Spider at local chain pet store

As far as i know from talking to a few larger breeders all the morphs that are going into petstores are males. Theres a few bigger breeders mass producing single gene co doms just for the reason of putting them in the petstores.

Our local store just got a baby spider and pastel for the first time a few days ago. I was kind of bummed to see them there :(

Luckily they were $149 for the pastel and $222 for the spider. Not terrible considering they are most likely males so the pet stores aren't dragging our prices down even lower. They were both decent quality actually, but very very young. Good luck with those whoever is crazy enough to pay that! The lady at the pet store took them out to show me the babies and we snake talked for a while. She said they get them from a really big breeder-one of those internet bulk breeders I'm sure. She said they are males unless the guy messed up, because he wouldn't send males for that price. I'm sure the pet store has a 50% mark up.

I just posted something up about that also, but there were some really good points brought up by others (including my wife who hates reptiles) you get what you pay for.
You're going to a pet store that probably didn't get them from any reputable breeder that knows what they are doing. Also they're just being put into a place where the employees probably don't even care about them much.
There's a reptile show coming up in Omaha, I have better chances of getting really good quallity animals there and even talking to the breeder who can give me pointers on starting my own breedings.

I've seen incredibly ugly, browned-out pastels at the local PetSmart for $249.99, I think it was. Never seen any other morphs at chain pet stores (I've seen them at local specialty shops, but not chains).

Personally I think it's great to encourage "fancy" ball pythons to enter the pet market. The pet market is our foundation; the pet buyers are the "end users" who enable the breeders to have a good home to send our excess stock. If every single baby ball python that gets produced goes to a home where it's used as a breeder, sooner or later the supply will HAVE to exceed demand (though I firmly believe it hasn't yet; not even close!) In addition, having a non-breeder home to place lower-quality stock into enables the breeding pool to continually improve.

... Not that I don't have an awful lot of major issues with pet stores in general ... But, that aside :rolleyes:

I'm not sure if any one you have "Petlands" around you but there are morphs there for over $1000. Nothing super special either. Just looked brown.