Yup, you are right.
I will go to Marlboro and buy something at a 30% markup so they can continue to sell things at inflated prices next year !
The crazy, f***ed up thing is if a lot of it was only 30% it wouldn't be so bad. The shows are so f***ed at this point that I can poke around on NES, find some guy (wherever) in MA
that opened up a new gun shop in the past year or two, get in my car and drive there with a fistful of cash, and get a better deal than I would at the show. The problem is the
show vendors get "noob deer fever" and they think that making a hit at 30-40% means that they can do it all the time. In the post SH era because the newb % was high, it made a target
rich environment and caused unrealistic pricing. Part of the problem is the temptation is too powerful given the math. If gunshow Dealer McGougeyguy sells two M&P Hygeineproduct Shield 2.0s at $450 ea on a Saturday, suddenly he now acquires this hubris derangement syndrome thing that makes him think that "well, I sold two, and I made $200, so that must mean there are more people that are willing to pay that price, so the idea of say, selling the gun for $400, which is $50 above the four seasons baseline price for the Mensturation Pad 9mm, is out of the question, because he'd have to sell 4 guns to make the same amount of money- and the only time Dealer McGougeyguy gets his ass kicked for this is over the long term if someone doesn't
take the bait. Before 2008 the dealers literally had no choice in this matter- the buyers they were courting were, 85% not noobs. So a dealer that didn't try to compete with someone like FS or at least meet in the middle, was not going to sell shit. The buyers were so tight it literally exerted market pressure that drove the prices down. Fast forward to Obama elected, and now we get obamascares and people being cleaned out, and a trickle of newbs, so between the dips etc the margins go up. But the coup de grace, was Sandy Hook.... early 2013 comes, and A
veritable spillway flooded with a stream of mostly panicky young retards into the marketplace, and the math of the situation changes. It suddenly becomes way more appealing to sell less guns at higher profit. It also doesn't help matters that the stupid f***ing E-FA-10 mandate makes selling guns twice as hard because the dealer can't just throw an FA-10 at the buyer and go "kid fill this out, don't f*** it up" it's all driven off the computer, so an employee has to waste time banging the thing out, etc. Aggressive discounting of any kind at a gun show has its
last nail driven in the coffin.
Of course the part of the equation that Dealer McGougeyguy doesn't get, is that over time, if all the dealers start acting like they do, the dude that goes to the gun show, that would have paid the $400, is going to stop going to the gun shows, and you look at the cumulative effect, and it is what we have now..... not to mention, eventually noobs stop being noobs, and even if most of them are still kinda retarded, probably 90% of those noobs that they raped a few years ago are at least smart enough to never go back to a gun show, because they have this notion that they're not likely getting a deal, or even being able to negotiate for one. And some % of those guys are spending gobs of coin probably at 1-3 other gun shops....
Basically, in short, a bunch of these dealers, and the promoters, via their collective actions, have basically kept pissing in the MA gun show well... the water in the well being, gun show attendees. and now time has passed, the water is gone and has been displaced with nearly 100% piss.
-Mike