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Rich Z's Blatherings Since Connie and I have retired the SerpenCo business, topics here will focus on topics of a more personal and general nature.

The purchase of lone or extra females..
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Old 07-01-2002, 08:13 PM   #11
SilverTongue
well when listing your prices just put
ex. Blizzards hatchlings '02 $40-$60

And when they call or e-mail you to ask why? just say 40 for male and 60 for female.

And another thing do a show in Texas so i can shop from you. I would rather pay money for more snakes than shipping and I cant afford to go to the shows you go to elseware, because i wouldnt have any money for corns after i pay for transportation!

 
Old 07-01-2002, 09:52 PM   #12
Kevin M
Ouch. Touchy Subject. And to think 9 of the 11 corns I just placed a deposit on with you are females. Doh.

Truth be told, If you had higher prices for females I'd have placed the same exact order with you. As hard as it may be to beleive I try to get 1.1 pairs when I do place an order but it doesnt always work out that way. Ive previously purchased 6 males at a clip from Don. And some months back I purchased 2 males and 2 females from you, Rich. For me at least its just a matter of what I want/need at the time.

Anyway... As far as I'm concerned it's your business to do with as you please Rich. I know you want to be fair but bottom line is your the one stuck with extra males in the end & this is your livelihood so you should do what you think best for yourself. Those of us that really want a specific morph or gender will purchase from you (or Don, or Kathy etc) regardless of price. (within reason of course).

These are just my opinions of course...

I do have one inquiry though. Are we talking specifically within single color morphs or would this apply to an entire order?

Would a 5.5 order of Snows be looked upon the same as an order consisting of say 0.5 Snows & 5.0 Ghosts? Just curious about specifics.
 
Old 07-01-2002, 11:02 PM   #13
Tim Madsen
I can feel for you Rich on the show subject, I hate selling at them. The only reason I go is to see people I wouldn't see otherwise. As for this female thing I think it is just coincidence. Shipping charges would wipeout any savings. I think it's more likely that people are catching on that one or two males can service a lot of females. I think selling in pairs or charging more for females is about all you can do and I'm not sure that will be effective. You might want to ask that person how it's working out with them. Personally if I wanted an extra female paying a little more wouldn't make any difference. IMHO
 
Old 07-01-2002, 11:43 PM   #14
Khaman
Well I see both sides of the coin, and I thought something like this might happen when I saw what Kathy decided to do. Who could blame her, assuming that she produced a even 1 to 1 ratio of females to males (I know it does not happen that way but for the point of this...) and if she sold mostly 1.2 orders by October all she would have left is males. The extra price is part deterrent, part job security, part CYOB. .

This is your livelihood, you have every right to protect it . She saw a problem with her business and corrected it if it is affecting your business then you have every right to take what ever measures you see fit to take. The idea of posting two prices works ( I snagged your Html and looked at it on a web editor it looked ok to me.). The only problem I see is if you offer a male for $40 and the female for $60 you lose $10 if they buy just the male.

Who is to say it is a blanket policy. the question I have is Carol, who bought a male Hypo Lav then later bought a female, would she still have to pay an extra fee if she bought both from you at different times?

Those of us that buy from Don, Kathy and you do so for two reasons all of you have a good reputation in the trade and you have animals that are unique or hard to find. I like paying less for something as much as the next guy but I for one don't mind paying a extra fee or you being sexist (placing more value on one sex over another) in pricing.
 
Old 07-01-2002, 11:45 PM   #15
abell82
I can totally understand that you would not want to be so male heavy at the end of a season.As much as I hate to admit it, it may not be a bad idea to raise the price of females.Here is my question is it possible that people are buying some of the females as they feel a female would be less aggressive than a male?I mean I realize that alot of people are buying in the hopes of breeding, but until you make a name for yourself and produce a certain quantity per year I do not believe there is much chance of getting rich from breeding corn snakes,(If all you are doing, is selling at wholesale prices you won't make much money!).What will you do about trios,and reverse trios?What do you do if you charge more for females, and find you have missexed a male as a female?I prefer shows to mail order as I get to actually SEE 5,6,or10 babies and pick the one I want,usually regardless of sex.
 
Old 07-02-2002, 01:37 AM   #16
Bippy
My $.02

I think it's the law of supply and demand. If people are demanding lone females, raise the price of lone females to match the demand.

I realize something like this may not be fair to the people who are buying a lone female to replace one that died, but there are probably alot more people out there who are trying to get 1.6 of some morph just so they can get the most hatchlings for their investment.

Perhaps price the males and females separately from the pair price? That way those truely interested in the females can still buy them separately, and those looking to start a snake harem will be discouraged. It would encourage more people to buy pairs. You'd have to adjust the prices so that the price makes the demand equal the supply, but I could see a triple price listing: male-female-pair working out. Say, like a male XXX would be $50, a female XXX would be $75, and a pair of XXX together would be $120 (a slight discount for buying as a pair).

Dunno if that sounds good to anyone or not, but it's my idea.
 
Old 07-02-2002, 05:35 AM   #17
Colleen
You gotta do what you gotta do!! I personally am getting orders from you and Kathy, some as pairs and some as singles from both sexes, to be pairs for what I already have. Like someone already mentioned I wanted some unrelated pairs.I don't think that higher priced females would really matter, I would still get what I wanted.

