Actually this has been going on for a while now. When I decided to retire, I was REALLY afraid that I had waited too long and it was going to take forever to move out all of my animals to ALLOW me to get out of it. As for actually selling my business, yeah, that was a pipe dream. Might have happened a year prior, but with the banks squeezing their money till blood ran out of it, not a chance.
A lot of my animals were going overseas, and that market seemed to be getting very sluggish early in 2009. Even with the retirement prices I was offering my animals for, sales were just very slow all through Summer of 2009 and by Expo 2009 (mid August) things were not looking good at all. Yeah, I know some people got pissed at me for selling my animals cheaply at Expo that year, but as of yet, I have not heard a single solitary person come up with an alternative that I could have taken instead. I was trying to retire. I needed to sell my animals in order for that to happen. Duh... Luckily for me Mark Bell offered to take the rest of the animals off of my hands at the end of Expo, or I would have been bringing a boat load back home with me even AFTER offering them at rock bottom prices. So where would I have been had I kept my prices higher?
Yeah, probably bringing them ALL back home. Now that sure would have put a crimp in my retirement plans, now wouldn't it? Even trying to sell off the adults was proving to be difficult, and again, Mark saved the day for me. Without Mark's help, I seriously doubt that I would be rid of all the animals even today.
Seriously, from what I have seen, everyone wants their competition to keep their prices higher than their own prices so they can sell them. That is the major complaint. I've had people say to me to my face that they felt it was perfectly OK for them to check out my prices, and drop theirs so that they could sell their animals in a price comparison competition. And they obviously felt that I was OK with their strategy. That just because I had a bigger name, that undercutting my prices was an acceptable practice. Well, how far does that go? Apparently until someone undercuts THEIR prices, I guess. The rules they set only apply to how they want them to be applied, I suppose.
Truth of the matter is, that if your animals (or whatever, really) are not selling at the price you want them to sell for, then perhaps the buying public is not interested in paying your price. So your options are simple: (1) keep them hoping that someone will eventually pay your price, or (2) lower the price until someone DOES decide that what you are asking is what they are willing to pay. Where this can oftentimes lead someone is to the realization that is you need to lower your prices VERY low, then it would make a whole lot more sense to contact a wholesaler to see if you can sell them ALL at that time, at that low price per animal, rather than messing with individual sales selling that low at retail.
Selling live animals is NOTHING at all like selling hard goods. You just can't stock away inventory and forget about it. Every week you keep them they are costing you more money in feed and care. Every week that you hold onto animals that are for sale you are less and less likely to break even on a sale, much less make any sort of profit.
Yeah, the economy sucks. People are losing their jobs, their homes, their entire livelihoods. Those that haven't are afraid that they might. Selling snakes has ALWAYS been a tough sell. Most people that live in the area I am in can no more understand people buying snakes than if I were to tell them I was selling crushed fireants in a jelly paste. So it's a very limited marketplace to start with. You are only getting the smallest sliver of the "disposable income" pie anyway, and there really has never been all that much room in this business for infinite competition. Smaller, part time breeders doing it mostly for the hopes of income instead of the fun and love of the animals will just not last this out. Those who are willing to cut their expenses and perhaps decided to even not breed their animals till this blows over, MIGHT survive. But in each case, the amount of work you put into it will always be weighed against how much you get out of your efforts, whether it be in financial return, or as a hobby, where other factors will weigh more heavily. But regardless, taking care of animals IS work, no two ways about it.
As to why people would choose to buy ball pythons over corn snakes, that has always bewildered me. The return on buying a pair of babies will always be greater with corn snakes if the prices are on par. Colors and patterns are comparable in attractiveness, and if anything, I believe corns just make much more interesting and personable pets than any ball python I have ever had or seen. So go figure..... Obviously I don't know a damned thing about what the buying public wants. How I made a decent living out of breeding corn snakes is something I will never fully understand. It certainly wasn't because I understood anything about marketing.........
OK, this is my LONG post for the day. And I've gotten real lazy lately about proof reading, so please accept my apologies if the fingers didn't exactly type what my brain told them to.