Stores that don't display prices.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by fishoholic

Prices vary depending on how much shipping was charged on the whole order: for example, sometimes if you do a larger order the supplier will give you a break on shipping, but sometimes the larger order costs more to ship depending on weight. Also where the shipment comes from (indo shipments are usually cheeper then anywhere else) will effect the price. Sometimes a supplier has a special on certain fish making that fish cheeper then normal and then there are certain times of the year were certain fish are less available then other times driving up the price of that fish. Also weather effects prices, if there is a storm somewhere, they charge more for shipping or sometimes delay shipping all together.

So needless to say there are many factors to take into consideration that will change the price of the same fish from store to store.

+1 It would be nice if prices were a little more consistent and reliable, but unlike pencils or hard drives, our fish don't come from centralized factories that can ramp production up and down purely depending on demand (nor should they). Each fish order is a unique transaction in which the LFS will pay a specific price that may or may not reflect what the same guy down the street had to pay for the same fish the week before. I remember just a few short months ago, purple tangs were around 80 bucks a piece, and now you can't find them in town for less than 200.

That being said, I do wish there was a little more transparency, though to be fair to the LFS in Calgary, even the ones where I don't see prices listed have been remarkably consistent to me, as in, the prices on a single species never seems to swing too wildly year over year unless there is a bigger economic reason for it to have done so (throttled supply of Hawaiian or Red Sea endemics, for example). The LFS owner would need to have a fantastic memory to remember what he quoted me on that species of fish a year ago and give it to me again last week if he was changing the price based on the customer.

What gets me worse than the un-listed prices is the amount of loss the fish stores in town seem to experience. I'd be way happier with high prices if I knew the premium I was paying was because a rigorous, behind the scenes quarantine and acclimation protocol had been followed before showing up in the display tanks, and not because the markup needs to be high enough to offset the number of fish who starve to death or die of treatable disease before someone buys them. To the best of my knowledge, none of the stores in Calgary do that - fish go from the bags they come in right to the sale tanks, when they should at least get one of the major 3 recognized ich treatments in the back for a few weeks while they're carefully acclimated to captive foods before being sold. It makes me want to open my own store.