Hello,

Convienience plays a large role as people have stated already. It's a matter of supply and demand. If you have a town that is 150 sq. miles and it contains one petstore in the towns center, you are likely going to have to pay a hefty price for whatever it is you are looking for. If you live in a town where there are 7 petshops, you will likely find lower prices.

In America, we have considerably cheaper prices on reptiles. The reasoning is simple, we also have a lot more petstores.

The US is made up of 50 states.(As everyone knew. lol) Petco alone has over 740 locations. That means that Petco alone has roughly 14.8 stores in each state. It's largest competitor, Petsmart, has roughly 800 stores between the US and Canada. That's another 16 stores per state. Between just those 2 retailers, each state contains roughly 30.8 petstores. These are rough figures and don't include any of the smaller stores and private chains that individual states contain. (Which could easily double these figures.)

The availability of these stores and their abundance have dropped all of the prices considerably.

Being in retail I can answer why they are so expensive really easily---people will pay the price. It's really the law of supply and demand. I work in printing and office supplies so my example is along those lines: When I was in college carbon paper was still plentiful but demand had fallen so it was cheap. Most manufactures stopped producing it so supply dwindled. Now carbon paper is selling at over $3 for just 12 sheets at normal retail price. There may not be a lot of demand, but there is almost no supply so the selling price goes up. Pet ownership is growing in all areas sometimes faster that they can get animals so priced are rising.

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0.1.0 Bearded Dragon (Dundee)
1.0.0 Chow/mix Dog (Simba)
1.0.0 Russian Hamster (Bear)
1.1.0 Parakeets (Little Tweet and Feathers)
0.1.0 Long hair gray calico cat (Opal)
0.0.3 Red-eared slider turtles (Mommy, Daddy, Robbie)
0.0.16 Fishy Friends - misc. tropical fish

You have to take into account the cost of electricity. Heating a small reptile room with lights and all that is quite expensive. I work at a pet store at the moment and I know how much it costs. Plus shipping live animals isn't cheap. We go through two suppliers for most of our reptiles and mark up is usually about 100%. When I first heard we marked our reptiles up that much I thought it was outragious, but then I figured into it the cost of food, supstrate, man power, electricity, mortality, etc.

We have an adult blue tongue skink selling for about $125-150, can't remember off the top of my head, for about two months now. Before that we had for a month, same price, and we had two babies, same price, the first adult went relatively fast, wasn't there more then a month and a half. The two babies, thanks to some of the dumb asses we have working there, were eaten by crickets, who thought two babies in a 15 gallon with nowhere to hide couldn't eat 30+ large crickets. Now due to those two losses the store is down x amount of money, if the adult blue tongue we have now doesn't sell within another month or two it'll be a loss as well.

Hope you take that into account next time you go into a pet shop and see an expensive reptile that you could get for less online. (I've found, at least with us, once you put in shipping and handling the animals cost about the same plus you can actually pick out your reptile.)

IMO, buying a reptile thats marked up 100% in a petstore that DOSNT CARE FOR THE ANIMAL PROPERLY is just stupid. Who wants to pay more money for a sick animal when they can get one from a breeder online for less then half of that, and they know its healthy

I agree! However in all fairness there are some seriously unscrupulous breeders on line (and even at expos). You have to just take them at their word that the animal is healthy or for that matter that they are even a breeder!
I have been to expos where the animals were all proclaimed captive bred but anyone with half an eye can see that they are wild caught imports.

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Merlin,
What's Life Without A Little Magic!

Have you ever had a friend, that really isn't into reptiles, take care of your reptiles while you were on vacation or something like that? Then ya come back and they've done something stupid, hopefully not costing the life of your herp, but something that potentially could have? Its not really your friend's fault, they just don't really know what the're doin.

Well its like that sometimes. They don't mean to hurt the animals, they just don't know any better.

And we are entirely at the mercy of our suppliers. Luckily we have a guy who works for us who will take the poor animals home and try to rehab them.

But then again, sometimes, we get in great specimens. We've gotten circle back RTBs before, pastel RTBs, etc.

We have our ups and downs.

"They don't mean to hurt the animals, they just don't know any better."
...yet most petshop employees ACT like they know EVERYTHING about the reptiles and assume the customer doesen't when the customer points out thier doing something wrong.

thus bring us back to the 'they don't really care for the reptiles statement'

otherwords, they'd listen to the customers, do research, and fix the problems.


its not a matter of wether or not they know at all really, because they could learn. its obvious they don't want to learn, as they keep making mistakes. chances are that the pet shop worker only took the job since he needed to make money. he doesen't want to waste his time doing research or anything, he actually doesen't care about the reptiles much, he's only thier to make money by reluctantly doing a job.

glad to hear you have an employee who actually cares for the reptiles though. people who actually care for thier job and work hard are so hard to find. i'm the manager of a local grocery store's dairy department and only have 1 good employee. the other 3 are slow as molasses.

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i'd be better off opening my own small zoo.