Apollyon wrote:*Cough* Matt *Cough*
Carnies wrote:*SNEEZE*
That one plant boi wrote:*WHEEZE*
Carnies wrote:*FURBALL*
You all crack me up!!!
I'll get to TCing all the GJ plants eventually. I got a nice specimen of GJ Bloody Nurse from Adrien and also got a quite large one directly from Matze (owner of Green Jaws Nursery) in Germany. So, I will almost certainly get GJ Bloody Nurse in TC this year and likely will have a few to offer later this year or early next year.
I'm also on the hunt for GJ Mariachi, the other very high-dollar GJ plant in the US. I didn't get one of those from Matze this winter. Didn't think/know to ask for that one!
If a person or group of forum users here wants to chip in and buy one for me so I can get it in TC, I'll pay half the $220 (I can't bring myself to pay $220 for a single flytrap) and send everyone who chips in a plant first-thing once I get it propagated
If a large enough group of us buys it, then I might not even have to pay half!
Apollyon wrote:I call them "meme plants." GJ Bloody Nurse is a cult hit. The market here in the US is limited though and people try to put a choke on it, like Jeremiah there, to keep its value up. That's great and all, I wouldn't want my black miracle to sell for 20 dollars today but 220 for a flytrap is absurd. Last I heard someone was pushing this one for 300. Eventually saturation will occur.
The good news is this sort of "meme plant" phenomenon where plants command a very high price is relatively new to the Flytrap market and I'm hopeful it won't last. Over the years, I've tried to do my best to keep up with acquiring new flytraps and make sure that prices in the market don't get so ridiculous. While Leah and I do have bills to pay, thus we need to earn money by selling these plants, our primary motivation isn't to get as much cash as possible from each plant but try to make them affordable to most hobbyists while earning enough for us to live. We're not trying to cut down the amount of work we need to do by selling every plant for the highest possible price. We actually enjoy working with plants every day and filling lots of orders for our customers! For that reason, we always try to be fair with our pricing. Yes, new varieties that are in high demand do sell for more on FTS and could be on the upper end of what most hobbyists would consider paying, but I would consider the vast majority of the plants offered at FlytrapStore.com fairly modestly priced in the current market.
The most I've ever sold a flytrap for was nearly $300 and I felt pretty bad about it after the fact. At the time, I wanted to gauge market value on a new release (Korean Melody Shark), so I put the first one we ever sold on eBay. I've basically avoided eBay and other auction sites since then and just sell plants in our FlytrapStore. New releases at FlytrapStore for very high-demand plants are typically priced in the $60-$80 range. I could be out of touch, but I feel like that's a fair price to ask for a Venus flytrap that's relatively new and very high demand (i.e. a "meme plant") to the point where Leah and I can't propagate enough to adequately meet demand in the short term.
But the last few years I've been busier with swimming-related activities (competing, coaching, building a local Masters team, etc.) and have largely neglected to acquire new flytrap cultivars, particularly from overseas, so I fell behind. Thus, some plants that I've not ever grown or not grown much in recent years are fetching pretty high prices now that many of us would consider ridiculous, though it's just a few. I'll get to TCing all of them eventually, particularly if there is high demand.
In some CP plant circles, I see "price fixing" or what appears to be withholding of plants to create a sense of rarity or scarcity of some plants to artificially create a high demand and keep prices inflated. I recently watched the "
Fear City" documentary on the mob in NYC and how they controlled some of the businesses there and were able to price fix and overcharge for services/work. Some of the CP markets these days remind me in some ways of how the mob runs a business. This summer I rekindled and actually significantly grew my interest in Sarracenia. The pandemic was good for shifting interests for me!
When I started looking at current Sarracenia prices, I couldn't believe what had happened to them since the last time I purchased any Sarrs. Some plants I've owned for over 10 years have INCREASED in value by 3 or 4 times!! And there are some plants that are fetching over $1000 and up to $1500 for a single Sarracenia. How and why can that be? Sarracenia grow very quickly and propagate quite easily, even without TC. So these very high prices don't make sense to me. But I paid the prices asked this summer for the plants I really want and hope that I can get them in TC too and bring down the prices for some of the best Sarracenia clones so they're more affordable for more collectors.
Granted, propagating, growing, and shipping plants is a lot of work! Soooo much potting!!! And there's always some loss and a risk of significant loss when dealing with any living product. But given how easy most are to propagate and grow, it doesn't make sense for plants to fetch multiple hundreds of dollars or over $1000. Over the years as I built FlytrapStore from the ground up, learning tissue culture propagation of Flytraps, I thought someone would come along and create an online presence similar to FlytrapStore, but for Sarracenia, after figuring out how to efficiently propagate Sarrs in TC but it hasn't seemed to happen yet. So I'm trying my hand now to fill that niche! I probably won't do as many types of Sarrs as I do flytraps, but maybe someday. Gonna be a multiple-year endeavor to get established, but I've started working with Sarracenia in TC again for the first time in over 10 years and am having good success so it looks like it will happen!