once the rock was in the ocean and coral on it you couldn't take it out. Not sure what ever came of all the legal issues they had over harvesting live rock.

Being in this hobby for so long I do cringe at the prices I see these days but I also know it is costing more and the coral is getting harder to get. A lot of the collection places that were around 15 years ago have been banned from collecting. We are the easy target for blaming all the reefs problems on when we are probably the smallest problem the reefs have to deal with.

 

[KJAG]

There are a couple Acans out there I'd lay down 200 for. The dynamics of a free market simply allow the end user to not pay a price if they don't agree with it. Is it really any more complicated than that? Just don't buy it. Problem solved.