Just to let you know Kathy told me that as long as the M to F ratio was equal and she could chose which morph they can from then she wouldn't charge the extra female fee. I needed to have the right sexes to make my pairs, so I paid more!


Colleen
 
Old 07-02-2002, 05:43 AM   #18
HomeBreeder
Well, being fresh-blood in the "industry" it almost felt to me in the early game as if breeders were temp-sexing their corns for males because of how hard it can be to find a female in the "off-season". Obviously it was (is) more the result of the buyers, not the breeders.

Is there a general ratio that's not 50-50 birth rate?

Regardless of the reason however, Bippy hit the nail on the head - it really comes down to market forces. As the breeder it sounds like it's in your best interest to charge more for females - regardless if your motivation is setting a price that "the market will bare" or simply trying to ensure you don't have a warehouse full of yearling and older males to contend with.

Hrmmm - maybe there's a placee in the market for sex-changing corn snakes

j/k

^Curtis
 
Old 07-02-2002, 11:22 AM   #19
pdrau
I think it isn't as complicated as some might think. Why buy two males and two females when a trio will produce the same amount of offspring. There is always going to be a higher demand for females than males. It isn't just with corn snakes, but with any reptile or any animal for that matter. The more females you have the more offspring you can produce.

If someone is buying your females to resell, then I'd put a stop to that quickly. The likelihood of that happening is slim though.

I think what the industry is seeing is a wave of small breeders coming into the picture and utilizing a higher ratio of females to males to get the most production out of a small setup. In my case for example. I'm looking to have 10 to 20 females in possession to breed in the Spring. I may purchase a few males, but I have two friends who have many males that are letting me use them for stud purposes this year. I'll compensate them in some way, but my point is the only males I'm going to buy are ones that they don't have.

Peter
 
Old 07-02-2002, 02:59 PM   #20
Rich Z
I guess I should let you all in a little secret that all of the more experienced breeders know, but you never hear about. We all know whom are the beginners are simply by how they order animals from us. Anyone whom orders 1 male and 4 females obviously does not have a clue about what they are doing. What are they going to do if that one male dies right before breeding season? Of suppose he is infertile or just a lackadaisical breeder? It does happen you know. Basically that person is putting all of his eggs in one basket. Even with 1.2, those two clutches you are hoping for STILL hinge on that one male doing the job.

One thing that all experience breeders realize after years of doing this, is that the more males you breed to a female, the greater the chances of 100 percent fertility. When I start a new project, do you really think I keep 1 male and 8 females or something like that? Heck no! I keep the entire clutch. If I cut out any of them, I make sure I have an even ratio of males to females. Three males and three females would be optimum for a double heterozygous genetic project. For triple hets, I would absolutely keep everyone I produce. And when breeding season rolls around when they reach size and maturity, I will breed every female with every male in the project.

I learned this the hard way. A friend of mine whom produced the very first Blizzard Corn (Art Myer) asked me to take his animal (a male) on breeding loan since he didn't have any suitable females for it. I got it early enough that I was able to put it into my mandatory 3 month quarantine, and then the following Spring I bred him to 10 to 12 of my females. Since he was a new line for my work, I used him SOLELY as the breeding male to those females. Guess what? He was a dud stud. Every female I mated him to threw 100 percent slugs. You all can find this out for yourself, and maybe you will be lucky enough that it doesn't happen to you, but do you REALLY want to raise up those babies for two to three years and then have something like that happen to you?

Another example: When the albino Honduran Milk Snakes first became available back in 1995, I was lucky enough to get one of the first pairs available on the market. I specifically asked for two pairs of them, but one pair was all I could get. So I raised them up for three years and on that last brumation period when the female was to come out of the cold sleep and produce for me, she wound up dead for no explainable reason. That project was definitely shot all to hell. Come to find out, that the male had absolutely NO interest in any of my other females either, so that was a lot of money spent on two animals that wound up being worthless. If I had had two pair of them, surely I could have at least produced something to make that project worth while doing.

So think about what you are doing and remember Murphy's Law. Find the weakest link in your chain of breeding expectations and try to strengthen it. In most cases, this weak link is because all of your hopes will be hinging on the males doing their job.

You have NO idea how many times I get phone calls in the Spring months from someone panicky because they lost the male and now don't have one to mate to their primed and ready females. I remember one year I had a guy call me all worked up because he lost his male Lavender corn and was desperately looking for one to breed to his females. I always have a bunch of them and could possibly have found one for him, so I asked him how much he would spend for something like that. (yeah sounds mercenary, but I LIKE to have lots of males during breeding season). So he hemmed and hawed a bit and then said he figured maybe $200, maybe a little bit more. Let's see, he only wants to spend $200 on a male that would make or break the chances of him producing Lavenders from a couple of females. Figure on 10 each, thinking conservatively, from two females and we're talking about an easy $2,000 that male could earn him. Actually more, but I like round numbers. If he had said he would pay $500 for that male, I might have been able to find one for him. But either he didn't understand tha value of that male, or he didn't understand what he would lose by not having that male available. Sorry, I don't have one to spare.

Don't put yourself into this same position some breeding season. Most of the bigger breeders do have a good supply of breedable males at all times, but they are not going to give them up easily or cheaply just to help you out from your lack of foresight.
 

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